What does the photo mean?
(I have not watched Heated Rivalry and I know nothing about hockey beyond what I learnt from reading Check Please! and its fanfiction, but you have made me curious)
(also, hi, I miss sharing a fandom with you <3 )
This is a photo from the 2005 world juniors international men's hockey tournament. In this photo Canada has just triumphed over Russia to win gold, leaving Alexander Ovechkin (Left) and Evgeni Malkin in tears. Two young Russian men (18 or 19 years old here), so overcome with emotion at being second best that they are weeping in public. Yes, Ovi will go on to be the greatest goalscorer of all time. Yes, Geno will be a three-time cup champion. But in this moment their whole lives have been building to this moment and they failed.
I think also in order to understand this you need to understand that (at times) in Russia, hockey is political in ways that it is not in other parts of the world. When an American says they want to do their best for their country at, say, the olympics, you know, they'll get a little misty-eyed and feel kinda patriotic maybe when their anthem is played or whatever and some camaraderie with their fellow countrymen at the village. Meanwhile in Russia, if you're Alex Ovechkin, perennial captain of the national team for international contests, Vladimir Putin might call you up on your personal cell phone (because he DOES have your number) to yell at you and demand an explanation for why you have personally failed in your service to your nation (in a goddamned team sport ffs, sometimes while you weren't even on the ice because of injury, but I digress).
Ovi as captain quickly grew into someone who doesn't much wear his heart on his sleeve and can navigate the complexities and politics of captaining a team the way he does - the loud side you see of his personality is carefully selected, in my opinion. I don't think we ever got quite as raw and honest a look at how he continues to feel about such things than we did in that 2005 world juniors tournament, but I can only assume what he feels is even more intense than what Geno does - and we do know that when Geno returned from the Sochi olympics he was profoundly depressed at his national team loss on home soil. So much so that there are articles about how the only thing that helped him climb out of his funk was his captain Sidney Crosby having a deep private conversation with him - presumably about all that crazy pressure and grieving the loss. I can only imagine how hard that had to be, especially in the context of being Sid's teammate - whose arguably most iconic triumph is (as you may well know being Canadian even if you never followed hockey) personally scoring the gold medal winning goal in the Vancouver olympics as captain of the team. Storybook shit.
Sid (who's partially the inspiration for Shane Hollander) is very much the closest analogue to Ovi on the Canadian side of the world, and he undoubtedly has felt incredible pressure to perform, to bear the weight of Team Canada on his shoulders too. But it's... just different.
Even if you're not in hockey RPF or heated rivalry fandom it's interesting stuff just in terms of history/anthopology alone. I can recommend a fascinating read From Behind the Red Line: A North American Hockey Player in Russia by Tod Hartje and Lawrence Martin which is the autobiographical story of "a young Harvard-educated varsity hockey star, who travels to Russia in the dying days of the Soviet Union to play elite league hockey." Basically a guy who was probably not gonna make it far in the NHL and had the opportunity to do an exchange program to the USSR instead - because again, in this time period in particular, hockey is genuinely part of political maneuvering and diplomacy. It's very much from one perspective and of its time, but it's a very human and fascinating historical look at the cultural differences in hockey between two halves of the world, and it's set from the time period people like Alex Ovechin and Evgeni Malkin (and in the fiction realm, Ilya Rozanov who is partially based on Ovi) are coming up as children in professional hockey in the USSR and Russia.
So. Getting back to my original point, in Heated Rivalry, in the first episode we have some scenes of Shane and Ilya facing each other in a world juniors equivalent tournament. I've seen (non-hockey) people talk about these scenes as like a little meet-cute, a ha-ha how fun for them to flirt in the handshake line - oh look at how brusque Ilya is he must be flustered by Shane's happy flush and freckles and "see you at the draft" or whatever the line is. Aw look at them riling each other up getting competitive! Meanwhile I'm sitting there like - fucking look at him, Ilya is crushed. The fact that he's going first in the draft is still (at least at that time) tainted by his loss on the world stage. Yes, Shane has been in a pressure cooker his whole life too, and going second in the draft is a disappointment that will eat at him a long time, but that pressure is different. When Shane has his turn losing his tournament, his disappointment is personal. He's probably never had the thought that if he fails in a hockey game a politician could decide to make life difficult for his family members back home.
All the details they put in there, the nuances in the acting choices, the references being made to all that context I described above changes the way those scenes work. These two young men are the same in so many ways, facing the same tournament, the same draft and the yawing chasm of their pro hockey career on the horizon - but they are profoundly foreign to each other at the same time. There are much bigger forces in play complicating how they can interact with and relate to each other than just general societal homophobia and romance story tropes.
Anyway, I'm probably taking it all a little too seriously here, but really, I just kind of don't feel like I'm watching the same show as people who don't have any of this context.
