{"id":11036,"date":"2008-03-15T17:39:37","date_gmt":"2008-03-15T21:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/15\/11036.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:13","slug":"go-wolfpack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/15\/go-wolfpack\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Wolfpack!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger and his Perfect Non-Reader were amongst the four thousand four hundred and fifty-six people in attendance at our local hockey team’s game last night<\/a>. We had a good time, as did the other four thousand four hundred and fifty-four people, as far as I can tell.
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As Gentle Readers may or may not know (or care), YHB has been a big fan of college hockey for many years now, and hasn’t watched professional hockey much at all. In the college game, there is no fighting. Oh, it’s a physical game, and people get hurt, and often somebody takes out a fellow on the opposite team and then is slammed into the wall himself, and there’s the odd roughhousing, and I’ve seen guys hit after the whistle. It’s hockey.
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But last night, at 18:02 in the second period, two guys shook off their gloves and pulled off their helmets. They circled each other for ten seconds or more, with their fists up in the Marquess of Queensberry pose, whilst the referees circled around them, watching intently. The crowd went wild. The loudest cheers of the night. Then one threw a punch, and the other threw a punch, and then they went into a clinch, with a fair amount of punching in the ribs, and they went down onto the ice, with the player on top knocking the player on the bottoms head into the ice. Then, the referees approached and pulled the players apart, sending the visiting player off and out of the game.
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I can tell you some of the specifics, because not only did the big screen show the fight in close-up, but they repeated the film<\/I> just as if it had been a goal or a great save. In other words, the referees allowed the fight to take place, the crowd encouraged it, and the ownership and venue presented it as a highlight of the evening.
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Now, as I say, I know this is hockey. It’s not Camp Easy-Peasey-Squeezey-Fun-Time. I enjoyed the (clean but) brutal checks against the boards. I hollered for the center to get in front of the net, knowing that the only way to get there was to force his way in, which is why you have a big guy in there. I explained to the Perfect Non-Reader that although, yes, they were fouls and the perpetrators should be held in the penalty box for two minutes, holding hooking slashing roughing and even cross-checking are all part of the game, and that no, it wasn’t usually an accident, other than the part where the ref sees it. And I wasn’t, you know, really surprised by the fight. But I was, in the event, shocked.
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Trying to examine my reaction from the next day, I think that what shocked me was not the violence, nor even the howls from the (tiny) mob for more violence. I think the reason I was disturbed was the lack of pretense about it. There was no sense that the crowd was cheering a home player who was defending himself from the bad guy from Texas, or even that they were cheering for retaliation against bad behavior from the visitors. No, it was just glee at the fight.
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I believe that our pretensions are valuable. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are who we are in our minds. True, people actually do a lot of things that aren’t in the stories they tell themselves about themselves, and that’s clearly a Bad Thing. But they do them with shame, and often they will not do them when there’s anybody looking, and there are lots of times that we don’t do them at all, either because you never know Who is looking, or because we really don’t want to break our illusions that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are true.
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Which is why I am so appalled by Our Only President’s attitude toward torture. I know the US uses torture. I would guess that there hasn’t been a year in the nation’s history that some law enforcement officer hasn’t tortured a prisoner. But for more than a generation, now, we have told ourselves the story that we don’t do that<\/I>. We tell ourselves that we are better than that. And we have been, mostly, when people were looking. Enough to keep telling ourselves the story, anyway. Not anymore.
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I know people go to hockey games to see fights. I just wish they felt a little bit bad about that, just enough to pretend that they are there for the hockey.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger goes to a hockey game and a fight breaks out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18302,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036\/revisions\/18302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}