Sometimes I think that, as a society, we overlook the kind of play that North Americans often
endorsed at the time of Clarke's slash and in many following years. Here out west I can still remember the image of our beloved Gino repeatedly punching a NYRanger in the back of the head as the two drifted up ice, as at least two refs or watched the whole time.
I don't condone the slash. Nor do I know much about other nefarious things that people attribute to Clarke here. That said, the simple fact is that a culture of excessive violence was literally imposed on Bobby Clarke growing up. From the time he began playing contact ice hockey, he was declared a piece of meat by the powers that be, in a hierarchical chain of conformity that lead all the way to the boardroom of the National Hockey League. The NHL legitimized what Clarke did in a trickle down effect that affected and degraded all levels of North American play - "degraded" except for people who liked that violence, of course. The North American media played a contributing role, by not commenting too much on more egregious examples. Can anybody provide documented evidence from the Toronto media that condemns this clip of
Tiger? Or is that okay, whereas what Parise did is not. Somebody please explain the unwritten line item in The code which shows that one action is acceptable, while the other is not...
When one considers the wider picture of society, it must come as no surprise that some people are more innately compatible with the violence that the NHL imposed on its players and society for decades. Clarke was one of them, apparently. Part of the reason why I believe this is because he seems to have zero regret for what he did, just as Eagleson seems to have no regret for the things he did. I get why people are so offended by the Slash. I just find it sad that people condemn Clarke for doing what was so widely accepted at the time on the NHL stage - by owners, the media in general,
and many fans.
So, why do we seem to conveniently forget the collusion that sustained 70s style hockey when it comes to the Slash?
My guess is that we do so for a paradoxical reason: because the international theatre reminds people of their shared identities as members of a given culture-nation.