Crime and Punishment

My morning has been punctuated with a handful of giggly messages linking to an article published in the London Free Press today. Apparently, a junior hockey player with the OHL’s London Knights was ejected from a game on November 6 and subsequently slapped with a hefty five game suspension. What was his crime, you might be wondering? Did he take out a few teeth with a vicious cross check? Leave the bench to get involved in a melee? Concuss someone with an elbow to the head or a hit from behind? No, none of these things. His transgression was to call a player on the opposing team a “Mennonite.”

Where to begin? I might begin by noting how, well, genuinely odd this is. Having played hockey on and off for over forty years, having sat in many dressing rooms, having been in the middle (occasionally even the direct cause) of more than a few heated moments on the ice, having endured numerous coaches’ tirades, having been yelled at and hacked and whacked and insulted (and, sadly, often returned in kind), I can say with some confidence that the word “Mennonite” would rate rather low on the scale of “suspension-worthy insults.” It actually wouldn’t even rate at all.

I’m frankly surprised that a twenty-year-old hockey player has even heard of the word. While I certainly have misgivings about too-zealously associating with the word Mennonite (I’ve written about this here and here), this is the first time I’ve heard of it being used so directly as an insult. I suppose there is the off chance that the offending party was using the term to insult someone who wouldn’t fight back, but even in the unlikely event that this were true, does this really count as a slur? Part of me wants to tell this young man that he needs to do a bit of research and maybe up his insult game. If an opponent tried to get under my skin by calling me a “Mennonite,” I would probably be more inclined to laugh at them than to get angry or offended.

Speaking of feelings and offense. The prevalence of the former and the possibility of the latter are, of course, almost certainly the rationale behind whatever league policy is being inflexibly applied here. Canadian hockey culture is reeling from recent “revelations” that young male athletes amped up on privilege and constant adoration and praise from their pre-teen years onward, and who marinate in super jock-y contexts from before they hit puberty until they sign their first contract occasionally regularly say and do things that would run afoul of your average diversity workshop. So governing bodies are feeling a bit twitchy. “Damage control” is the order of the day.

It all leads to a bit of a bewildering spectacle. The PR and HR experts are desperately trying to create the image and cultivate the culture of a hockey world where everyone behaves themselves and never does or says anything bad, or at the very least where players only insult each other in socially approved ways (presumably they’re still free to verbally abuse one another with appropriately secular terminology, usually involving who or when or where or how often someone might be invited to f***). And of course, they can still punch each other in the face for the low, low price of five minutes in the penalty box.

But should they veer into the fraught territory of language around race, religion (which is really just a subcategory of “race” or “culture” in most people’s estimation or understanding), or sexuality? Well, then the bureaucrats will very solemnly and righteously shake their heads. They will inspect the offending word (“Mennonite”), determine that it fits in the same category as “Muslim” or “Jew” in the diversity pantheon, and thus decide that this is a very, very grave sin indeed. Johnny will have to be educated. Johnny will have to begin to “do the work” of improving himself. Johnny will have to spend five games in the press box pondering his iniquities which will likely remain ever before him, condemned by the online age to remain red as scarlet with no hope of the whiteness of cleansing snow.

It’s all rather comical, in my view. You could hardly dream up a more hilarious word to use as an insult than “Mennonite.” Far, far worse things are said in almost every hockey game that I have ever played than this. But these are the confusedly puritanical, self-righteous times in which we live. The only sacred category we have left is “identity,” even though we mostly can’t articulate why our identities might be sacred or what might confer this status upon them (other than our feelings). And so, we police these terms with grim and dutiful vigilance. And we perform our righteousness for all (or at least our lawyers) to see.

To be clear, I am not in favour of using identity markers as insults (on a hockey rink or anywhere else). I think it would probably better if we just didn’t insult each other at all, even in the socially approved secular ways. But this suspension seems absurd to me. Perhaps a more fitting punishment would be for this player to attend a Mennonite worship service. Who knows, he might learn a thing or two about human nature, about crime and punishment, about forgiveness and grace? Or not. But my guess is that at the very least he would leave disinclined to use the word “Mennonite” as a slur again. He would have discovered that there are far better tools for that particular job.