Olympic hockey

It is a pleasure to watch Olympic hockey because it is not nearly so violent as the NHL. The Olympic national teams are comprised of highly skilled players, and the 'goon' element has been left at home.

I live in a country where people feel very protective of hockey, and are unwilling to see it change as has other sports. I remember as a kid, when a baseball pitcher went a little too far in pushing the batter off the plate to allow for outside pitches to catch the plate for a strike, and hit the player, often it led to the batter storming the mound and taking a swing at the pitcher, which then led to bench clearing brawls. However, such things are a rarity in baseball today: in fact, I cannot recall seeing such a thing in baseball for at least a decade. Rule changes and penalties have nearly taken it out of the game.

There is an argument in Canada that hockey is a game that requires a pressure valve. Big people who skate really fast wield sticks that are sometimes used to club other skaters, and the hockey 'fight', it is argued, is an opportunity for everyone - the combatants, other players, and fans - to relieve the pressure. These fights, then, are thought to be cathartic, and actually healthy for all concerned.

This argument is full of holes. Baseball is a much more frustrating game than hockey. Players sit in a dug-out for long periods of time, nervously and passively watching a game unfold, and when the camera sweeps the dug-out, one can sense the pent up tension in the players. Nevertheless, fighting (once part of the game), has since been almost completely removed from it. Nevertheless, records continue to fall, players flourish, and the game seems as healthy as it ever was. At any rate, I have never once heard a sports commentator argue that baseball is any less of a game because people no longer fight.

Second, this argument instructs us that in order to deal with stress, we must engage with other people using our fists. This is what might be expected of young children who 'can't find their words'. That such purging is healthy is simply ridiculous: if one is truly overcome by stress, one ought to learn culturally appropriate ways to deal with the stress, beyond punching someone in the face repeatedly. In other sports, the rules evolve to meet new sets of circumstances, so that referees can enforce rules that serve to lessen stressful situations. Soccer is a really good example: while none of us like the diving at the international level, at the same time, gratuitously injuring people is now almost absent from the game, as is fighting. The NHL might need to treat the disease of highly stressful situations so as to eliminate the symptom of fighting.

Two weeks ago, one of our Campbell River Under 14 boys hockey teams played a road game in Gold River. A few days after the game, I heard from a reliable source that one of our boys had punched the referee in the face. Later, I was told that the controversy in the hockey community was whether this boy should be given a two or a three game suspension. I find such appalling behaviour and such leniency towards it remarkable. Can we be certain that such youths will be able to distinguish what is appropriate at the hockey rink from everyday life? Will they treat policemen, judges, teachers in the same way as they do referees?

And so, why is such behaviour permitted (and perhaps even encouraged) in the NHL, and not in the Olympic games? The standard answer, of course, is that NHL hockey fans like the fighting, and the Olympic games require a higher standard of behaviour. My hope is that the youth of Canada watch an Olympic gold medal game in which the cleanest, most skilful team prevails.