Stanley cup craze falls flat for me
(Originally published February 2024)
These days, everybody wants a Stanley cup.
When I first heard that, I thought, “Well, if they want it bad enough, they’ll learn to play some damn good hockey.”
But no, it turns out this is not the NHL championship trophy. It’s the insanely popular, expensive, oversized, insulated steel tumbler, made by the Stanley company. It keeps water cold.
“Yes, this is yet another trend I have missed out on. ”
Unlike all the other expensive, oversized, insulated steel tumblers out there, however, this one has a unique feature you can’t get with any other brand: a Stanley logo.
And that makes all the difference.
At least that is what I’ve heard. Apparently—and I say “apparently” because I’ve never seen a Stanley cup in the wild— popular (mostly young) people have decided these tumblers are a must-have. As the latest arbitrary status symbol, they’re hard to find and, according to news reports, are causing social friction between the haves and the have-nots.
Here we go again.
I don’t get the hype over the Stanley cup, in particular, maybe because when I was young, the need to constantly carry water on our bodies—as if we were all travelers on a month’s foot journey across the desert rather than house dwellers who are never more than 15 feet from a faucet—had not yet been invented. But I do understand what it’s like to want to get in on a trend.
My desire to fit in started when I was little, too little to know what it felt like to be shunned in the school hallway for wearing off-brand clothing. (That would come later.)
My earliest memory of not measuring up, trend-wise, came in the early 1970s. At the time, clogs were in, and all the popular first-graders were wearing a particular style. These clogs had wooden soles and leather uppers featuring a Swiss dot pattern of pinholes. They came in red, white, or blue, a nod to the coming Bicentennial.
I sensed, even at that age, that I would never be a somebody at recess if I didn’t have a pair. I don’t know what clogs cost in those days, but I know how interested my parents were in shelling out for something I would probably sprain an ankle wearing and would outgrow in a matter of months: not very.
They did, ultimately, relent. Sort of. They got me a pair of plastic, pink, clog-type shoes. These pale imitations fooled no one and, if anything, made me look like a pathetic wannabe.
Which I was.
Of course the stakes got higher when I got a bit older. Like the majority of my classmates, I was neither one of the popular kids, who always had the newest and most expensive clothes and accessories, nor one of the truly cool kids, who didn’t define their personas by looking or acting like everyone else.
I was a hopeless admirer of the first group, and it showed. But settling for the knock-off of the hot item of the day—or finally getting the real thing, six months after the trend had passed—only revealed my patent desperation to rise in the social ranks and, ironically, had the opposite effect.
Parents, what do you do? Do you spring for a pricey Stanley cup for your child, thus reinforcing the notion that material items do, in fact, buy social standing?
How shallow of you.
Or do you say no, so your child can build character and learn that it’s better to be unpopular than to try to impress people who judge others’ worth on their brand-name accessories?
Oh. So you want your kid to be a loser.
There is no good answer.
Looking back, I can’t say my life was ruined by not getting the right clogs—or, later, the right clothes in the latest styles. Maybe those things wouldn’t have made me happy anyway. Maybe no one would have been envious, which was half the point. Maybe I still wouldn’t have been popular.
I would have liked a chance to find out, that’s all.
Today I feel bad for the kids and parents wrestling with the social complexities of the Stanley cup frenzy. On a personal level, however, I’m enjoying the show. Yes, this is yet another trend I have missed out on. But at this stage of my life I’m thrilled to discover that I don’t care. I really don’t.
And that can only mean one thing: I’m finally cool.
Took long enough.
