“The players, the fans, the coaches, the general managers like it … who doesn’t like it?”
Don Cherry
“To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.” Brian Burke, Maple Leaf GM
Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.”
Gary Bettman
The Code Airs to Clear The Fog of Icy Wars
CBC’s Fifth Estate Drops the Gloves on Fighting and the Big Lie
By Terrance Gavan
The CBC’s Fifth Estate documentary The Code hosted by Bob McKeon aired last Friday and it will take some hits on the chin for its forthright examination of hockey’s bullyboy mentality.
The Code featured interviews with a few NHL enforcers, and the de rigueur talking head shots of some pro-brouhaha gurus including CBC commentator, Don Cherry, Leafs GM Brian Burke and NHL Commissioner and pugilistic apologist Gary Bettman. The father, the son and the holy ghost. Who’s who? It’s a Vegas pick ‘em.
What irks me most about this triune coven of contrarians - Cherry and Burke and Bettman - is that inordinate air of haughtiness. Speaking like Moses from the burning bush.
They dismiss anyone harboring anti-fighting ideals with an opulent puissance and a self-aggrandizing conceit. They remain insufferably arrogant and self-important on the subject of fighting.
Cherry regards people in the anti-fighting camp as simpletons or no-nothing leftists. Tree huggers, pansies, patsies and traitors. Cherry, in his fist-popping, ham-handed glee, accuses the anti-fighting set with conspiracy; conspiracy to bring down “hockey … the only thing we (Canadians) do well.” Yes Cherry said that in the course of an exchange with McKeown.
Apparently Donny-boy was somewhere getting his melon frazzled in the A-League when Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize or when TC Douglas put up his dukes, chugged into a political void, and brought a world-renowned health care system to Canada.
According to Cherry, Bettman and Burke there is no room in the fan base for those wimps who feel hockey could survive without the punch, bump and grind.
Cherry, Burke and Bettman remind me of Rush Limbaugh, that Republican Party mouthpiece, who, like Cherry, has access to a national microphone and who is similarly prone to wielding hyperbole, cynicism, and fanaticism like an AK-47 stuck on auto.
Recently, on his nationally syndicated radio show, Limbaugh said that returning soldiers and war veterans who espouse contempt for the conflict being waged in Iraq are “phony soldiers.”
The comment sparked an outcry against the overstuffed redneck conservative flak. An outcry from those soldiers who had lost legs, arms and their sanity in the conflict. They carried the guns and feel they earned the right to speak yea or nay about the topic of Iraq. They are seriously pissed at Rush Limbaugh.
Forgive poor Rush. He’s only using a time-honored tactic of the morally ambivalent. When challenged on ethics, shoot the messenger. Limbaugh and his neo-con ilk utilize the legacy of the “big lie” as their set piece.
Primary principle of the big lie? “Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
That quote, of course, taken from an excerpt of a US army psychoanalytic report on Adolph Hitler commissioned during World War II. Hitler was a big fan of the big lie.
I prefer New York comedian Richard Belzer’s take on the “big lie”: “If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth, even when what you are saying is total crap.”
The big lie in hockey states that, “fighting is part of the game.”
In the Fifth Estate last Friday evening the big lie was punched, pooped and propped ad infinitum, ad nauseum by that legion of fighting proponents. And when challenged they sounded like Limbaugh. They offered disdain, they grabbed statistics from thin air, and they lashed out at the flower children, and the “phony fans.”
Phony fan? According to Cherry it’s a hockey aficionado with leftist tendencies that deigns to challenge the entrenched cognoscente with their lily-white abolitionist rhetoric. We are pansies, we followers of hockey who prefer the even-tempered dance of an International Olympic event with its attendant concentration on free-flow and exuberant dedication to skill, skating and style.
Fifth Estate host Bob McKeown interviewed a few non-pugilist activists including Fan 590 radio host Bob McCown who remains steadfast in his quest to staunch the bloody legacy of NHL fighting, and has for years been a no-nonsense dissembler and activist.
“I said somebody is going to get killed in a hockey fight and when it happens we’ll see the hockey world turned upside down,” said Bob McCown in the documentary.
McCown explained that when he first professed that very sentiment many years ago on his national radio show, Don Cherry didn’t talk to him for four years. McCown had done the unthinkable. He challenged the Big Lie long before it was fashionable. And he earned the ire of the mainstream pundits, including Cherry. Cherry branded McCown as a “phony soldier” engaged in a struggle to ban fighting from the game. McCown was deemed a threat. An insider and sports guy who should know better. He became the enemy at the gates. The first tenet of the big lie kicked in. “Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy.”
An interesting exchange between McKeown and Cherry serves to illuminate just how fervent this struggle has become. McKeown told Cherry that a poll found that 60 percent of fans wanted a ban on fighting in hockey.
“No, no, no, no,” said Cherry. He then went on to cite his “real” poll, which suggested that 70 percent or the “real fans” of the game and the bulk of hockey insiders supported fighting. Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” and Cherry’s “phony fans.” Part and parcel of the propaganda. Dismiss with disdain the “fakers.”
A more disturbing excerpt was the little ditty came from Commissioner Bettman who said, “Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.” Again, flirtation with the big lie, which has been refuted in basketball, in soccer, in football, and in countless other world sports events where fighting is rewarded with an automatic ejection.
And from Burke that sourpuss, newly-minted savior of the Leaf Nation comes this gem: “To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.”
Which sums it all up quite nicely. Fighting for peace.
A beautiful little snippet of inevitable logic sliding from the big lie that begs the question.
Is Burkey being oxymoronic or just moronic?
Or both?
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