McGill has to stop this behaviour

TODD

Continued from Page B9

We were ordered into the pit, and then forced to do pushups, submerging our heads over and over in the wet mixture of water and cow manure. Finally, we emerged stinking and choking. We were hosed off, to a degree, and left shivering and wet and humiliated in the cold until it was time to begin the four-mile run back into town — still clad in our shorts and reeking of manure.

The first part of the run was through a cow pasture; one of the guards on our basketball team was running beside me when he leapt a little hummock and came down with both bare feet on a prickly bare cactus; he had to be taken to hospital where the spines were removed.

The rest of us trooped along the highway. Passing motorists honked; the lettermen’s initiation ritual, it seemed, was a familiar spectacle. The coaches knew, the school authorities knew, the police knew, the hospitals that treated the victims knew, but this went on, year after year. When I qualified for the lettermen’s club at the University of Nebraska, a football player who had been through both initiations said our high school hazing was like a picnic compared to Nebraska’s, which included the liberal use of cattle prods.

Boys will be boys, even when they’re sodomizing their victims with a broomstick?

I don’t buy it.

Boys will be boys, yes. They’ll kill each other if you let them. McGill has to put a stop to this, even if it means the end of the football program. Better that than some future rookie dying.

CanWest News Service