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PREST: Fun sports celebrations should be celebrated

Serious Hockey Men get their feathers ruffled by a little Duck, Duck, Goose

Whatever you do, please do not have any fun while reading this column. Especially if you’re a man.

Real men, it turns out, are not allowed to have fun. Under no circumstances are they to play Duck, Duck, Goose, particularly if playing Duck, Duck, Goose involves any time spent with other men PLANNING a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. You don’t get your name engraved on a very important cup for playing Duck, Duck, Goose. 

This reminder comes to us from the Serious Hockey Men, who now have a serious problem with the NHL hockey players in Carolina. In case you forgot there was an NHL hockey team in Carolina, they are the ones with the logo that looks kind of like a toilet swirl.

The toilet swirl was one of the things they were known for, along with having a goalie named Arturs Irbe, before this year when they became the team that is having fun. Yes, the Carolina Hurricanes are actually decent this year and have added a new wrinkle to the fan experience down there in their non-traditional hockey market (in the same way that McDonald’s is a non-traditional vegan market). After home wins, the Hurricanes have taken to saluting their fans with a Viking Clap and then a funny team celebration. By the way, how thrilled must actual Vikings be now that they are known mostly for synchronized clapping.

It’s the post-Viking antics, however, that have gotten the Hurricanes into trouble. They started by charging one end of the ice and jumping into the glass. They’ve been upping the ante since then, playing human dominoes, bowling, limbo, and, yes, even a quick game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

They took it to another level last week with a baseball game that involved a monster home run followed by an epic bat flip. The celebrations have been embraced by the team’s fans and given a cool identity to a team whose former identity was “Hey, We Exist.”

The club’s clever Twitter account has helped push the amusing agenda, presenting the bat flip with the caption “Now we’re upsetting analysts in two different sports.”

And there’s the “problem.” Serious Sports Men are not thrilled with all the fun the Hurricanes are having. Just like bat flip celebrations are frowned upon by Serious Baseball Men, Carolina’s post-game theatrics have come under fire from Serious Hockey Men who are deeply offended that these young men are besmirching the good name of the sport by, you know, enjoying themselves and entertaining their fans.

The most coherent arguments against this sort of thing are that time spent having fun is wasted time – time that would have been better spent backchecking or cold tubbing – or that playing Duck, Duck, Goose after a win is unsportsmanlike and makes the other team feel bad. This argument is made despite the fact that the losing team is long gone by the time the limbo line begins. Apparently the only Serious Man-approved way to make another player feel bad is punching them in the face.

The least coherent argument against this sort of thing came from Don Cherry during his latest Saturday hockey sermon. You could tell he was mad (another emotion that is OK with serious hockey people), but it was hard to get much more than that after he failed to complete approximately 12 straight sentences and then called the Carolina players “a bunch of jerks.”

It’s is a bit rich that the guy who is ripping the Hurricanes for showing some personality is doing so while wearing a suit pattern that looks like it was ordered from a tattoo parlour for tweens. Of course, Don Cherry is not the first Serious Man to come down on players for “destroying the sanctity of sport” with their inexcusable displays of joy. The bat flip by the Hurricanes was really perfect, because for Canadians it brought immediate flashbacks to the famous Jose Bautista bat flip of 2015. That flip, a spontaneous act of celebration after an amazing achievement in an extreme high-pressure situation, was also criticized. “Jose needs to calm that down, respect the game more,” said the pitcher who threw the pitch that Bautista rocketed over the leftfield wall.

Count me as one sports man – a youth coach, community sports reporter and owner of a slightly smudged Mario Lemieux rookie card – who thinks it is OK for athletes to have fun. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between “fun” and “taunting.”

There’s more than just “Protecting the Sanctity” going on here. Cherry gives it away when he puts on his “sissy” voice and mockingly says “young men, expressing themselves, for joy of winning.”

It’s obvious to anyone who has heard him speak that men “expressing themselves” in anything other than unintelligible shouts and periodic thumbs up is something that Don Cherry is not on board with. I’m happy to see that many disagree.

“[Carolina’s] post-game fun is deeper than just a celebration,” former Canucks goaltender Corey Hirsch wrote on Twitter. “We have a problem in society that says men can’t show emotion and I’m tired of it. Shaming men into not showing emotion sets us back 100s of years. Kids look up to hockey players. Be fun, be entertaining, be you!”

Now THAT is a serious sentiment that should be celebrated. Also, GOOSE!

Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at aprest@nsnews.com.