If many Canadians consider hockey to be their biggest and most boisterous source of pride, then the stubborn “man’s game” culture that surrounds it may be the source of their biggest shame.
Flash back a few months to the now infamous collision between Washington Capitals forward David Steckel and Pittsburgh Penguins forward Sidney Crosby, the latter of whom was knocked senseless after a crushing mid-ice blow to the head. Crosby never saw the sharp shoulder of Steckel coming, and Steckel was just focused on getting back into the flow of play. After much debate amongst fans and media, the Steckel hit was mostly dubbed as an unfortunate, but accidental incident. Crosby came back to finish the game, and would play the next one too, before doctors finally figured out something wasn’t quite right.
Flash forward a few weeks to a game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins, where Leafs forward Mikhail Grabovski suffers a pair of crushing cranial blows after getting plastered into the boards by hulking Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara. After the second hit, Grabovski plummets to the ice in a heap, pauses before attempting to push himself back up, then staggers back down again. Although Grabovski is clearly disoriented, the Leafs make the decision to keep him in the game. Later, there’s a shot of Grabovski using smelling salts on the bench, trying to sniff his way back to coherence. The image elucidates a disturbing reality about the never-say-die attitude of the sport.
Too often, a player’s decision to stay in the game after suffering a nauseating hit or blow to the head is backed up by the rah-rah chorus of media and fan voices who use descriptors like “courage” and “guts” in support of the player. This language is merely one part of a larger macho discourse that trumpets strength over weakness and hard-shell resiliency over perceived feminine vulnerability. Analyst Mike Milbury asserted that the removal of fighting would result in the “pansification” of the game, and called fellow analyst Pierre McGuire a “soccer mom” for his stance on no-tolerance headshots. McGuire is loud, but Milbury is louder, and too often the ones promoting change and growth in the game are drowned out by those who like things just as they are, thank you very much.
A journey into the bowels of the Internet – the hockey forums – reveals just how far this vitriolic and often misogynistic discourse trickles down.
“Nothing like a crushing check on Cindy Crosby!!” says one user on the YouTube comments section. “Hope he remembered to re-apply the mascara he lost as he went crying to his trainer.”
What the user fails to comprehend is that Crosby, of course, is not a straw dummy there to withstand the anonymous slings and arrows of juvenile name-calling. He is a human being, and when he gets nailed by a 20-miles-per-hour freight train, he’s going to feel it just like you or I would. I’m not sure if the morning after his concussion diagnosis, Crosby proceeded to his vanity table and applied his daily quotient of mascara. He may have, however, experienced the scary collapse of tunnel vision, saw the world unnaturally tilt sideways and felt waves of nausea just by taking a step out of bed.
Move back to the day of the Capitals-Penguins game. Crosby returns to the third period, and even plays the next game – the doctors claim to find nothing wrong and he is, as the patriotic hockey mantra goes, a “good Canadian boy.” This is all before the oh-wait moment, where the neuropsychologists reexamine Crosby’s brain and discover something they hadn’t previously. Before you know it, the game’s best player is out for two months and counting.
The NHL has the second-highest rate of concussions next to the National Football League, where, unlike in hockey, head-to-head encounters are typical and expected of the sport -- just a "part of the game." A CBC report found that the number of NHL concussions remains unchanged from last year’s totals, despite the new Rule 48 banning all blindside hits to the head. More disturbingly, The New York Times reported an average of 75 concussions per season in the NHL, a statistic believed to be “vastly underreported.” Former pugilists like Rob Ray, who sustained around 10-12 concussions during his career, say that enforcers do not report their concussions because they know they are “too easy to replace.” In other words, if you're a so-called wimp and can’t handle the hurt, pack up your bags. There are 10 others waiting to take your place.
All of this has made one thing painfully clear: the game is in want of a cultural change, and badly.
Changing the entire culture of a 100-year old game is not done easily. In fact, it may be one of the hardest jobs commissioner Gary Bettman will ever have to face, over headaches such as the two season-ending lockouts and the bout of financially struggling markets in the Southeast. He will have to confront a solid contingent of folks who will shout about the alleged destruction of their beloved game. He will have to deal with financial losses from angry fans who will fly to other sports that can give them what they want.
But the game is in a state of near-emergency, and the protesting voices are getting louder. One voice in particular, Keith Primeau’s, is speaking up about the four concussions he sustained before his NHL career was prematurely ended. Primeau and others have designed a program called “Play it Cool” whose goal is to educate minor hockey leaguers on proper attitude towards the game.
"There were choices that I made [to play through concussions] and part of that is because I believed that was the right mentality," he tells TSN. "The design behind 'Play it Cool' is to try and change that cultural mindset. You can still be courageous and you can still be a competitor and you can still enjoy the game, but with less risk.
"It's a new form of courage."
[Crosby photo: NY Daily News]
[Primeau photo: Finding Dulcinea]
