This topic has no doubt provided some heat around Cranbrook ice surfaces.
Our National Game or the National Shame?
How would you like to be the best in the world at what you do, but broken up and finished at the age of 24 and never knowing – nor the world ever knowing – how good you might have been?
That's the sad scenario facing Sidney Crosby, the hockey phenomenon from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, the player that scored the “golden goal” for Canada in the 2010 Olympics, who is now out “indefinitely” with another concussion thanks to the thuggery that passes for “hockey” these days.
And it isn't just Crosby who's fallen victim to the “rock' em, sock' em” hockey popularized by Don Cherry from his bully pulpit on CBC's “Hockey Night in Canada” every Saturday night. In addition to “Sid the Kid,” NHL leading scorer Claude Giroux is also out with a concussion along with several other players, including Philadelphia Captain Chris Pronger who's out for the season.
Pronger, however, is 37 and has had an illustrious career as an all-star defenceman. Crosby barely got started on what could have been a Gretzky-like career and now even a Vegas bookie wouldn't give you odds on Crosby ever winning another scoring title. Or even completing another season for that matter. And this is tragic, not just for Crosby – the “face of the NHL” as is often said – but for the future of Canada's national game, which is rapidly catching up with the RCMP as one of Canada's most criticized institutions.
Small wonder when you consider a stunning series in the New York Times two weeks ago on former NHL goon Derek Boogaard, or “the Boogeyman” as he was otherwise known, who once went almost five years between goals but pounded on other players' skulls almost every game until his knuckles literally started to peel off. He died at 28 of Traumatic Encephalopathy, his brain basically a vegetable from the blows he endured and the pain killing drugs he took to dull his suffering.
In some ways, the titles alone of the three-part series tell you all you need to know about the Boogaard tragedy – “A Boy Learns to Brawl,” “Blood on the Ice” and “A Brain Going Bad.” Did I say the Boogaard tragedy? I really should have said the “Hockey Tragedy.” But when it comes right down to it, the best title would be “The Canadian Tragedy” because Boogaard was a big, tough Canadian boy from Melfort, Saskatchewan – son of a Mountie, no less-- doing what far too many Canadian boys have to do to succeed at our National Dream, a dream-cum-nightmare that is now ending careers at a tender age and cutting lives short in what is now a vulgar National Spectacle acted out on living room screens and in arenas coast to coast including our own.
A tad harsh, you say? If that's what you think then I challenge you to Google the New York Times series and read it for yourself. In this short space, I can only give a few highlights, but here they are:
- After countless bare-knuckle fights, chunks of scar tissue would flake off Boogaard's knuckles. The knuckles themselves would be driven back into his hand almost to his wrist and the team's trainer would have to pull them out again.
- Despite his monstrous reputation as a fighter, off the ice Boogaard was more like a gentle giant, always volunteering for charity work and eager to speak to children, who he would talk to after getting down on his knees to their level.
- In the fall of 2009 during a concussion checkup, a doctor asked Boogaard how many words he could say that began with 'r.' The veteran NHL brawler couldn't think of any.
I could go on, but I think you get the drift. NHL hockey today, and sad to say the three top junior leagues, including the WHL, which provide about 40 per cent of NHL players, is becoming a Roman-like spectacle of violence and thuggery more akin to a night of UFC mixed martial arts fighting than the fastest game on ice. Careers are being cut short, players are dying of concussion-related issues before they hit 30 and two former NHL enforcers committed suicide in a ghastly two-month period last summer.
And while making a lot of noise about cutting down on so-called “head shots,” the NHL establishment including managers, players and fans remain conspicuously silent on banning fighting or violent body hits that can also cause concussions by shaking the brain inside the skull.
Have we gone mad?
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