Make hockey public good and national pride

Make hockey a force for public good and national pride.
The justification for organized sports used to be character building. The saying used to be that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.
When I played Rugby Union in Southwestern Ontario in the 1950s, we were expected to applaud exceptional plays by either team, like a running drop kick for a three-point field goal. We were supposed to pat our tackler on the back.
If we did lose our cool and react physically, the game stopped until the fighters shook hands.
In North America, sports became the domain of win at all cost jocks. In high school Rugby League in Pictou County, the Pictou team was accused of having nails protruding slightly from the toes of their boots.
Meanwhile the majority of jocks vehemently defended fist fights in hockey as a safety valve for more serious violence. Somehow, NFL football managed to ban it and eject fighters from the game.
Hockey Canada is now being shown to be a totally misogynistic, pro violence, hazing and tolerant of and prepared to excuse and cover up gang rape.
That entire echelon of male thugs has to go. They should be replaced by at least half women. Ad client jocks used to try to bully me into covering all their recreational leagues insisting people wanted to read it. Every research study of newspapers revealed sports had the lowest readership of any part of the paper. No one read it except the players.
Women didn’t read it at all except what their kid was in. They didn’t seem to care so much about the score and who won or lost. They wanted their kids to be safe and having fun.
I believe one of the reasons many families put their kids in soccer was to avoid the stupid violence and mismanagement of the game. Kids managed their pond and road hockey games much more intelligently. A kid didn’t get put on a losing team and left there for his whole time in that age group. Kids chose sides every game. We’d even stop if one team got a huge lead and hold a mid-game redraft to keep it interesting. This kept the players on the winning side engaged too. It meant they got more chances to touch the puck. Everybody was on the ice at the same time. We were only on the sidelines if we were exhausted. We all got all the ice time we could endure.
Hockey is beloved by Canadians. It makes other games seem glacial in comparison and offense and defence are on the ice at the same time unlike baseball or football.
Bullying and male sexual aggression are huge problems in North American society. Fitness and character building should be made prime components of the game.
Players should have it drilled into them from the beginning that hockey players are gentlemen who don’t cheat, don’t lose their cool when losing, don’t bully ANYONE, on the ice or off and don’t think group sex, consensual or non, is acceptable behaviour for boys and men of character.
Anyone who thinks that would hurt the game needs to consider the Canadian women’s hockey team. They’ve been consistently near the top of the world game without any abuse scandals other than perpetrated by males in management in lower leagues.
Time to rebuild hockey into a sport that is a force for good and pride in the world. As it is any Junior hockey players who are or were not thugs are now tarnished with the stains coming to light.
Hockey Canada and the NHL should endorse, embrace and enforce such standards for the betterment of the game and the country.