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Here's Where to "Stick" It
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After the events of the past week culminating in the Crown prosecutor of Vancouver, British Columbia filing charges against Marty McSorley for aggravated assault we are already hearing the same old hue and cry that hockey sticks should be banned.
But we state, however cliched it may be, that hockey sticks don't attack other people with a vicious two-handed swing to the temple, people attack other people with a vicious two-handed swing to the temple. The anti-stick lobby comes out with statistic after statistic about how countries where the hockey stick to person ratio is very low also have a low number of hockey stick related assaults.
But this is a spurious conclusion, because they fail to take into account the ratio of other blunt objects. For example, what is the number of cricket bat attacks in India? In the U.S. and Canada it is quite low.
And the simple fact is that if hockey sticks are banned the only people with hockey sticks will be hockey players and the rest of us will be defenseless against their soft-tissue attacks…unless we had guns, which now that we think about it might be a better solution.
Either way, the answer would not be to ban hockey sticks altogether. Others propose to have a waiting period for sticks, but that in all likelihood would not have prevented Marty McSorley from trying to imprint his stick blade into Donald Brashear's temple.
Not the only real solution is to fight the problem at the root, the individual act. And in this case the NHL suspended McSorley for 23 games, which in our mind is fair. Most of us will never realize how difficult it might be to go several months without having to play in a hockey game and therefore we should not judge this penalty too lightly.
In review, if you outlaw hockey sticks only outlaws and goons will have hockey sticks, or something like that.
©2000 Copyright David Oliver
DISCLAIMER: These stories are not true. No really. It's all just a joke, you know for fun.
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