Slap Shot — the rare sports comedy about capitalism’s transition from Fordism to FIRE industries! — doesn’t give a shit about winning.
By Noelle Mateer
While in Johnstown for a hockey tournament inspired by the 1977 Paul Newman comedy Slap Shot, I thought I’d pop into the flood museum. This was silly of me. One does not “pop in” to a museum dedicated to a tragedy that killed 2,000 people. But there was time on the tournament schedule between Brunch with Bruce and Beers with Bruce (Bruce was an extra in Slap Shot) so I walked to the Carnegie building on Washington Street, and went inside.
The first thing you do when you go to the Flood Museum is meet Doug, who is so old that for a second I thought he might have witnessed the flood. He spoke with the kind of historical authority that only a man in chest-high khakis can muster. Doug felt it was important that I get a thorough explanation of the museum’s exhibits before I peruse them, and that I follow his preferred walking path so that my visit could proceed correctly from the vibrant mill town section to the futile warnings section to the mass death section. He then deposited me at the small theater, where I would watch a short 1989 documentary by Charles Guggenheim. Doug explained to me that the film’s scenes of water bursting were actually footage from Niagara Falls, and though that does give a good sense of the destructive power, the dam would have burst slowly, over hours.
The film recounted the events as follows: In the late 19th century, tycoons from Pittsburgh liked to hunt and fish at a private lake in Cambria County, 14 miles upstream of Johnstown. The lake was held in by a dam, but the owners of the luxe private vacation homes — including canonical Gilded Age villain Henry Clay Frick — made amendments to the dam that are thought to have compromised it, such as lowering its height to make room for a carriage-friendly road on top. The owners also sold off a system of relief pipes and valves for scrap metal and never replaced it, knowing full well that meant they had no way to lower the lake’s water level in an emergency. Perhaps you see where this is going. On May 31, 1889, heavy rains caused the dam to burst, and water from the lake gushed downstream to Johnstown. Guggenheim’s film ends on an image of a woman’s dress floating in the water, the camera below, looking up from where her corpse would lay.
I emerged from the theater distraught, and looked at some relics that had washed up in the Pennsylvania hills. “Handkerchief found in trouser pocket of C.T. Schubert, whose body was recovered several days after the flood.” “Hettie Ogle’s keys. Hettie Ogle was the telegraph operator on duty in Johnstown on the day of the flood.” A panel reading Facts About The Flood noted that 2,206 people died, one for every 10 in the neighborhoods that were flooded, and the destruction of downtown Johnstown took less than 10 minutes. 396 children under the age of 10 died, and 568 children lost one or both parents. I overheard Doug telling a visiting family that most of his ancestors alive at the time were wiped out, with the exception of his branch. “The fact that they lived on a hill is why I’m here,” he said, chipperly.
I tried to leave, but before I could, the volunteer at the door stopped me. She was also inexplicably cheerful, and selling limited-edition Blu-Rays of a 1926 silent romance thriller based on the tragedy. She said I should drive to the site of the burst dam. I respectfully disagreed. I asked if she could tell me how to get to the world’s steepest vehicular inclined plane instead. It was the one other Johnstown attraction I knew of and a visit to a straightforward marvel of engineering felt like just the ticket. “It’s closed,” she said. I returned, instead, to the hockey rink.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, has experienced two dramatic population declines in its history. The first followed the flood, and the second followed the steel mill closing, which also happens to be the inciting event for the 1977 Paul Newman comedy Slap Shot. Set in fictional “Charlestown,” the movie is based on, and filmed in, Johnstown. It centers a minor league hockey team who — following the mill’s closure and sudden dip in game attendance — are under threat of getting shut down. To draw bigger crowds, they play shockingly violent, bloody games. The ploy works, and they amass a fanbase of equally rowdy hooligans.
Slap Shot is a matter of pride in Johnstown, given “cult classic sports comedy” is a far funner thing to be known for than 19th-century tragedy, and the film’s legacy helps keep Johnstown’s hockey culture alive. Last November, a group of fans and hockey players organized The Slapshot Cup, a hockey tournament at the rink where Slap Shot was filmed. The event drew amateur teams from across the region, many of whose players were willing to pay an additional $25 to $50 for the chance to meet the aforementioned Bruce.
Meanwhile I — a woman with no interest in hockey let alone an understanding of its rules — was not there as a fan. I was there, rather, in search of a story. In the months prior, my writing life had been sputtering, my ideas growing stale, and in situations like this, I believe you need to go to a convention — some sort of earnest gathering of weirdos — and interview people at length, after which writing will emerge. The Slapshot Cup had all the elements of a Good Story. I felt so certain about its potential that I told the organizers to expect me before I’d even watched the film.
