By Mike Latona
So you want to be a star? Read about this high school hockey program and you may re-evaluate. Author John Rosengren spent the entire 2000-01 season with the Jefferson High School team near Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, gaining unlimited access to the Jaguars. Blades of Glory shows how a single defeat can overshadow numerous victories — wins that are treated as small, expected steps toward a state title.
The author, a Minnesota native, examines hockey mania in a region where arenas fill up for games involving 5-year-olds. He also details the violence, substance abuse, divorce and suicide that mark the high schoolers' lives. Compared to the movie Fargo, this depiction of Minnesota lifestyles is less humorous and more subtly disturbing. Rosengren follows a soon-to-retire coach and his team's one last big run for a title. The coach extols his program's proud tradition in demanding a commitment to excellence, spewing profanities as he goads his players to perfection. Buying into this intensity are the parents, whose expectations for success are enormously high. Many parents are divorced, leading one to wonder if hockey also helps fill a personal void.
Through Rosengren's lens, success is seen as both a blessing and a curse. Team members come off not as invincible jocks strutting down the hallway, but as startlingly fragile adolescents petrified of failing on the ice and then having to show up at school. The opening chapter is titled “King S–t”, based on a player's perception of the Jaguars' reputation should they lose a single game.
Rosengren forces any family with child athletes to reflect on their value systems. Few parents in the book are quoted as saying they feel all the sacrifices were worth it. Rather, they seemingly fall victim to a syndrome where winning breeds an intense desire for more wins, much like an alcoholic who needs one more drink or a compulsive gambler in pursuit of a jackpot. Some have a vague knowledge that they're in too deep, but can't seem to change. For all these intimate glimpses, we learn little about the principal characters' daily lives outside of hockey. Perhaps this is Rosengren's way of asking the million-dollar question: Do such lives even exist?
(Mike Latona is a staff writer for the Catholic Courier. This article is used with permission of the author.)
