Detroit hasn't won since donning a jersey advertisement, and its playoff hopes are slipping away. Is the patch a gothic curse, and what other anxieties underly fans' revulsion for it?
Detroit hasn't won since donning a jersey advertisement, and its playoff hopes are slipping away. Is the patch a gothic curse, and what other anxieties underly fans' revulsion for it?
Is the sky falling? It feels like the sky is falling.
That's certainly the consensus when I check Twitter, but it's more than the byproduct of an online echo chamber with a tendency toward doom and hyperbole. It's what I hear from the Red Wings fans in my life too—friends, family members, strangers I overhear on the street or chat idly with at the dog park.
Two weeks ago, the Detroit Red Wings had won six games in a row, the longest winning streak since Steve Yzerman returned as general manager in 2019. It felt inevitable that these Red Wings would be the ones to snap the franchise's playoff drought (dating back to the 2015-16 season, the second longest of its kind around the league). As of this writing, Detroit has lost six games in a row, and during that losing spell, it has seen its captain go down to injury and fallen to the wrong side of the playoff cut line.
So, what changed?
Never mind that it's been a season defined by the extreme polarity between its highs and lows, and never mind the difficulty of fine-pointing a singular source of dysfunction in an environment as fluid and chaotic as a hockey game (or five of them as the case may be). On this rare occasion, Red Wing fans have a clear locus for their frustration and for their anxiety.
That is because on the morning of February 29th, a few hours before Detroit sought to extend its win streak to seven against the New York Islanders (who have since supplanted the Red Wings in the Eastern Conference wild card race), the team announced that it would be placing an advertisement on the front of its iconic game jerseys for the first time.
And between Dylan Larkin's injury and the five-game losing streak, Detroit fans (online and in real life) have made their animosity for what's become known with vitriol as "the trash patch" public and unambiguous.
To better understand the precise contours of the fast-spreading trash patch panic, I turned to the only realm I believed could provide answers: gothic literature.
In his book "Gothic: A New Critical Idiom," Fred Botting (a literature professor from the United Kingdom) explains what he believes to be the "negative aesthetics" of the gothic, a literary tradition that emerged quite directly as a tool to force us to reckon with the boundary between irrationality and emotion with knowledge, empiricism, and scientific inquiry.
Botting writes that "if knowledge is associated with rational procedures of enquiry and understanding based on natural, empirical reality, then gothic styles disturb the borders of knowing and conjure up obscure otherworldly phenomena or the 'dark arts,' alchemical, arcane, and occult forms normally characterized as delusion, apparition, deception."
So why might gothic literature offer us an insight into the Red Wings' present losing streak and a fan base's reaction to a jersey advertisement? Because a lot like sports fandom, the gothic exists at the intersection of our natural tendency toward "uncontrolled passion" with clear and unambiguous reality—whether that's the scientific revolution and age of reason that served as a backdrop to re-animating corpses in Mary Shelley's classic 1818 "Frankenstein" or a collective willingness to pour an endless supply of emotional investment into the results of sporting events over which we haven't the faintest control.
Like any good gothic monster, the Red Wings' new jersey patch is, perhaps more than anything else, disorienting. It disturbs the comfort fans associate with an iconic uniform, and that disturbance has (if only via correlation) coincided with a losing streak and injury that have laid bare much larger fears about the future and direction of the organization. Botting writes that "crossing boundaries...demonstrates the protection they offer" and that, in the world of the gothic, "what seemed familiar and comfortable is threatened by the return of known but hidden, fears, ideas, and wishes."
The possibility of North American sports teams turning toward jersey advertisements is not a new one, and, for obvious reasons, it has never been a popular one amongst fans. However, when the NHL announced that 3-inch x 3.5-inch advertising patches would be allowed on uniforms for the first time, many prominent commentators insisted that any concerns about the purity of uniforms themselves being disturbed were naive and silly. Ads, this logic dictated, meant more hockey-related revenue, which meant a higher salary cap, and fans were to take that development as an improvement, because of the COVID-induced salary cap strain of the preceding seasons.
Would fans receive a cut of this newfound revenue in exchange for their acceptance? Of course not, and this argument in favor of jersey ads only reinforced the legitimacy of the salary cap as something other than what it's always been—a tool to suppress player wages and further line the pockets of the billionaires who own NHL teams.
Botting argues that in the context of gothic literature, "the axis of patriarchal persecution-protection is set against a romantic horizon of freedom." Here again, there is a clear parallel to fandom. "Patriarchal persecution-protection" is made manifest in the league's insistence that these advertisements are essential to the health of the sport, while "a romantic horizon of freedom" is more or less the essence of rooting for a team of any kind and the possibility that it will be great either now or in an uncertain future. That "romantic horizon" allows us to celebrate our favorite team as more than a business and instead as a personal, social, and cultural institution.
According to Botting, in the realm of the gothic, "monsters combine negative feelings that oppose (and define) norms, conventions, and values; they suggest an excess or absence beyond those structures and bear the weight of projections and emotions (revulsion, horror, disgust) that result." In this sentiment, Botting gets at the crux of the despair and anxiety many Red Wing fans are experiencing. This present doom spiral is about much more than a stupid patch on an otherwise beautiful jersey. The anxiety and even panic circulating around Detroit at the moment is much bigger.
It's about whether there will be a payout for a promising season whose fate still hangs in the balance. It's about the fact that however successful this season has been it cannot provide any assurance that next year will bring more progress. It's about a lingering concern that despite an extended window of anything but contention the Red Wings did come away with the kind of top-of-the-draft talent that defines the idealized version of a rebuild. It's about a more fundamental question of whether it's still possible to perceive the teams we've grown to love as anything more than businesses in an age of hyper-consumption and craven capitalism.
Of course, this silly little jersey patch isn't an explanation for the result of a hockey game, nor does it actually impact the moment-by-moment experience of watching one of those games for fans all that much. But it should also come as no surprise that fans have latched onto the patches as a clear and tangible landing place for much bigger and trickier to pin down anxieties.
And despite the online revulsion, there is little reason to believe that ownership will walk back from the threshold it crossed in adding the ad to the team's jerseys. So now, as if the Panthers, Bruins, and the rest of the Eastern Conference playoff picture weren't enough to contend with, a 3-inch by 3.5-inch jersey patch has become one more monster for these Red Wings to slay.
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