People are still talking about Nail Yakupov's goal celebration from earlier this week. The complaint is that his exuberant charge and slide down the ice after scoring the overtime winner was over-the-top and self-agrandizing.
This is something I find aggravating about sports. The world of athletics may seem savage and anarchic, yet every now and then people in the sports world will lapse in to an almost Victorian expectation of manners. Hockey seems to be the worst at this, in that it is the rawest, least civilized of sports, but it has the highest expectations of behaviour of players. I could understand if there were expectations of great character and sportsmanship, but that doesn't seem to be the case. You could be celebrated for intentionally injuring an opponent, then condemned for being too enthusiastic in celebrating a goal. Go ahead and try to hurt your fellow player, but hurt his feelings and there'll be hell to pay.
I have to be honest, they do have a point that the celebration was a little excessive, and even a little selfish. But on the scale of everything unjust in the world of hockey, this was hardly worth mentioning. But instead, it's become a major topic of conversation, far more than if he had, say, broken his stick over an opponent's head.
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