This Russian Youth Hockey Fighting Class Is A Great Sign For The Future Of Hockey
History is all cyclical. What goes up must come down. And what goes down must eventually go back up again. It's the way that the world works. We try to do things differently than the generations before us, and then eventually we become the generation that younger generations try to break away from ourselves.
So right now all these Charmin Ultra Soft millennials are trying to take fighting out of the sport of hockey. Gone are the days of having an enforcer out there on the ice to protect the star players and keep everybody playing an honest game through the threat of violence and pain. There are more rats in the sport of hockey today than there have ever been. The NHL is basically Ratatouille 2. And that's because very few of these guys ever have to answer the bell for some of the nonsense they pull on the ice.
But in Mother Russia? Well they've already produced some of the most prolific goal scorers the game has ever seen. Guys like Fedorov and Bure and Ovechkin and Datsyuk. Now they're going full Ivan Drago on Ice. Cultivating the next generation of enforcers to police the game and will eventually be bringing fighting all the way back to the top of hockey like it's the 70s all over again. What goes down must eventually go back up again. Like the late great philosopher Chumbawamba once said, "you ain't ever gonna keep me down".
P.S. - It's just locker boxing. No big deal. Let the boys be boys.