other synonyms:“bucket fighting” and “cage match”

 

Locker-boxing. Here's a relatively new, odious term to add to the stewpot of Canadian sports lingo. This is the kind of activity encouraged by some of the bloated colostomy bags of egotism who parade on Canadian TV as sportscasters, heroes to young people. Check this enormity out, if you have a strong stomach.

Locker-boxing is prevalent across North America among minor-league hockey teams. Kids in a hockey locker room at a local rink or arena lock the door to adult coaches and beat the shit out of one another wearing hockey helmets and gloves.

The boy players and the girl players are under the delusion that helmets render their brains concussion-proof. They do not. Serious injury including possible paraplegia, cerebral traumata like subdural haematoma and lesions, fractured digits, severe dermal lacerations: all these horrors await young combatants. One Canadian emergency ward reported a thirteen-year-old boy who, after a minor game skirmish, had later come out of a locker-room shower to have his bare feet stepped on by another boy wearing ice skates.

Clinical trauma photographs depict a boy’s almost severed ear, due to a skate slash to his head, the sharp skate blade wielded by a fourteen-year-old hockey hero who had first ripped off his opponent’s helmet during the locker-room donnybrook.

The earliest print appearances of the term locker-boxing are in American newspapers, so its origin may be stateside.

Tiny camera-phones record these locker-room fight videos for broadcast on YouTube. Watch one of them. All-girl teams photograph their locker-boxing cat fights and lacrosse teams enjoy it also.

Don’t you love the lying, dithering hockey coaches who throw up their arms and lisp, “Gee, I didn’t know such unruly fisticuffs had marred the nobility of our sportive endeavours.” Or words to that effect. Actually, most coaches would not be capable of that much satiric pseudo-literacy. But what a useless coach! And what a load of crap! Coaches know well that, after a hockey game, these pubertal boys, flooded with testosterone and bug-eyed with adrenalin (hopefully not with illegal injections of Human Growth Hormone but---it does happen and sometimes the coach is the drug dealer), are looking for nothing better than a good, ass-kicking, rib-cracking, lip-bloodying “shit stomp.”

In spite of the threat of permanent injury, some coaches and most young players think that locker-boxing is a sound test of manhood. Said one shocked hockey dad to a Globe and Mail reporter: “They close the door, and it’s Lord of the Flies in there.”

Yet sports fans wonder about the origin of hockey goons, the noggin-clobberers who board-slam and highstick opponents instead of outskating and outscoring them.

But parents are not at fault. Oh no! In my local arena here in southern Ontario during a game played by young kids, I watched a mother stands-coaching her son while sucking on a beer hidden in a paper bag. When her eleven-year-old son failed to check an opponent properly, she screamed at her son, “Paste him! Paste that fuck, you little faggot! You afraid of him?” That sodden slut said that to her own son! Dear darling mommy pissed as a newt at nine o’clock in the morning. I don’t think one has to ponder too long the caliber of persons involved in much of minor-league hockey.

Tip # 34 from your loving coach: Remember, guys, you don't need a face to get through life. What are you, a bunch of pussies?

 

© 2007 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

 

Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007 A site visitor in Quebec’s Eastern Townships who wishes to be anonymous says my piece on locker-boxing is “one-sided” and is “anti-sport hysteria.” Why, thank you. The lady claims plenty of intelligent parents fear constantly for their children’s well-being; plenty of hockey moms and dads are not trying to fill up their own failed, vacuous lives by living vicariously through their children’s amateur sports victories. Oh really? For proof of that Candide-like utterance, I'd have to see a terabyte of psychiatric evidence. If parents fear constantly for their children's physical health, why— inbetween polishing their trophies for being Mother-of-the-Year and counting their sons’ facial stitches — why then do they send their children into known danger, to play one of the most violent games, to put their children's safety in the hands of hockey coaches some of whom are clearly psychotic and others of whom are pedophilic drug-dealers offering ten-year-olds anabolic steroids? Come on, is it impossible in this country to be honest about hockey for even a nano-second? Let's be frank. Some of these psycho thugs of machismo should be behind bars, not behind nets. Victim impact stories constitute some of the proof and here is one story. The lady reader of my site who emailed me her disapproval of my column also bolstered it by blowing the offside whistle quoting an article on locker-boxing from “Canadian Parents” website: “For Scott Randles, a 14-year-old from Lower Sackville, N.S. who suffered a concussion from locker boxing two years ago, it’s had a life-altering effect. Following Randles’ locker boxing concussion, he had three other hockey-related concussions, one coming just three games after the initial incident. Now, two years later, his memory is weak and he has trouble concentrating. ‘Sometimes I blank out and I’ll look at the clock and it will be two minutes later,’ Randles said. ‘It’s a lot harder to learn stuff, and it’s a lot harder to remember things.’ Contact sports are no longer an option, but he’s taken up playing guitar and bass to fill the void. His mother, Sharon Randles, told CTV.ca she was horrified by her son’s injury. ‘You hope not, but you’re expecting that, if your child is going to get hurt playing hockey, it’s going to be on the ice,’ she said.”   The full article is available here:   http://forum.canadianparents.ca/ubbthreads/ showflat.php?Cat=&Number=362981&Main=362981   The same Canadian Parents article quotes an editorial in the May/June 2007 number of The Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine which describes locker boxing as “adolescent risk-taking behaviour with significant potential for concussion.”

 © 2007 William Gordon Casselman