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This is the Life: Finally, a cure

When I shut down television signals coming into our home a couple of years ago, I didn’t give up watching hockey...

When I shut down television signals coming into our home a couple of years ago, I didn’t give up watching hockey. One can usually find the Canucks’ games on the Internet and I continued to watch or listen on the computer, following the team I’ve cheered for since moving here from Alberta in 1979.

Giving up television was one thing, but giving up hockey was something altogether different. Like most Canadian boys, I grew up with hockey, playing on backyard rinks and on the outdoor ice at our community centre. I cheered for my beloved Leafs and booed les Canadiens each Saturday night. I was ecstatic when CTV began telecasting Wednesday night games (joining games in progress to allow the evening news to continue as scheduled). Sunday evenings I tuned my radio into CBC to hear Foster Hewitt broadcast games.

In my basement sits a collection of tens of thousands of hockey cards, player figurines, posters, pucks and other collectible items. Hockey was a passion I shared with our two boys.

But everything changed in the last few weeks. I found myself feeling increasingly soured by the games I watched in a final series that pitted the Canucks and the Boston Bruins. Wildly inconsistent refereeing left viewers and players unable to discern what the rules of engagement were. Penalties that were routinely called during the regular season were suddenly ignored. Mostly what bothered me, though, was the wanton disregard players showed for the safety of others. One began to sense that hurting opponents had become a priority. Was this the game I’ve spent most of my life loving, I wondered.

I want to make it clear that my disenchantment had nothing to do with the series outcome. I watched only a few minutes of the seventh game, spending the first period making dinner and leaving the house midway through the second for an event in Kuya Minogue’s recently constructed meditation centre. When I learned that the final outcome was 4-0 for the Bruins I felt a curious sense of relief that the whole thing was over with.

This was a series that couldn’t compare, hockey-wise, to earlier matchups. After the seventh game of the Canucks-Blackhawks series I commented that the game was as good as hockey gets. But the final was filled with ugliness. Viewers sat and watched players’ legs being viciously hacked at by opponents’ sticks, players — mostly Canucks — diving at the slightest provocation, others “finishing checks” on players that had long since given up the puck, if indeed they ever had it, and stars being intimidated and mugged, all in the pursuit of a championship.

My enthusiasm for the series dropped out of sight early in game six, when Henrik Sedin was flattened by a crosscheck to the back, then sent off the ice for diving with the offending Zdeno Chara (a player I happen to really like, although much less so after he drove Montreal Canadien Mark Pacioretty headfirst into a stanchion during the regular season). Soon after the bizarre call on Sedin, I watched as an obviously injured Mason Raymond was heckled by Boston fans, then recklessly hauled to his feet and off the ice by a trainer and fellow players. Replays showed just how ugly an incident this was, at least from my point of view. Raymond was hooked, which spun him to face defenseman Johnny Boychuk, who proceeded to run a player in a jackknife position into the boards. Raymond couldn’t possibly have been in a more vulnerable position and he was of no danger to the Bruins at that point, but still Boychuk, by decision or by years of having “finish your check” drilled into him, ran him into the boards.

I don’t want to watch hockey games in which players become modern day gladiators, committed to injuring opponents at every opportunity. I was equally offended when Alexander Edler smashed Marc Bergeron headfirst into the glass on an icing call, and relieved when Bergeron bounced back up, apparently uninjured.

The NHL, under the leadership of Gary Bettman, has proven woefully unable or unwilling to tackle the viciousness that has crept into the game over the years. Two simple changes — eliminating the armour players wear on the shoulders and elbows and enlarging the ice surface — would make for better and safer hockey. Until such changes are made, I’m finished with the game I loved for more than a half-century.

Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.