The Windsor Spitfires are easily the most shamed sports franchise in Canada right now -- not just this latest hazing and suspension innocent, but a build-up of little disgusting incidents that barely make it to the sports pages.

Hazing is the ugliest side of sports and the aspect of sports I am most ashamed of. It is the side that promotes team "unity" at the cost of individuality, the unabashed, disgusting degradation of teammates and such a pure idea of a sport polluted by such a violent and irrational underbelly. It goes beyond the idea of team unity and cohesion into fucking abuse and sometimes I wonder why they choose to act out this way -- the peer pressure to stick a broomstick up someone's ass cannot be that great. I want to believe that the players are simply under a lot of pressure, away from home and a little too high on the premature freedoms of junior hockey but there are so many of them. Why didn't ANYONE on the Windsor bus stop them? Why did the coach and the owner of all people allow the future of their team to be stripped naked, humiliated and stuffed into a bathroom? They are playing for a hockey team, not joining a fucking cult. Why is there such a huge need to psychologically break them down like this?!

I don't think I've ever mentioned this article on here, but there was a site and an article a while ago that really angered me personally. The site was Junior Hockey Bible, intended to be "humorous", and discussed various ways to sexually assault a girl ("puck sluts") in a socially acceptable way, because dammit, they're hockey players and they have the right to pussy whenever they damn feel like it. The worse thing is, this wasn't even the first time that the theme of sexual assault in junior hockey had been brought up.

Junior Hockey Bible was originally started up to sell a "Gongshow" brand of clothing. Hockey gear for a hockey lifestyle. After it was exposed through an article in the Ottawa Citizen a while back, the site closed down, revamped and became the cleaner, friendlier site that you now get when you search for it. The article in the Citizen was taken down a long time ago, but amazingly enough, the full-length of the article can be read on a puck bunny forum. The discussion on the forum is interesting; someone quotes sociology thesis material:

From high school to the professional league, athletes are treated preferentially, and they begin to feel entitled to their desires; they are not encouraged to be responsible for matters off the playing field. In this subculture, "a curious reversal takes place in which the play world becomes real and the real world becomes play" (p. 9). Professional athletes spend their idle, non-game time enjoying a high volume of sexual encounters, often with the female sports groupies they meet at designated bars and hotel lobbies. They perceive these sexual encounters as a fringe benefit to which they are entitled.

There is a troubling statistic in this article that junior hockey players are statistically more likely to commit sexual assault than their counterparts who don't play. There are mounds of stories, articles that somehow always begin and end the same way: a girl in a junior hockey town reports a sexual assault by a famous, respected junior player, the case goes to court and the player is charged but by then, he has already moved onto another team and the juidicial system gives up. This story usually ends with the player continuing his career, having relative success, while the girl ends up 10 years in therapy. I don't think I've heard of one case where prosecution has actually lead to something, even outside of hockey and within the larger sports realm.

Sorry for the lack of organization and possible incoherency in some parts.