I don’t think anyone would deny that playing for a team can be a beneficial experience in terms of building character. Unfortunately, throughout Canada, team sports at the youth level, hockey especially, have been infested with over-stimulated parents, and potentiated with almost fanatical hype about Canada’s Game(R) by the likes of Ron MacLean and neanderthals like Don Cherry. Meanwhile we hear little of the puck bunnies, the university hockey teams whose initiates are sexually assaulted with broomhandles, and of course all the fighting to the delight of fans only too willing to tell you it’s part of the game and if you don’t understand it’s because you haven’t played the game, so suck it up you wimp. None of this looks like character-building to me. When I played bamtam and midget hockey in NDG in Montreal no parents ever came out to the games because the games were were outside and it was cold as hell. Also tv had just been invented and our parents were all inside watching Our Pet Juliette. We had it all to ourselves, including ploughing the ice. We didn’t have coaches to teach us little cheap clutch and grab tricks or television to show us in colour dirty play being exalted by screaming fans. Today’s professional team sports don’t build character, they devalue and deface it, while the fans roar their approval. Today, every goal or touchdown scored is showboated as if the player had cured cancer. What kind of character-building is this? It’s time we realized that the character-building myth of sports teams is just that, and left it alone. It’s fun for kids to work together and to play together because of the camaraderie. Surely that’s enough justification. Hockey is a wonderful game, a miraculous expression of our existence in a cold country, a graceful telling of little physical stories with the occasional Mozartian move, seen and gone in a flash. I don’t care whose kid did it on what team. But I’ll leave it to her or his parents to daily try to instill a sterling ethical character to go with the joyful skill of playing hockey.