Men are traditionally thought as aggressive and being tough, and this ideology is still very prominent in the 21st century. One of the areas containing a lot of physical contact is in sports. You might be thinking of fighting sports such as boxing, mixed martial arts or even football, where physical contact is the goal of the game, but no. The team sport with the most fighting and unnecessary injuries is hockey. One of the main reasons it is so prominent is perfectly explained by Kilmartin: “aggressiveness” (7). In his book explaining masculinity, “Masculinity is characterized by a willingness to take (physical) risks and become violent if necessary” (7). Men are just naturally more aggressive and seek fighting more than women. This, combined with the long history and ideology of fighting in hockey makes minimizing this aspect of the game very difficult.
As “The Fifth Estate”, a CBC documentary, discovers an unwritten code, nicknamed “The Code”. This hidden law of hockey is kept by the pride, feeling of accomplishment and love for the game they professionally play. In these unwritten rules, when a smaller player gets bullied by a larger player, it is the responsibility of his teammates to help him. These are called the enforcers and their main job is to fight with the other team. Another rule is to take the helmets off, to not get hand injuries after dropping the mitts, because apparently, hands are more important than a brain to some people.
The brain is the central organ to every person, and is the reason we are alive. In hockey, however, entertainment for some people seems more important then this vital organ. Multiple brain injuries are caused by tens and hundreds of small, repetitive hits to the head, and in the long term cause degradation in the human brain. One of the main injuries that hockey players can get because of fighting is Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Of course, the NHL completely refutes this fact, as less fights could possibly mean less viewers and in turn less money. The disease is not obvious at first and has some symptoms such as “impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and paranoia” (Concussion Legacy Foundation). The symptoms continually get worse, until the person with it is unrecognisable.
An example of players diagnosed with this awful disease are Wade Belak and Todd Ewen. These NHL players decided to take their own lives because of CTE. They would constantly have severe memory loss, complete disconnections with the outside world and severe mood switches, even with loved ones and good friends. Wade’s wife says how he would sometimes turn into someone else and not have any idea what he was doing. She says that “he was trying to brush her (his daughter) hair after the bath, and he smacked her with the brush, which he has never done anything like that” (Hockey wives 15:25).
It is time to change what the code really means and does to certain people, as even though it is a way to respect the other players, it is not worth respecting if it means life or death. For players who are only on a team to fight, there is a huge amount of pressure on their shoulder because they must fight often, even if they don’t want to. These are the players that have the most risk of suffering long term brain damage. The first step to making hockey a safer game is to convince the officials and coaches of the NHL that fighting is useless and the game would work fine without it, since in the end, the game is happening for entertainment purposes.
- “What Is CTE?” Concussion Legacy Foundation, 15 Apr. 2020, concussionfoundation.org/CTE-resources/what-is-CTE.
- Hockey fight: Wives reveal the cost of concussions – Episodes – The Fifth Estate. (2020). Retrieved 4 May 2020, from https://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2019-2020/hockey-fight-wives-reveal-the-cost-of-concussions
- The Code – Episodes – The Fifth Estate. CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2009-2010/the-code.
- Kilmartin. “Defining Men’s Studies.”
Lovers and Fighters | Section 22 