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Burke: Athletes that can’t separate violence in game with outside world don’t deserve paycheck

Brian Burke

Brian Burke

AP

Contact sports are violent, but that’s not an excuse for taking that physicality outside of the game.

Or as Calgary Flames president Brian Burke put it, “The notion that ‘I get paid to fight on a hockey rink so that same level of violence is acceptable on the street or in my home,’ I think that’s just pure [expletive]. And if a player can’t separate them, then the player doesn’t deserve to earn professional athlete wages.”

Burke’s quote came in response to a question about the Ray Rice scandal and the NFL’s handling of it, per the Canadian Press. A video has surfaced of the running back assaulting a woman who is now his wife.

Burke has been thinking about what he would do if one of his players had acted in a similar matter. On the one hand, he believes that people deserve due process when accused of a crime, but if the evidence against the player is significant enough, then it changes things.

“So in the Rice case, when there’s a video, we don’t have to guess what happened there,” he said. “That case, we’d say ‘We’re done with this player. He’s done with us.’ We’re going to do the right thing first.”

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