Or maybe a player overstepped his role, creating more opportunities for himself, to push his stats up higher than the others. They allowed a player to work at a more personal level without the added support of the team, undermining the potential for synergy. No team created something greater than the sum of its parts. No magic numbers, only obvious and measurable reasons. In the games in which Australia scored in '79, more than half the team's goals were from one player. In the 1974 Worlds, one or two locals did more body and stick checks than the rest of the team combined. In the Seventies and Eighties, hockey fans here mainly watched games where one or two players achieved great personal stats, but the team lost. An entire generation lugging four-by-twos, pulling drinks, making latte art, slaves in black helmets, hockey has us chasing money for others, working jobs we hate so we can pay to play at the next level. I see all this potential and I see squandering. "I see in my team," says a young player approaching his prime, "some of the strongest and smartest locals who ever developed their game here. As ethereal as fairy dust, synergy is essential to extending the frontiers of Australia's understanding of the game, because anything less does not cut it at the top. That rare commodity Australian ice hockey needs, yet does not want. Stranger still, it is a glass ceiling of their own making. Australia twice broke through to Division 1 in recent times, but the nation Down Under is still under the glass ceiling of Division 2. Out on the wet pavement, the big wheel is motionless, the side-shows empty, Coney Island rejects, a big-top no-one ventures. Yet, the best teams, the ones at the top, they either get close or they actually do it. It is harder in the game against the Division's top side, the side relegated the previous year, and an Olympic final is even harder than that. And even fewer can do it consistently, let alone every time.
Teams need to create synergy like this at the top of each IIHF world championship division, but only a few do. Beyond 6 is the kingdom of gold where medals become reality. A team of five skaters and a goalkeeper outperforming its best player of the game. Expressed as an equation, this is 6 x 1 > 6. IN THEORY THEY SHOULD NOT BE WINNING, yet they are. Don (left) and Ryan Switzer, Ryan's wedding, undated.
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