Best Canadian Sports Writing by Stacey May Fowles

Author:Stacey May Fowles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2017-08-29T21:17:01+00:00

JESSE RUDDOCK

THE TODD BERTUZZI KNOCK-OUT CLUB

* * *

The Classical, August 17, 2012

One way to exclude women from a conversation is to ignore us completely — just don’t look at us. Don’t say anything. Exclusion is effective — isn’t it? — because no one has to admit it’s happening: the roles we play just play themselves out. In The Classical’s first installment of “The Disabled List” — an article series designed to celebrate the gore and glory of sports injury — the exclusion of women athletes is so glaring it feels like an invitation. One I can’t resist. It reads like this:

“I know you’ve been a part of this conversation before, the one that starts with a bunch of guys talking last night’s game but somehow devolves into an argument about who in his glory days suffered the worst sports injury.[1]”

When a piece of writing has only one footnote, it takes on special emphasis. In fine print, the author Brian K. Blickenstaff added:

“[1] And I really do mean he. Women, in my experience, tend to steer clear of this sort of conversation.”

Dear boys, there are all kinds of women in this world you might not imagine. When it comes to injuries, visit any college training room and you’ll find us doing our rehab exercises, our bodies riddled with problems that can’t be neatly solved, our surgeries still raw. We are everywhere — seeking full range of motion, waiting for our turn on the ultrasound machine, pulling on those rubber bands. We are immersed in ice baths. Women are mothers and Olympians.

As a hockey goalie at Harvard, I fell to injury, ankle to brain. My personal disabled list is disgusting. But my most absurd sports injury wasn’t something I did to my body. It was something Todd Bertuzzi did. Bertuzzi’s brutality is world famous, but when we met, he was still just a teenage scrapper from Sudbury, Ontario, a place we call the near north, but which is still pretty far. He had no contracts, no money in his pocket, probably one pair of nice pants, and was living as a billet in my hometown, Guelph, Ontario. He was playing in “The O.” Bertuzzi was not yet an NHL power forward or a member of Team Canada, nor had he committed the worst hockey atrocity in recorded history. That would be in 2004, when, as a Vancouver Canuck, he chased Colorado’s Steve Moore around the ice, pawed at him, then ended Moore’s career with a single spine-splitting punch to the back of the neck. It’s true that, in his rookie OHL season with the Guelph Storm, Bertuzzi had been suspended for fifteen games for kicking a Kitchener Ranger, but no one cared about that. We, the people of Guelph, hated the Rangers, and we loved Bertuzzi so much that we were happily blind to his faults. We cheered for him so hard his faults were ours.

From 1991 to 1995, Bertuzzi was one of the most dominant players in the O, along with

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