Hockey and Fighting
Recently, Coach and former NHL goalie Patrick Roy told his son to go beat up the other team’s goalie during a Quebec Major Junior Hockey League game.
Having both my sons in hockey at a high level, I have been asked about this situation by so many people and my response has been, “No comment”.
I feel that I needed to hold my anger about the situation and see what and how I think and feel about it.
First of all, it makes no difference if you have a child in the game or not. What happened is but an effect of a series of causes that are rooted in the belly of our conditioning. Sport is now the opium of the masses and just like religion, it will produce the greatest horrors. Religion has seen tyrants, as politics has. Patrick Roy is just a tyrant in sport. What has the world done about the tyrants in the world? Unfortunately very little. We do not see the small acts against people as crimes against humanity. Yet are they not one and the same? The leaders of the hockey world have not come out and publicly done something to insure this tyrant is removed from the game and made an example of. What goes on in hockey is tolerated, and if you did the same behavior on the street you would be charged and in court. No one has asked how one of the greatest goalies ever went through our Canadian Minor hockey system and the NHL and never learned what it is to be respectable or to have any human values. There are news clips of Patrick Roy telling stories of emotional harm done to his wife, and here he is telling his son to go and fight another goalie who was totally not engaged in any of the chaos present on the ice. What kind of man does this?
The answer? A man that has been brought up in a society that teaches the golden road to success in Canada is hockey. Look at the parents today that want their child to live the Canadian hockey dream at any cost. Lie, cheat, fight, do anything to be the best. Who cares who you hurt and how you hurt them, just get noticed, Hockey has become a business.
We as a society have created a Patrick Roy, and we are responsible for his actions. When we live out our dream through our children and base our relationships on their performance, they know in their hearts they are not loved and cared about in the true sense. These children who become adults have great difficulty forming and maintaining relationships that are based in honesty. respect, commitment to excellence and, of course, character development. The purpose of sport is for that single purpose: you want to see your child learn things like being a team player, anger management, perseverance, commitment, physical fitness and health. Overall you want your child to develop more than just skills. If I had my wish each situation would be handled by the players themselves and a community made up of a strategic plan process, set up by the captains of the teams.
When we handle situations in hockey as we handle them now, the levels of accountability are punitive and disconnected from the major people responsible for how they play and that is the players themselves. We create outside governance in sport because we are not character and value focused. It is like schools who put cameras in all over the school to catch misbehaviors, rather than educate and create processes that changes the culture of the school. Where violence sells tickets and character and skill are secondary. people are not interested – until it happens to a parent’s child and then the love of the game is killed in him or her. By then their skill set must now become also about being violent and criminal to survive a very short career.
Coach bri