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Too Much Nostalgia? A Decennial Reflection on the Heritage Classic Ice Hockey Event
Abstract
This research note explores the legacy of the Heritage Classic, an outdoor ice hockey event held in Edmonton, Canada in November 2003. The event explicitly and successfully evoked nostalgia for former players, past teams, rural environments, and the egalitarian nature of childhood games, becoming a major international media and tourism event as well as the template for numerous outdoor ice hockey events held around the world. It also provided the Edmonton Oilers hockey club and the event's organizers with both emotional and economic capital at a time when the franchise required support. However, the success of the Heritage Classic meant that the National Hockey League (NHL) and other hockey leagues would organize subsequent outdoor hockey events, thereby minimizing the ability for individual franchises to benefit from their heritage as the Oilers did. Furthermore, little was done locally to build on the success of the Heritage Classic, while the proliferation of similar events globally may have minimized both the media and tourism impacts of subsequent outdoor hockey games.
... The proliferation of outdoor hockey events across North America and Europe, for example, espouse the roots and traditions of the sport while also providing unique spectating experiences (Ramshaw & Hinch, 2006). These types of heritage events are also significant profit centres, as events like outdoor hockey games are significant money-makers for franchises and leagues alike, and often generate their own event-specific heritage merchandise (Ramshaw, 2014b). Roberts' (2014) discussions of the heritagization of popular music, the culture of sport (which is seemingly about the present), and the heritage of sport (which is seemingly about the past) are now virtually indistinguishable. ...
... Also, unique heritage products could potentially solidify fandom. One of the reasons for the launch of the outdoor hockey game trend in 2003 was that the Edmonton Oilers, organizer of the Heritage Classic, needed something special to retain their fan base after years of poor play (Ramshaw, 2014b). Indeed, sport heritage goods and services appear to have a very distinctive purpose beyond just being goods and services. ...
... Hinch and Higham (2005) position sport tourism as a particularly authentic cultural experience, in part, because of its resistance to commodification. By emphasizing the heritage attributes of a particular sporting place, practice, or experience, authenticity could clearly be part of the sport heritage experience, though its over-emphasis and explicit commodification could transform something special into just another tourism product (Ramshaw, 2014b) while also alienating local supporters. ...
This paper reflects upon the development and increased acceptance for heritage becoming a key component of sport tourism research. The original sport heritage typology, as posited by Ramshaw and Gammon [2005, More than just Nostalgia? Exploring the heritage/sport tourism nexus. Journal of Sport & Tourism, 10(4), 229–241], is re-examined through a more critical lens, revealing additional dimensions that help augment its key components. More specifically, it is argued that future studies should consider the more intangible features of sport heritage, as well as acknowledging the expanding global nature of sport and its impact upon fandom. Also, the case is made for research to explore the dissonance inherent in much of sports heritage, as well as determining where the power lies in allocating and championing current sport heritages. Lastly, the more general implications to the field of sport tourism are offered with particular regard to motivation, place, and consumption.
... On the one hand, we can identify sports events where the heritage dimension is a core feature. The Heritage Classic in ice hockey (Ramshaw, 2014), the Arctic Winter Games (Hinch & de la Barre, 2007), the Dragon Boat Race in China or the Kirkpinar Oil Festival in Turkey (Pinson, 2016b) are some of the examples presented in the academic literature. Although most of these events have a competitive dimensionmeaning one of their aims is to designate a winnerthe celebration of the sports heritage or the local heritage is central to them. ...
Although sports heritage is increasingly recognized as a potential catalyst of tourism, heritage sporting events (HSEs) are still an emerging concept in the academic literature. Notions that associate sports events and heritage remain rare, and are usually analysed through the scope of nostalgia sport tourism. This can be partly explained by an inclination to associate the notion of heritage with conventional ideas about folklore and traditional culture. Through a constructivist approach of heritage, this contribution argues that contemporary sports events, which would generally have competition as their primary focus, might also be perceived as HSEs. A comprehensive framework, built on a multi-disciplinary literature review, is presented to show the process that transforms an initial resource (a sports event) into an accomplished resource (a HSE), which might represent a competitive advantage for the territory. A qualitative–comparative analysis is conducted among 24 sports events in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, to observe the configurations of HSEs and understand which characteristics are necessary for the perceptions of a sports event as a heritage good. Interestingly, this contribution shows that if the event needs to be sustainable in the territory to be perceived as a HSE, it is not sufficient. Indeed, a differentiation strategy should be set up to distinguish the event from other more or less similar events, to be perceived as an authentic feature of the territory by the local population.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14775085.2016.1263578
... In many respects it may also inspire further academic research, particularly into the festival aspects beyond the pitch such as the spectator experience. Furthermore, as many sports such as ice hockey have recreated and reenacted particular sporting practices in traditional/nostalgic sporting landscapes (see Ramshaw, 2014;Ramshaw & Hinch, 2006), contemporary event managers may wish to consider the cricket festival as a template for a "new" kind of sport heritage event. ...