I was later horrified to learn how many punchlines relied on the f-slur. By then, though, it was too late. I arrived just as Bruce was speaking into a podium in a back room of the Cambria County War Memorial Arena. Overhead lights reflected off the whitewashed cinder block walls. About 50 attendees paid to be there, and were listening to Bruce with rapt attention. Bruce, a stocky man with a puff of white hair, was a hockey player for Johnstown’s minor league team in the 70s, and people were asking about decades-old plays in great detail. “Can you talk about the classic up here in the rain you played in?” asked a man in a camo hat and hoodie, leaning back in his chair like he was settling in for a good yarn. Another fan was hovering with a yellowed program from a 1970s season of the Johnstown Jets he desperately wanted Bruce to sign; an organizer pulled him aside and said “let him finish his talk.” I guess I looked like I was in the wrong room because another organizer waved to me and whisked me to the side, knowing instinctively that I was the woman who’d emailed them about possibly writing something.
The question and answer session wrapped up, and the attendees filtered out, leaving me, the organizers, a buffet table, several platters of cubed cheese, and Bruce. We sat down together. A friendly woman with bleached blonde hair asked what kind of stories I write.
“I write culture stories,” I said.
Bruce piped up from the other end of the table. “What’s a culture story?”
I said I liked to write about the interesting things people do in their spare time. He nodded.
“You should write about our cryptid festival,” said the blonde woman. I said I didn’t realize there was one. She said it’s called Squonkapalooza. Google tells me Squonk is “a mythical creature from Pennsylvania folklore that is known for being very ugly and constantly crying about its appearance.” The woman also said I should also check out a bar called Aces because there was a photo on the wall from when they filmed parts of Slap Shot there. The woman had actually been married at Aces, she said, and it was her second marriage to the same man. The first time around they’d gotten married in his religion, but when she got breast cancer, she said, “If I’m gonna go down, I’m getting married in my religion too.” I nodded as if it was something I could relate to. She didn’t specify which religions. We had, without thinking, entered the kind of easy trust that happens when you are the only two women in a room, and I realized this when Bruce was pulled away from the organizers. People had paid $50 to be in a room with Bruce and I had forgotten to interview him.
I found Bruce in the Slap Shot paraphernalia room, a wood-paneled triangle of a space bedecked with signed movie posters and photographs. There, he sat on the arm of an old sofa, which left me no choice but to sit on the cushion below, peering up his nostrils as I peppered him with questions. I asked him if Johnstown had changed since 1976. “Oh not really,” he said, which was interesting, given the population had shrunk by nearly two-thirds. Bruce was friendly, if perfunctory — he had the air of someone who’s given interviews before. Paul Newman? Nice guy. Johnstown? Nice place. Eventually he was pulled away by a handler.
Just months after the movie came out in 1977, Johnstown experienced its second “great flood.” Twelve inches of rain fell within 10 hours, and five dams failed. This time, the dams’ failure was a surprise — the city had constructed a system to eliminate flood risks, and regular inspections had come up clean. It was just a very, very bad storm. 84 people died.
When you drive to Johnstown — which, in November, is to see mangled deer corpses strewn along highway shoulders as if a massacre has recently taken place — you notice there many businesses named, inexplicably, after the floods. Flood City Boxing Studio. Flood City Flooring. Flood City Massage. On the drive in I’d found this merely quirky; when I left, all I could think was Hettie Ogle’s keys. The local craft brewery, Stone Bridge Brewing Company, is named for a bridge that blocked flood debris in 1889, including barbed wire, which caught on fire. The blazing debris created an inferno spanning 30 acres that burned for three days, trapping and killing people caught inside. Stone Bridge sells IPAs now.
The idea that a town’s brand can be “flood disaster” is almost as ridiculous as the widely held belief that a town should have a brand. And yet Johnstown is squarely within the churn of the brand-oriented local revitalization efforts that have taken place across Appalachia and the Rust Belt. My friend Madison connected me with her friend Katie, who, until a few months prior, worked for the county. “Some awful person a long time ago convinced an entire vulnerable town that like this [flooding] is what we need to lean into,” Katie told me. “It makes you kind of want to find and strangle the person that convinced an entire community that this was the way to go.” She said the local mall still had a poster from an old 1980s rebrand that showed a pair of legs in galoshes and said: Flood’s over! Come back to Johnstown!
The town has moved away from flood marketing in more recent decades, focusing instead on the recreation possibilities in the nearby mountains and rivers. (The slope that hosts the world’s steepest incline plane is great for downhill biking.) Fostering sports tourism has been part of that, Katie said. In 2015, the town lobbied to win Kraft Heinz’s annual Hockeyville USA competition, and won — as a prize, it got $150,000 in rink upgrades and the chance to host the Pittsburgh Penguins. Katie said there was also an ongoing effort to big up the town’s newly added amateur baseball team, the Mill Rats. None of these things were coming close to beating out the flood for being The Thing the town was known for, but all of them were competing to become Johnstown’s Second Thing, with the backing of small yet important local development funding. It appeared to me that Slap Shot stood the best chance.
Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” was playing as Springdale, a suburb of Pittsburgh, prepared to take on Greensburg, also a suburb of Pittsburgh. In the bleachers beside the hockey rink, I read over the Visit Johnstown gift bag I’d been handed when I walked in. Inside was a QR code to scan to view a self-guided Slap Shot walking tour: a map and series of videos starring Steve Carlson, who played one of the rowdy Hanson brothers in the movie. (At one point in the film the brothers climb into the stands and beat up people watching the game.)
