Don Cherry is our madwoman in the attic. The attic is hockey. The Victorian novelists put the madwoman in the attic because she was still theirs, a family member, scary but undeniable. I used to think of violence as our Canadian secret, and we kept Don on to honestly own up to it.

Other people think of Canadians as polite and peacekeeping. But in two world wars, when no one else would rush into the meat grinder, they’d send the Canucks. I thought of that rage as a suppressed result of subservience acquired during centuries of truckling to imperial overlords: French, British and American. You build up a lot of anger biting your lip. On the home front, it emerged in hockey. Long before NHL expansion, when fighting became a marketing vehicle for markets that knew no ice, hockey players had fought.

But that’s too parochial. Murderous mayhem is universal. This week in Alabama, 10 died in a "shooting rampage." Germany had its "worst shooting since another teenage gunman killed 16 people" way back in 2002. Last week, Mounties testified about the man they tasered once, and he fell, so they blasted him four more times. The so-called Greyhound bus killer was found not criminally responsible for a beheading. What’s scary isn’t just that someone or anyone can kill, but that we’re all vulnerable merely because we’re human. It’s less a regression than an eruption. What’s surprising isn’t that people suddenly kill; it’s that they usually don’t. I know playwrights and poets who I’m pretty sure have never been in a fight, or seen one, who write obsessively on violence. It’s our genetic inheritance. So why make a big deal about hockey fights?

Well, consider this: The ancient Greeks took contests such as the Olympics seriously because they knew they contained — in both senses — impulses similar to those in war or family conflicts. Sports, and much of culture, serves that purpose: It substitutes for fighting. So what is the point of stopping a game, play or other cultural form — to fight? Only hockey does that. It’s as if a chef and his staff stopped preparing a meal and tore strips off the carcass to send out to the diners. It wouldn’t be a meal any more; it would turn into a primitive ritual, reminding the species of its beginning. That’s what hockey fights are like. It’s as if they read Freud and others on the diversionary value of culture, and took it too literally. You fight — to avoid fighting?

Nor can you claim, like Don Cherry and others, that fights are a release valve for the emotions built up in hockey. That’s absurd. Hockey is a release valve. You fly around at a million miles an hour. You bang the puck straight at other players. You whack your sticks together at faceoffs. You can skate straight into each other on the mild pretext that the other guy has the puck. And you need fighting as an outlet? What comes next? Do you need a death as a release from the emotion that arises from fighting?

I know a 10-year-old who loves hockey, though not the fights. I told him about the NHL meetings on fighting this week. I said many players don’t like it but are reluctant to speak out. And fighters themselves mostly seem to hate it. But, I said, the bosses in the suits want to keep it. "Then why don’t they do the fighting?" he said. "In their suits!" Not a bad idea. Brian Burke and Bob Gainey could "go" down on the ice or up in their boxes.

Pro wrestling is a real release — exactly because it’s not a real fight. But this week came the sad news that 82-year-old Verne Gagne, a former pro wrestler who has Alzheimer’s, had body-slammed to death a 97-year-old co-resident at his seniors home in Minnesota. I used to watch Verne Gagne and his "sleeper" hold on TV when I was about 10. It may be the only time he hurt anyone in a fight. But he at least had the excuse that he’d lost his grip.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.