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From The Walrus Associate Editor, Ariella Garmaise:
To be a junior hockey star is to be the Justin Bieber of your hometown, complete with a total insulation from rules or consequences outside of the penalty box. If you’re an OHL player, fans can buy jerseys with your name on them. There’s a never-ending stream of “puck bunnies” (groupies for hockey players).
In this story, I write about these deified young men—boys, as they’re often called—who found themselves in a volatile, hyper-sexualized situation armed only with signals from hockey culture that failed them completely, and about the young woman who stumbled into that world and got torn apart. But we built that world. We lionized these boys from the time they were Timbits. We let the culture of hockey fester, unchecked. We excused the aggression, normalized the entitlement, and looked the other way when lines blurred.
On October 7, the puck drops on a new NHL season. The players were acquitted, but the NHL has said that their behaviour was “disturbing” and that it has not yet decided whether to lift its ban on the accused. Will they play again? Was our national reckoning a reckoning at all? |
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