Prescribed Pain: How a Culture of ‘Toughness’ Hurts Hockey
Content warning: Discussions about suicide.
This is part of an ongoing series on hockey culture and masculinity. Check out the previous piece, Assisting Abusers: How Hockey's Approach to Harm Prevents Accountability.
This week, we’re continuing to explore some of the harms of hockey culture, and it's heavy. It’s necessary to outline the severity of the problems to know what we’re up against…but stick with me, next time we will turn to solutions and hope!
Turn the TV on any evening in the spring and you’ll hear a commercial for the playoffs describing the Stanley Cup as the “hardest trophy to win in sports.”
Fans and media alike will often lament after an elimination that the team needs to get bigger and tougher if they want to win in the future, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the loss.
There may not be a story more beloved by commentators than Wayne Gretzky’s recount of the lessons the Oilers learned after losing in the 1983 final to the New York Islanders.
So it goes that Gretzky and Messier were walking out of the arena past the Islanders dressing room expecting to see a boisterous celebration unfolding. Instead, the atmosphere was happy but subdued as most of the players were tending to injuries: “too beat up to really enjoy it,” as Gretzky put it.
The lesson they took away was that to win it all took sacrifice.
Now some are starting to question: where is the line between sacrifice and exploitation? At what point do the expectations of players become inhumane?
The Consequences of Head Injuries
2011 was a long overdue wake-up call for hockey.
The world was beginning to realize the severity of concussions to one’s long-term quality of life. That summer three NHL enforcers lost their lives. Wade Belak and Rick Rypien both struggled with depression and died by suicide. The third, Derek Boogard, fell victim to a deadly mix of alcohol and painkillers.
Mental health problems are as complex in their causes and solutions as the people who battle with them. However, there have been increasing connections made between concussions and depression. Repeated head trauma has been linked with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This disease increases irritability and instances of mood swings while also being linked to early dementia, depression and lowered life expectancy. Belak, Rypien and Boogard were all found to have CTE following their deaths.
The deaths of these three players were likely avoidable and may yet be avoided for others because the role of enforcer has largely disappeared. These players' job was to keep the other team in check and motivate their own by fighting, or on occasion laying a big borderline hit.
The game is faster and more skilled than ever and having someone take up a roster spot who cannot keep up is now generally seen as a liability. Partially as a result, fighting has decreased substantially from a peak in 2002, a year when a majority of games would feature a fight (2 for every 3 games) whereas now one occurs just under once every 5 games.
Notably, it is not only enforcers who are at risk of brain injuries and their consequences.
On the first day of 2011 Sidney Crosby was hit by a blindside hit to the head by David Steckel. A few days later he was hit again, this time from behind by Victor Hedman. As a result, one of the NHL’s greatest all-time players would, at the peak of his career, go on to miss nearly a season and a half due to the concussion and a related neck injury he suffered.
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Increasing Safety Improves the Sport
Thankfully, this has all led to some positive changes.
Rule 48 was introduced to punish hits where the ‘principal point of contact’ is the head. While this still leaves room for a number of concussion-causing hits, it has limited one of the most dangerous plays in the sport.
Increased awareness has also meant that players can be forcibly removed when neutral observers suspect a head injury has been sustained and more time is given to recovery to avoid potentially life altering set-backs.
This is undoubtedly safer for the players, but it is also good for the sport.
This truly phenomenal essay outlines how McDavid is the first superstar of the post-headhunting era. In the 90s and early 2000s dirty hits theoretically existed. Yet when it came time to label one as such the onus rarely if ever fell upon the hitter. Instead there was always a vocal response about how the injured player shouldn't have put themselves into such a vulnerable position.Something that could only consistently be interpreted as “stepping on the ice,” or maybe “touching the puck” (read: the entirety of the game). The default position was to blame the victim and implicitly defend the right to injure.
The culture has since shifted, especially at the youth level. New rules and greater enforcement has allowed for a new generation of players to develop skills previously impossible.
Offense has flourished, and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who misses the days of Jamie Benn winning a scoring title with 87 points. That total is good enough for 20th this season. The aforementioned McDavid had 153.
It’s also a reminder that sports are never stagnant. There is no ‘natural’ state of the game.
Whether you’re talking about tennis, basketball, football, soccer, or hockey – any GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) debate will inevitably feature hypotheticals about how stars would have fared in different eras. Things can and do change.
What needs to change next is the culture of playing through injury (a conversation mirrored in the NBA).
The Problem With Pain
The wake-up call needs to extend from the head to the rest of the body. Hockey is obsessed with toughness. It’s ingrained at a young age.
At higher levels a reputation for being ‘tough’ can extend one’s career by multiple seasons and one of being ‘soft’ will shorten it by an equal amount. Millions of dollars are at stake.
But what playing through pain most often means is playing with painkillers.
The opioid epidemic is beyond the scope of these articles but the hockey world has by no means avoided its tragedies.
The new drug of choice is toradol; a non-addictive anti-inflammatory. It is not safe for continuous consumption as it can lead to liver and renal complications. Yet some players are likely taking hundreds of dosages a year to make it through a season and there are serious consequences. Former all-star Ryan Kesler first developed colitis and then later Crohn’s disease as a result of his toradol use. Others suffer chronic pain for the rest of their lives from continuously pushing their bodies past their limits.
These stories come from a 2020 TSN documentary titled The Problem With Pain. The documentary’s release is a positive step for the sport. But commentators since continue to fall over themselves to laud “warriors” when injury lists are revealed after a postseason elimination.
I am not the first to advocate for a safer game, for less hits to the head (even when it’s not the principal point of contact), and for players to be sat out when they are injured. When others do, someone will inevitably claim that we want to make the game ‘soft’. The implication is that this will make the game worse.
The opposite is true.
The more that star players are healthy, the more exciting the game is. The more exciting the game is, the more kids want to play. The more kids want to play, the more parents want to be assured they will be safe. It’s a positive feedback loop in all of our best interests.
Next week we will move to wrap this series with some much-needed hope and healing. We’ll explore the positive initiatives being developed within hockey and turn to some of the social theories underpinning these articles to see what solutions can they offer.
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Blake Holtsbaum is a volunteer with Next Gen Men and a recent graduate of Mount Royal University with a degree in public policy. He has been all over the world, most recently living in South East Asia. He is passionate about maps and mountains and is an advocate for refugee rights.