Scrubs On Skates

"It’s a 1952 book about a young player who’s a potential hockey star. Then his family moves and he has to go to another school, where the team isn’t as good. He considers himself a big deal with the lesser team. It’s all about how he learns to redirect his focus from himself to the team. In the end, of course, he and his new team beat his old team in the big championship game. It’s a very simple kind of book, but hockey is in some ways a very simple game. Scott Young was, I think, the best hockey writer during the first 70 years of the 20th century. He was a great beat reporter, following the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he also wrote these kids books. And, of course, he famously was the father of Neil Young, the rock musician. Scrubs on Skates was a seminal book for so many kids. If you were a young boy who wanted to play hockey this is a book that you would read. In the days when Scrubs on Skates was written, every hockey player had to defend himself. We used to have bench-clearing brawls, people going up into the stands, and long drawn-out fights on the ice. Then there were no Europeans – I think there might have been one or two Americans in the NHL, not many. Hockey was still an internal Canadian drama. The influx of Europeans and Americans into the sport changed it. Now the violence is very strategic, very sudden, very dramatic and because the speed of the game is so much greater, the impact and the injury is also much greater. We have a different kind of violence today. I don’t think this is the most violent first round of the NHL play-offs by any means. I’m 58 years old, I’ve seen plenty. It has changed a lot, but what has changed the most is our understanding of the consequences of concussion. The result of that is that hockey has come under more and more scrutiny, because it still has a 19th century attitude towards violence. A lot of people these days would like to codify it because they feel like the league doesn’t define it very well. It changes from day to day. The biggest problem we have right now is targeting the head with a hit. The league has decided, like the NFL, that they have to protect the head because the hits are taking too much of a toll. That’s the biggest focus – trying to get certain players out of the game who hit the head as a tactic. It used to be that when you banged a guy with your shoulder we called it a good hockey hit. That has changed. Back when Scrubs on Skates was written, most of it was anger-induced. It was the product of coaches pushing guys harder and making anger a weapon in the sport. It’s very different now. I think that in 95% of the cases fighting is just a poor coaching technique. A lot of the time a coach sends out his fighter into play to change the mood of the game, to try to get his team inspired. There’s no animus behind the fights. By and large, it’s done by coldblooded gunslinger types put in play by coaches trying to change the tenor of the game. The league has to get serious about reducing violence. The league has to be consistent about what it wants to sell to the public. Until that happens, I don’t think anything is going to change. It takes a lot of courage to play hockey in the first place. It’s a fast game. The puck goes whizzing by your head. There are sharp blades. It’s not a game that you take on lightly. It’s not softball on a Sunday afternoon. Even a casual hockey game has a lot of risk in it, and at the professional level the risk factor is enormous. It’s not a game that you can take the danger out of, even by eliminating the fighting."