I think back to my days playing different sports at various levels of competitiveness . The lessons I learned have been carried on through my life and I have passed many of these lessons on to my kids and as a coach to young competitors. Mantras such as always having the backs of your teammates and never pointing fingers when mistakes are made but rather raising up your brothers/sisters in arms are just a couple of these lessons.
However, one that I have strongly conveyed seems to be getting pushback in the world of safe spaces and trigger warnings. That is the belief that words are just words and they will only hurt you if you allow them to rent space in your head. How one responds in a sports setting will likely be reflected when a person is faced with similar circumstances in the real world.
The recent suspension of Landon Sim, the son of former NHL player, Jon Sim was in a word… ridiculous. The star centre of the London Knights was handed a five-game suspension after an on-ice incident in his team’s Ontario Hockey League conference final match-up with the Saginaw Spirit.
Hockey is a physical game and often players cross the line. Liam Arnsby – captain of the OHL’s North Bay Battalion – was suspended for six games for delivering a hit to the head of Linus Hemstrom during an April 3 game. The hit saw Henstrom taken off on a stretcher after spending several minutes prone on the ice.
Mississauga Steelheads defenceman Stevie Leskovar was suspended four games for an on-ice incident. The blueliner slashed Evan Konyen in the face during a battle after a face-off. Fortunately, Konyen was able to return to the game but the suspension recognized that the possible outcome of such a reckless act could have been much more severe.
So what was Landon Sim’s transgression you may ask? He must have done something worse than slashing an opponent in the face and slightly less egregious than laying out a player with a dangerous hit to the head – the kind of hits that have led to the end of player careers (see former NHL star forward Marc Savard as an example), right?
Well, as it turns out the London Knights forward never actually laid a hand on his “victim”. He made the cardinal sin of inflaming the sensitivities of the woke mob by using a word that the language police deem as “misogynist”. No, he didn’t use the “C” word (as in C-U-Next Tuesday) or even the less offensive but still taboo twat (an aside, I love watching British comedy because both of the aforementioned words are sprinkled in liberally to the dialogue by both men and women). He called his opponent a word commonly used as slang for a cat. Yes, for those of you fellow Gen Xers he used a word that we had as part of the competitive verbal tool kit and used often. He called Saginaw Spirit captain Braden Hache… a pussy.
As I often say context matters. Sim, who had recently recovered from a shoulder injury was responding to a comment made by his opponent. Prior to a face-off Hache said to Sim that he was going to “break your shoulder”. Sim’s response? “No you won’t, you are too much of a pussy to do that”. Really, that is what gets you five games, in the midst of the playoffs no less?
Maybe I shouldn’t admit it but I would have served an unending/overlapping suspension in every competitive sport I ever played. What was said on the ice or on the pitch, where I played a lot of hockey and soccer respectively, was left on the ice or pitch. Usually we said something that may have gotten your mouth washed out with soap at home in my day (yes, this was a thing and I still can’t get the taste of Irish Spring out of my mouth) but was totally acceptable within the confines of the game.
There were two reasons to dig into our urban dictionary of the day during a game. One was because you were angry, which probably meant the other team was winning. The other was because you wanted to get under the skin of your opponent, which probably meant your team was winning.
We were taught that words were just that… words. When an opponent said something a little offside to you your response was under your control. The player delivering the insult was hoping to illicit a response, preferably a physical one, which would lead to a power play for your team , a yellow card or possibly an ejection/red card.
When you returned to the bench after drawing a penalty or getting a player tossed by using nothing but your words you were greeted with pats on the head from your teammates. You had helped the team. Conversely, if you were the player who allowed something as simple as a word (or words) to get you to lose your cool the coach usually found you a not so nice spot at the end of the bench for an undetermined length of time. Your actions were “undisciplined” and “selfish”. You had hurt the team.
What makes the situation involving Sim which led to his suspension even more disheartening for those who believe the world has lost its collective mind is that the player who threatened to break Sim’s shoulder went to the official to report this unforgiveable verbal act. In the world in which I grew up that person would be known as anything from a tattle-tale to a rat. What’s next, telling his mommy so she can call Landon’s parents and tell them what a bad boy he has been?
For clarity, we never saw the word “pussy” as meaning anything other than soft… like a house cat. When we began using the word I would hazard a guess than none of us boys knew that it was also a slang word for part of the female anatomy. Even if we did know, so what? We called each other dicks all the time.
Do you see the problem here? When we start policing words in sports we will be playing a game of whack-a-mole. My kids use words which may be deemed offside that I have never heard before. Should we choose to police language, we will need to establish a full-time arbiter to keep track of words and deem which are acceptable and which will get you banished.
I am going to say something controversial here. I believe this also applies to race and sexual orientation slurs. I say this as someone who has been subjected to slurs. Yes, white people can be the victim of racism as well.
The difference for me is that I was taught to ignore the words. Sometimes I did – sometimes I didn’t. I learned that choosing to ignore the attempts to get me off my game was always more preferable given the potential penalties and the spot in the coach’s doghouse.
No, I am not saying that calling someone a racial/gender/gender identity slur is acceptable. All I am saying is that eventually the referee or the teacher or your mom won’t be there to protect you from the words. What we learned is that eventually the words really didn’t matter to us. Now, instead our kids are being sheltered from the realities of the big bad world where there are people who are jerks. Learning that there are people who will say things that are hurtful is a valuable lesson.
In today’s upside down world we are not teaching our children lessons like stand up for yourself; words are just words but rather we are saying be a victim; words are violence.
For the record, the snowflake culture which wants us to believe that words can be equally as damaging as a punch in the face – we can try that experiment if you want. I have been punched in the face and also been called names like pussy, I will gladly take the latter.
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