My Brothers and Sisters, Come Back to the Promised Land: The NHL

I am an American.  I love sports.

Football, baseball, hockey, college sports—I can't get enough.

But I am tired of seeing my sports of having no integrity. 

Tired of hearing about the best baseball and football players taking steroids, tired of seeing athletes shooting or being shot at in night clubs, tired of seeing athletes do drugs and get DUIs.

Professional sports have become a travesty against the populace, except the only league that has any integrity, the NHL.

How many times has anyone heard of a steroid scandal in the NHL? Or have a NHL player get shot at in a night club?

The answer is very, very rarely if ever.

This whole steroid thing with A-Rod (or A-fraud, or A-roid) has gotten me thinking about the NHL in a whole new light. It is the last big sport that has more character guys than anything else.

I'm a Pens fan and every time I watch a game, I see Crosby sitting down next to a kid who has terminal cancer, or I see highlights of the Pens giving free equipment to kids between the ages of four and eight, because hockey equipment is too expensive for most people.

These are the types of things that the NHL does for the community, and the majority of Americans have turned their backs on it.

The NHL handles it's business with swift justice. The biggest problem that the league has had this year dealt with Sean Avery, a wing formerly of the Dallas Stars, now the New York Rangers. He made comments against a fellow player, Calgary's Dion Phaneuf, and his girlfriend.

The NHL did not wait to suspend Avery for six games, and the Dallas Stars organization did not let him play for their team again. Why one would ask would a team spend money on a product, then not use it? The Stars have too much integrity to allow a player like that on their team.

Most hockey players are real "down to earth" guys. I was at the opening day for the Pirates last season with my sister and some other friends. We saw four Penguins—Hal Gill, Adam Hall, Brooks Orpik, and Jarkko Ruutu—standing outside a restaurant. The next twenty minutes was a period in time I will not forget.

I went up to the players and started to talk to them, ask them for an autograph. They talked to me, not like they were better than I was, but just as any other guys. We all had a beer and b.s.ed until the start of the game. I actually got to explain baseball to some professional hockey players, and give Hal Gill a little hell because he was wearing a Red Sox cap.

The NHL has a plethora of young, uber-talented players that should be household names. Everyone knows Crosby, Malkin, and Ovechkin, but how about Jonaton Toews and Patrick Kane in Chicago, Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry in Anaheim, or Alexander Semin and Mike Green in Washington to name a few. These are young people who are going to change the face of the NHL in a few years.

Most of all, these guys don't get caught with weed at the rookie camp as in the NBA, or have multiple arrests by the time they get to the NFL as a rookie.

People say that it's a violent sport, with the checking and, most of all, the fighting. I say that this is absolutely hypocritical. People love to see big hits in football; the NFL suspends people for laying big hits, then reaps the rewards from putting these hits on a highlight tape. Georges Laraque, one of the most feared fighters in the NHL, says good luck to his opponent before they fight.

It's the same with baseball.  When a pitcher throws at a team's batter, the opposing pitcher is going to do the same. It is an unwritten rule—we protect our own. When Colton Orr takes a cheap shot at Sidney Crosby, I want Orpik to come and lay him out, I want Godard to come and beat the snot out of him. Is it barbaric to protect a teammate?

I am tired of seeing these guys in other, more popular sports getting off with nothing when they break the law. How many chances does Pacman Jones or Chris Henry get before the league says enough is enough? How many heroes in baseball are going to test positive for steroids? How many basketball players are going to get in trouble for being at a night club at three in the morning the night before a game?

We see these things happen all the time, but we do nothing about it.

I beg all of us sports fans to come back to the promised land and make the NHL popular again.