Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Outlawing Fighting in the NHL

by Todd Maternowski

Top of the morning, hockey fans! Last week we royally dissed on the 2009 NHL All-Star Game. This week, I was planning on writing my tri-annual Which is the Best Conference of All Time? column (#4: Yalta, 1945) when recent events in el mundo de hockey once again forced my hand. It seems that, following the unfortunate death of a player in the AHL, that once again the tired paper-demons of outlawing fighting in hockey have been summoned from their infernal crypts.

(sigh) Do we, as hockey fans, really have to do this again? How many times will the disease-ravaged corpse of this tried-and-failed argument rear its hideous head?

Here are the facts of the incident: a few weeks ago, a 21-year-old Canadian hockey player Don Sanderson died after sustaining a concussion following a fight that ended with him hitting his head on the ice. Note the cause of death: his helmet was taken off during the fight, and the ensuing fall resulted in the concussion.

Predictably, some sports journalists have been using this poor kid's death as a soapbox for their anti-hockey ranting, most notably Ken Campell of The Hockey News, who's gone on record as saying the players, fans, GMs and owners are all unspeakably moronic for wanting fighting to remain in hockey.

Some great reasoning there, Kenny. Here's a short list of some other things Mr. Campbell can't believe we still enjoy:

Bacon

Driving Over the Speed Limit

Pre-marital sex

Truth be told, fighting is nasty and brutish. You'd have to pay me well over a hundred bucks to step into the ring with George Laraque and engage this gentleman in fisticuffs. On the other hand, if Campbell really believes that a blisteringly fast and powerful sport will be adequately policed by NHL referees, then he's been spending far too much time in his parents' basement downloading unicorn porn and not enough time experiencing what us "hockey purists" refer to as real life.

Fact: juiced-up Canadian farmboys flying into each other at 20mph and swinging potentially lethal weapons need an emotional outlet. If you're going to outlaw fighting, you must take measures to ensure players cannot skate as fast as they can now, and that sticks are somehow made significantly less lethal. Because angry 24 year-olds making split-decisions in an ultra-competitive game that occurs in a tiny box will take out their aggressions one way or another.

Fact: Fighting in hockey is significantly less dangerous than any alternative. Two trained professionals standing straight up, facing each other, balancing on skates, gripping each other's jerseys tightly, and using their fists to hit a well-protected target present a laughably smaller injury risk than a swinging stick or a player flying full-speed into a defenseless player along the boards.

Fact: No-talent injury-causing punks are far worse than one-talent fighting goons, and far worse for the sport. Every recent high-profile injury in the NHL was the result of cheap shot artists (Bertuzzi, Pronger, Simon) who intentionally tried to injure unsuspecting players rather than face them head-on. For those that consider fighting dangerous, please name one instance of a fighter trying to cripple or intentionally injure another fighter.... go ahead, just one. Other than Alexander Semin, of course.

Truth is, "enforcers" are the Judge, Jury and Executioners in hockey, and will continue to be so as long as the referees remain a league-wide joke only capable of mass-producing bullshit hooking calls. While fights following 'clean' hits have gone up in the last year or so --and yes, even I'll admit that those fights are usually completely pointless and unnecessary-- eliminating a player's ability to respond to a dirty or illegal hit is dangerous both for the players and for the health of the sport.

The economic impact of fighting in hockey is unquestionable: hockey without fighting would have the popularity level of men's lacrosse or the WBNA. The comparison with NASCAR is apt: puck-handling skill = driving around in circles for four hours. Fighting = crashes. Try keeping a fanbase after enforcing 40 mph speed limits during races --after all, it's a proven fact that higher speeds and more aggressive driving lead to more collisions-- and you start to get the idea of what hockey would be like without the physical element.

Why does everyone always forget that the 1980s --the oft-alleged "heyday of hockey"-- was also the heyday of hockey fights? Not surprisingly, the NHL averaged twice as many fights during the 80s as it did in the 70s and 90s. By what must of course be a complete coincidence, hockey's ratings and popularity mirrors that almost exactly.

With fans, players, owners, coaches, GMs and even commissioners nearly unanimous in support of fighting, it seems the #1 group opposed to fighting is sports journalists; but why should anybody listen to burnt-out hacks who never played the game and generally have nothing whatsoever in common with the average fan? It should be common knowledge that journalists are merely wanna-be writers who have nothing of interest to say, and take out their creative infertility on easy targets that they refuse to try and understand. Journos probably want the games to be over sooner and personally resent the fact that something interesting is happening on the ice that will delay their run-of-the-mill, joyless automated prose by 5-10 minutes. And don't forget that these guys get to go to the games for free, while the fans that they insult pay hefty prices to witness the game they love.

On the other hand, the massive decrease in fan interest would put a vast majority of hockey journalists out of work: a self-fulfilling subliminal desire, perhaps?

More to the point, and I ripped this straight from wikipedia's entry on fighting: "Community members often become involved in the debate over banning fighting. In December 2006, a school board trustee in London, Ontario attended a London Knights game and was shocked by the fighting and by the crowd's positive reaction to it (emphasis mine). This experience led him to organize an ongoing effort to ban fighting in the Ontario Hockey League, where the Knights compete, by attempting to gain the support of other school boards and by writing letters to OHL administrators."

Hating a positive reaction from a crowd? Trying to politik behind-the-scenes and bully administrators rather than face the fans head-on is typical of the cowardice-rules, holier-than-thou backstabbing arguments of the anti-fighting lobby. Blaming fighting for Don Sanderson's death is about as cause-and-effect accurate as blaming the JC Penney Summer Catalog for those weird stains on your cargo shorts. Just because they are technically related....

In the real world, we fight for the things we love. And if you're not willing to throw down for something or someone you care about, you can't possibly really care about said thing/person as much as you say you do. Hockey's success will be and always has been driven by its fanatical fans. And fanatical fans are nearly universal in their praise of fighting. Frankly, only in a bizarre Esperanto-speaking tofu-slurping world --a world run by joyless journo-proles-- would it be any other way.

That's it for this week's ill-informed collection of sweeping generalizations. Tune in next week when --after tirelessly poring over hundreds of hours of game film-- I finally release my failsafe blueprint on How to Defeat the Atlanta Thrashers. My findings may surprise you.