In his walking tour, Carlson points out filming locales. In one video, he directs our attention to the statue of Morley’s dog, which a rich resident of Johnstown, James Morley, purchased as a lawn ornament in the 1870s. The dog statue was carried away by the flood until it was caught in the pile of debris at the stone bridge — perhaps you recall the one that caused a blazing inferno spanning 30 acres? — but fortunately survived as it is an inanimate object that does not require air to breathe. The Morleys donated it to the town, and it still sits in the main square.
Apart from this horrifying aside, the virtual tour was charming, and through Carlson I saw Johnstown through Paul Newman eyes, a more favorable lens than environmental disaster or Rust Belt decay. Still, see the hallmarks of a town past its prime poke through as he strolls through the lofty, empty train station. You notice this when you drive in, too: the old mill and its hulking infrastructure lying dormant. An incredibly steep inclined plane — a marvel of engineering — which, as I mentioned, is closed.
Slap Shot is a film about desperation. The closure of the mill effectively demolishes the American dream, turning other elements of society upside down: sportsmanship, civility, respectability. The hockey players’ escalating violence is a response to their futures crumbling before them. Oddly enough, the film ended up being bizarrely predictive — though Slap Shot begins with the fictional mill closing, the actual mill closed in 1977, a year after the film’s release.
According to film scholar Grant Wiedenfeld, this constitutes one of the first depictions of the Rust Belt in mainstream culture. In Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream, his 2022 book from Oxford University Press, Wiedenfeld argues Slap Shot satirizes conservative American sports culture “from a populist left angle.” The mill, with its built-in hierarchies and gendered labor, epitomizes traditional manliness of the day; when it closes, the men of Charlestown possess a form of working-class masculinity that no longer has a shape. They turn from members of civil society into “goons,” and as their violence on the rink wins them fans, Wiedenfeld writes, they “unleash a populist rage that lampoons sportsmanship and respectability.” Bound together by “shared suffering” (something I might call “solidarity”), the goons’ rage is directed “at the neoliberal executives who close the mill and fold the team,” he writes. Meanwhile, screenwriter Nancy Dowd portrays the team’s owner, Anita, as a functionary who is simply doing her job in “perfect ethical standing.” I suppose I don’t need to tell you there are parallels to today.
Slap Shot — the rare sports comedy about capitalism’s transition from Fordism to FIRE industries! — doesn’t give a shit about winning. Rather, the hockey players’ rowdy, yet still successful, performance, “satirizes the meritocratic myth of sports.” Of course, this is a characteristic of the Rust Belt as a whole. If American capitalism is a system of crowning winners and losers, the Rust Belt is a zone that has been beaten. Puncturing the moral significance of winning allows us to see the absurdity of this system.
Wiedenfeld also argues that fictional Charlestown is a space where radical queer and feminist themes can take root. In some instances, the hockey players’ homophobic jabs are intended to rile up their enemies, making homophobes the butt of their jokes. This is perhaps a charitable reading of a film in which Paul Newman says “your son looks like a [f-slur] … he’ll have somebody’s cock in his mouth before you know it!” But even if you do find the hockey players’ moral conduct lacking, even if you were to say that they don’t hold up, there is still a fairly socialist conclusion to draw: that the fight for economic justice and dignity of work is a fight for all, even for those whom we may deem distasteful.
Bruce, as it turns out, is not primarily known for Slap Shot. I googled him after our interview, and learned, to my horror, that he had been a head coach in the NHL until 2023. The fans — the pricey lunch tickets — the hoverers asking for autographs — suddenly it was all making sense. These people weren’t weirdos; they were sports fans, a perfectly regular thing to be. Meanwhile Bruce had coached in Stanley Cup playoffs, and I was the weirdo who had asked him if he had a favorite bar in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Mortified by my not-knowing, I decided to head home. On my way out of town, I passed a charming little place called Flood City Cafe. Handkerchief found in trouser pocket of C.T. Schubert. I also passed the liquor store that appeared in the backdrop of a Slap Shot scene. Per Wiedenfeld: “The austere sign ‘State Store’ and the medical green lights ironically suggest that the state aims to anesthetize its provincial citizen consumers.” The politics of that statement are correct and also exhausting. I kept thinking: how do people live happily with all these unpleasant reminders of destruction around them? Don’t they create some kind of subconscious psychic weight?
This line of questioning is short-sighted, though, because of course they don’t. We all live with gruesome histories around us, everywhere. In that moment, I was driving back to Pittsburgh, where we have a 644-acre park named after Henry Clay Frick. On the park’s Northern edge is Frick’s old mansion, which now houses an art museum. Frick is such a horrific villain that causing the Johnstown flood isn’t the first thing he’s known for. It’s not even the second thing he’s known for.
Noelle Mateer is a writer in Pittsburgh. Her work appears in Wired, The Guardian, The Economist and more, and she currently writes Pennsylvania: The Newsletter.
