Newspaper Coverage of Early Professional Ice Hockey: the discourses of class and control.

This paper explores the manner through which the International Hockey League (IHL) and its operations were portrayed in newspaper coverage in the larger urban centers of eastern Canada, where hockey had its developmental and organizational roots within the middle- and upper-middle-class community, and compares it to coverage that appeared in newspapers in the communities that hosted IHL teams, which were communities driven by industry and had large working-class populations. To do so, a comparison of newspaper coverage of the IHL in local IHL newspapers with reports published in newspapers in major Canadian cities strongly associated with the origins, development, and organizational control of ice hockey, is undertaken. The development of the sport of ice hockey in both Canada and the USA, and newspaper coverage generally, and hockey specifically, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reviewed. Representative examples of the coverage of IHL games and operations over the course of its three-year operations are then provided. Having compared the coverage of games and operations of the IHL between IHL and Canadian-based newspapers, the paper concludes with a discussion of how business competition, competing ideologies toward high-level sport, and class-based perceptions regarding violence, aggression, and masculinity can affect the newspaper coverage of sporting events.