The purpose of this research was to explore different issues and controversies found in media narratives about hosting the Heritage Classic Ice-Hockey Game, on Canada’s Parliament Hill. This paper utilized the Eight-step Qualitative-Temporal Visual Analysis and Narrative methodology to look at how Canadian media framed the discussion around the hosting location of the Heritage Classic. A total of 81 news articles from 12 media outlets served as the data for the current study. Media frames were grouped into seven themes: parliamentary rules, interest groups, anniversaries, logistics, competition, event landscape, and nostalgia. These frames point to how Parliament Hill was maintained as an institution through regulations and symbolism. The following manuscript informs research on institutional work through applications of special events, eventscapes, and nostalgia.
This paper contributes to the recent debates concerning sport and the “Americanization” of culture with specific reference to Canada. The analysis focuses on the media’s role in articulating specific political, economic, and cultural events in order to construct a crisis of Canadian identity. In particular, this study examines how the 1988 marriage and trade of ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky were articulated within a discourse of crisis and specifically linked to an alleged threat of “Americanization.” It is asserted that a comprehensive understanding of Americanization must address its complexity beyond a simple case of cultural imperialism and should consider such issues as appropriation and strategic use to serve particular political interests.
Sport can be heritage, and sport heritage attractions such as halls of fame, museums, and stadium tours can be one of the more potent forms of heritage tourism. However, few studies have examined sport heritage attractions, nor considered their construction. This paper examines three ways in which sport heritage attractions are constructed, exploring in particular the human dimensions of sport heritage, the link between sport heritage and legacy, and the relationship between sport heritage, tourism and globalization. Several outcomes of these constructions are examined, both in terms of the representation sport heritage as well as implications for the attractions themselves. Ultimately, this paper seeks to consider sport heritage, and its constituent attractions, in wider heritage and heritage tourism debates.
Sport is an important factor in the construction of place identity. This is particularly evident in the case of nostalgia based sport events that have been consciously developed in an attempt to influence destination image. It is unclear, however, just how much influence attraction planners have on identity in the face of varying media interpretations. This paper examines the way that place identity was constructed by local, national, and international media sources in the case of the Heritage Classic – an outdoor professional hockey game played in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on 22 November 2003. Findings show that local, national and international media all bought into the nostalgia theme. Local media saw the game as epitomising the ‘good old days’ of prairie hockey. The national press was more critical and tended to either expropriate the event as a national one or to dismiss the event as being peripheral. Internationally, the event was seen as uniquely Canadian and compared to a Norman Rockwell painting in terms of its nostalgic effect. Interestingly, while the event was often seen as reflecting the authentic roots of the sport, it was presented and interpreted in a way that was neither place nor time specific.
This paper explores some uses of nostalgia in two accounts of ‘the death of hockey’ in the professional National Hockey League of North America. The two accounts examined offer critiques of the commodification of the game some 26 years apart, in 1972 and in 1998. The argument developed here is that nostalgia can be more than just a longing or a yearning for an unattainable golden era located some unspecified time in the past, when social life was well organised and clearly understood, but rather that nostalgia can also take on a tough critical edge when its practical uses are recognised and exploited. Couched as practical nostalgia, such interpretations of the past provide a vision that can be used as a way of creating a space for the development of a critique of the present and opening up possibilities for the future. In the public culture of hockey practical nostalgia can be used to articulate a theoretical approach for understanding the ongoing commodification of the game.
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McCurdy, B. (2013). Memories of Oilers past: The Heritage
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years-heritage-classic-remains-thestandard-for-players-fans-venue-and-extremely-frigidtemperatures and promotion of the event. One of the organizers of the Heritage Classic termed the
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and promotion of the event. One of the organizers of the
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