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'Hockey mom' becomes a challenging phrase

JOHN JEANSONNE

October 5, 2008

'Hockey Mom" is a song. Thoroughly apolitical. Written four years ago by 40-year-old Connecticut musician Dave Schneider - whose group, the Zambonis, has been performing only hockey-themed songs since 1991 - it is a loving paean to Schneider's mother, and to all mothers who sacrifice for their kids beyond reason.

"The rink is twenty degrees

"She's got long johns and a thermos full of coffee

"From Philly to Maine

"She never complains

"She's my hockey mom."

There is nothing in the tender, gentle tune about pit bulls or lipstick. Whatever Sarah Palin has been trying to say to America, by branding herself "just your average hockey mom," is proving fairly difficult to parse. (Just as Slate.com argued last week that diagramming Palin's sentences provides a significant challenge.)

This new household phrase, "hockey mom," could be political code (white, suburban, family values), some form of niche marketing, an accidental acknowledgement of the modern-day over-scheduled child, a we're-tougher-than-you-are update on the 1990s soccer-mom demographic.

It certainly is not about hockey or the start of the NHL season this weekend.

In response to Palin's hockey shtick, news organizations around the country have rushed out to rinks to interview mothers of hockey players. Web sites (Hockeymoms.com; AskHockeyMom.com) have been flooded with comments not only celebrating the recognition of them as community but also questioning the "pitbull wearing lipstick" stereotype. One loopy YouTube clip, sponsored by "Hockey Moms for Truth," features four women rejecting Palin as one of their own, one mom expressing outrage that Palin doesn't know the difference between icing and offsides.

Holly Buchanan, a women's marketing specialist for the Brooklyn-based online service FutureNow and co-author of the recently published book, "The Soccer Mom Myth," warned that, "at the end of the day, 'hockey mom' and 'soccer mom' are both just labels. The danger is that all sorts of biases are associated with the stereotypes. The very women they try to speak to, do they relate to it?"

The assumption of commonality - "Ich bin ein hockey mom" or, as Palin put it during Thursday night's vice-presidential candidate debate, "Joe Six-Pack hockey mom's across the nation need to band together" - is at odds with Buchanan's experience that "women don't like being called soccer moms, even though there isn't anything inherently bad in that."

Duke University cultural anthropologist Orin Starn suggested the brand could represent "a post-feminist statement that, 'OK, I'm chauffeuring my kid to the rink and arranging for the team's drinks but I'm not suppressed; I'm a stay-at-home kind of woman, in tune with a conservative agenda of family:' A proud-of-it, kick-your-ass kind of feminism."

Politics, Buchanan reminded, "is marketing; it is the ultimate marketing," but noted that hockey moms represent a "sub-group, a micro target" - not much larger than, say, the Iditarod demographic.

To Starn, the incongruity of presenting hockey families as American Main Streeters is fairly stark on more than one level. Not only is the sport "expensive, decidedly a middle-class, suburban phenomenon, not exactly hard-scrabble working class," he said, but also "restricted to northern-most states. Maybe they ought to go after basketball moms and football dads."

Whatever the political strategy, Schneider certainly isn't unhappy about the spillover potential of more Zambonis fans and more ears to hear "Hockey Mom:"

"I open up my bag at the rink

"Thanks to Mom, my gear, it never stinks

"She's one of a kind

"She's mine all mine

"She's my hockey mom."

The group has a Web site - thezambonis.com - and will perform Friday at the NHL Store in Manhattan for NHL Fan Appreciation Day. They have recorded a hit called "Hockey Monkey" and a tune, "Boom Boom Boom," for the league's national TV campaign. Among their apolitical (though not always politically correct) songs is "Johnny Got Suspended," about a Rangers' fan who wore an anti-Islanders shirt to school. (Schneider used to work for the Islanders and currently is M.C. for their Bridgeport farm team.)

"To me," Schneider said, "it's sweet to say, 'I'm a hockey mom.' Politically, whatever is your bag, go for it. I love hockey, and at least [Palin] has hockey going for her." (He did add that the Zambonis will play at an Obama rally at Brooklyn's Williamsburg Music Hall on Tuesday.)

He has written, by the way, a "Hockey Dad" song, "but the basis of that," Schneider said, "is a dad screaming at the ref. Hockey moms get a love song, and dad got, 'You need to chill out and go to the penalty box.'"

Just your average hockey dad?