As First Published at www.Hockeyinsight.com
There is no nice way to put it. The National Hockey League is sharing a room with an elephant the size of Gibraltar and even if there were clear solutions neither the owners nor the PA have anyone in the driver’s seat with the fortitude to make tough decisions. It’s a case of a thousand cuts and if it doesn’t mean death it means a right proper castration at the alter of player safety.
Over the course of our favorite sport’s modern history, you might have been forgiven if you thought it mismanaged, bizarre, even a touch self-hating in parts, but you could never call it sterile. If fancy passing, iconic goals and Lady Byng-ing it up with the less fortunate are the head and heart of the league, then Sherwood dentistry, blood spitting fisticuffs and dirty checks are most certainly it’s guts. The Stan Mikita, Claude Lemieux and Gordie Howe legacies might not shine as brightly as Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and … Gordie Howe, but they’re there nonetheless and history would be sorely lacking without them.
Fighting, for starters, is on the way out, beginning with the CHL (more a weather vane for hockey’s big league than any other feeder system for any pro sport). David Branch has said as much when pressed, and it stands to reason that if the kids aren’t allowed to fight, then the services of enforcers won’t be required in the minors. That all but evaporates the pool of tough guys for the league to draft, unless they want to go nosing around the octagon to see if Keith Jardine knows how to skate.
That’s ok, because on the one hand, most fans consider fights to be an amusing but ridiculous sideshow, but on the other hand, watching Iginla trade knuckles with Lecavalier after two and a half periods of agitation, that’s something you tell your grandkids about. Now fighting has taken a convenient backseat to the newest bugaboo, head shots. Talks of banning or even curbing fights have been pushed back for a while, but it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Head shots cause career ending concussions, brain spasms, and are in all ways a thing to be avoided. But players duck, players put their heads down, and in a league that lets mutants like Chara play against regular sized people, head shots are going to happen unless body contact is ruled out altogether.
The same forces that rally against demolition derbies, smoking in the workplace and unprotected sex are now lined against violence in hockey. No, not violence, just fighting, head shots, interference, charging, elbowing, hitting from behind, and a nice fat caveat reserved for whatever causes the next big injury.
So when Charlie Tator, the doctor with a man-sized hunger for his fifteen minutes, calls out Don Cherry for promoting an aggressive game, he does so with crippling, flat, sterile reason in his corner. Don can give him the one-fingered Kingston Salute, but he can’t sit down and argue because all the good doctor has to point to is Don Sanderson, or Steve Moore, or Mikael Tam or the dopey stream of players past and present coming out of the concussion closet. These are tragedies all, and products of violence in hockey. There is no more compelling motive than these examples, and no reasonable objections can be made against taking all measures to prevent them. Hockey is just a game, and a game is not worth more than life. End of story. Grapes will argue and preach for self-governance amongst the players, a policy he knows is doomed to fail, all the while loving the kids on the ice and the game itself the way guys like Tator can’t understand. The way Don sees it, hockey is one or two new rules away from cashing in the very spirit that makes the game great in the name of safety and reason.
Hockey is dangerous. These boys get paid to go real real fast, to throw their bodies around, to drop the gloves and to hurt each other on purpose. They do it because there is a desire for violence amid the glory, a need for the unsanitary that puts asses in the stands at Joe Louis Arena the same way it did at the Coliseum. You don’t get the frenzied electricity that makes hockey fans hockey fans without the threat of fists, sticks, shoulders and elbows bubbling in the pot. They go hand in hand and it’s what makes our sport better than anything else out there. No one would ever suggest that the game can’t change with the times, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. At some point, when someone gets hurt, the NHL, it’s players and it’s fans have to say “So it goes” or abandon it altogether.
Hockey is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be played tomorrow in such a way that would negate all but the most basic risks. Players could skate across center ice with their heads down, wingers could screen goalies with no thought of reprisals, and the weakest of men could taunt the strongest with as many barbs as they could imagine. We can have a kinder, gentler NHL and there is sickly, constant pressure to move in that direction.
The NHL’s debate about violence is really a debate about identity. Hockey is a sport like no other and the rough stuff is a big piece of what sets it apart. Without the mean body checks, the fighting, the missing teeth and the violence, how close does hockey really get to soccer on ice?
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