“Will you ever win?”

Abstract

Slap Shot’s Lily Braden is the origin of what I term the “willful wife.” The “willful wife” is a unique character of the hockey film genre as she appears in nearly every popular post-Slap Shot hockey film but is incredibly rare in other sports films. I define the willful wife as the girlfriend/wife of an athlete, in literature or film, who is unhappy with her partner’s devotion to sport, and so demands that he be a more attentive boyfriend/husband and/or father; however, later in the story, the willful wife then either illogically drops her demand or forgets about her previous relationship problems and reconciles with the athlete-protagonist. This article argues that Slap Shot is often considered a comedy rather than a satirical comedy, and as a result, Lily’s satirical journey in the film has been misread, which has led to the sexist legacy of the willful wife in the hockey genre. The resulting popular hockey film genre reproduces Lily’s “willful wife” storyline without any of her story’s satire or politics and in doing so, the genre ignores Lily’s critique of (dominant) heteropatriarchal hockey culture that relies on devaluing and demeaning women.