Hateeeeeee today everyone super excited to congratulate Poulin playing through a severe knee injury like that. If you want to talk about combating the bad parts of hockey culture this is part of the conversation.
Sports have immortalized playing through injuries as noble and necessary. The gratification of Now vs the Future is also really pushed out. How many players would have gone on to have extremely successful careers if they had rested an injury and gotten the medical attention they need? How many players would have been able to do the things they did without plain?
I love Poulin. I love what she has accomplished. But I’m not going to immortalize this as a good or noble decision.
Grown adults can and should be in charge of their own medical decisions, and hockey/sports culture create environments where people are encouraged to push through injuries and discouraged to take the time to rest. These statements exist in tandem with each other and are equally true.
If Poulin came out and said she played through a severe concussion would we be celebrating that? What is our line for pushing through what the average human can do, and creating long term injury? And why is that your line?
On the other hand I’m not going to disparage or moralize this decision. MPP as a person deciding to play through an injury is morally neutral. Even if young athletes look at her and decide this is something they should replicate given the circumstances. There is a responsibility role models have and they have those responsibilities regardless of if they want to be role models or not. But the causation of the issue does not lie in individual players decisions. That is built on decades of culture attitudes from both sport institutions and over all ableism in our societies, as well as the policies and procedures that leagues and institutions have put in place and how they are enforced.
I hate it whenever a player goes down the tunnel for a head injury and comes back during the game. In a high contact sport like hockey that has large risks for brain injuries like CTE, the risk should be met with equal caution. Get hit in the head? Sorry. You are out for the rest of the game. Which yes could have some bad consequences but could also be mitigated. In a league that proclaims player safety is an important part of core identity I don’t believe them.
If you’re making these jokes please don’t think I am talking about you in particular. I laugh at the jokes and feel pride as well, because I am not removed from the culture narrative. I’m more concerned with criticism over all systems. But I do hope you think about how policy and cultural environment interact, with player safety and how fans response to it, impacts those systems.
