Wed Feb 2/05
Bruins suck

Behold: Bobby Orr, columnist!

Recently, the father of a 9-year-old boy, frustrated over a lack of ice time for his son, reached over the glass during a hockey game in Toronto and assaulted the child's coach. This single act powerfully illustrated the need for parents across Canada to, first, be educated and, second, be held accountable for their actions at minor sports events.

That's Bobby Orr, Toronto Star columnist, in case you couldn't guess from the tenor of that opener. (The idea that a "single act" can "powerfully illustrate" the need for something lies at the root of perhaps one in five Star editorials.) Because Bradley Desrocher lost his shit, in other words, all parents must now report for re-Neducation.

I'm with Don Cherry on this: distributing 200,000 "parenting manuals" and designing ad campaigns that lampoon parents freaking out at three-legged races and spelling bees is insulting to all hockey parents, especially when the people designing "Chevrolet Safe and Fun Hockey" admit (as Orr does in his Star piece) that "the extreme nature of the recent episode in Toronto was shocking and rare." So why are we talking about it at all? Every now and again, someone is going to throw a spaz at his or her kid's hockey game, baseball game¹ or spelling bee. Can't we just set him or her straight (as has been done with Mr Desrocher) and move on?

Well, clearly we can't. At least in part, that's because sideshows like Émile Therien vs. Don Cherry and the Injury Prevention Research Centre vs. body-checking necessarily blow everything out of proportion. Remember when Team Canada dared to finish fourth at the 1998 Olympics? They held a summit, for heaven's sake — you'd think Canada had won every gold medal, instead of no gold medals, in the preceding half century. Similarly, Cherry is now widely cast as actually being in favour of injuries, and body-checking as a potential killer.

The debate has been taken up largely by professionals paid to espouse one side or the other, which is never a recipe for a solution, and sports sections, seemingly in thrall of having landed an actual source, refuse to sift out the ensuing irrelevancies. The Post's article about the original incident (since banished from the Internet, I'm afraid), contained a very telling quote from Peter Donnelly, director for the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at U of T:

I wouldn't have highly organized hockey and leagues for anyone under 12 years old. It's bizarre to talk about low levels of physical activity among our children, when we are actually cutting kids from teams who want to play.

Ahem. What on earth has that got to do with Desrocher reaching over the glass and choking his son's hockey coach to the brink of unconsciousness? Donnelly feels that "part of the problem is that children are playing on [sic] highly charged, competitive leagues at younger and younger ages," which may or may not be true, but is certainly beside the point. Why would the Angry Dad phenomenon (or the Exhibitionist Mom phenomenon) disappear if kids only started "highly organized" hockey at age 12? Anyone?

-contact-