It proved to be one of those rare moments of enlightenment.
Some time ago, a woman friend, who had no real concept of adult recreational hockey, wondered why I chose to play such a violent sport. She said she considered it ostensibly a game for young people. I agreed, since that’s when must of us learned to play it, but I insisted our brand of the game was gentlemanly and perfectly safe. She said the game was inherently violent. Well, I suggested, for those of us who really loved the game, the real attraction was the skating and stick-handling.
“Oh,” she said, “A game with two blades on your feet and a piece of wood in your hands, doesn’t suggest violence.”
That was the moment of enlightenment. I agreed that hockey was violent if a player chose to play it that way. As a retort, however, I suggested a number of sports that I considered much more violent than hockey. Lacrosse and rugby, for example. And the athletes playing in those sports wore even less protective gear than we do in rec hockey. It occurred to me that perhaps the violence in sport was proportional to the attitude of the players. If we used the two blades on our feet or the stick in our hands to try to hurt an opponent, then, yes, hockey becomes unnecessarily violent.
I guess the other quotient to consider here is the danger involved. Hang gliding came to mind as a sport that could be more lethal than no-slapshot, no-body-checking hockey. Driving in a demolition derby or snowboarding down a nearly vertical mountainside, I consider more life-threatening than a collision in the corner of a hockey arena. I can remember watching the mountain biking marathon at the Beijing Olympics, last summer, and that sport had more potentially life-ending thrills and spills than anything I’ve witnessed in a game of shinny.
When I did a little research the other night, I found plenty of sports I would never try. If the sport demands that you have to leave the ground without a parachute or go into a ring without a helmet, I consider it dangerous, unnecessary, and, yes, too violent. I’m thinking of such activities as climbing up a frozen waterfall or windsurfing in a gale. I remember the first time I saw luge and later skeleton racing at the Olympics, I considered them to have more of a death-wish component than anything on two skate blades.
Of course, some have taken the word sports to new lengths. Bungee jumping from downtown buildings. Motor bike racing on water. Riding on the backs of dolphins. High jumping over barbed-wire prison fences. Lawn mower jumping across ravines. Shooting rapids without a canoe or kayak. Chasing tornadoes. There’s even something called extreme zorbing. The so-called zorber climbs inside a large plastic ball that’s rolling uncontrollably down a mountainside.
Participants have given these pursuits the title: Extreme Sports. They have their own magazines, websites and competitions. Extreme ironing, reports its official website, challenges competitors to haul an ironing board to the most unlikely places on Earth to produce the best pressed shirt. Some extreme ironing contestants have ironed in a jungle, in a canoe, underwater, while snowboarding and even seated atop a statue.
I guess it’s all about one’s 15 seconds of fame on the Internet.
The cyber generation cannot lay claim to originating this stuff, however. A little research reveals something called bare-knuckle or fisticuffs – boxing without gloves or head gear – which dates back to 18th and 19th century England. Among its heroes was a man named Jem Belcher.
Born in Bristol, Belcher at the age of 18 challenged reigning champion Jack Bartholomew. In their first title match, in 1799, the two bare-knucklers went an incredible 51 rounds and fought to a draw. In a rematch Jem Belcher won the Champion of All England title and held it until 1805. He lost an eye, not boxing, but playing fives (barehanded racquet ball). Despite the disability, in 1807, he attempted to defend his title in a 31-round match, losing to Tom Cribb, who later became world champion bare-knuckle boxer.
All of which makes our Sunday oldtimers’ hockey games seem pretty tame by comparison. Unless, of course, a hockey player such as yours truly, accidentally becomes airborne during one of last Sunday morning’s SOFA games and meets the corner boards unceremoniously back first. Then I’d have concede to my female friend, not withstanding Don Cherry’s “Knock ’em Sock ’em” videos, that (occasionally) our sport can be violent.
No damage, just a moment of enlightenment.
