If you claim to be a sports fan and don’t understand what the appeal of hockey is, you are either lying or missing the point. Hockey, at its best and most beautiful, is a display of raw athleticism and pinpoint precision. It incorporates the team harmony of soccer while simultaneously stretching the limits of what the individual is physically capable of achieving. Take that combination, add the electrifying catalyst of players interacting with the ice itself, and then consider the speeds they can reach and the balance they must maintain. That’s how you get the breathtakingly acrobatic saves of a Ryan Miller or the backbreaking dexterity and strength that goes into an Alex Ovechkin highlight-reel goal. That’s why hockey, for my money, is the most exhilarating spectator sport. Midseason or postseason, televised or live up against the boards, hockey trumps them all.
But many of the people who are missing the point of hockey are not wrong, because there is something standing in the way of the beauty of the game. That impediment is, as it seems to be in just about every sport, inextricably linked with the quality that makes it great. Take some of the world’s finest physical specimens, slap helmets on them, and stick them on the ice, and collisions are bound to happen. The brutality of hockey doesn’t approach the pounding players dish out and receive in a football game, but when you consider that players are taking hits to the head before hurtling towards the hard ice, the results read the same way. When the league turns off legions of prospective fans with enforcers headhunting on the ice and goons turning games into boxing matches, I want to say how much more there is to it than that. But no matter how much we may want to ignore it, goons and concussions are a part of the game.
The logic of the violence-adverse demographic that can’t get into hockey is understandable. I will defend the presence of enforcers in the NHL, but not goons. Goons are meatheads with poor footwork and poorer intent, the guys sent onto the ice solely to rough up the other team and go after their best players, turning a finesse game into a slogging struggle of brute force. Enforcers, on the surface, are not all that much different, playing to defend their team’s stars and make their impact through physicality. The difference is a matter of instigation. The goon hits the ice as a human missile while the enforcer is a deterrent, his presence a threat against any misdoings on the ice for fear of retaliation.
So where is the line between enforcer and goon? Part of the problem is that it doesn’t really exist right now. In a league scourged by head injuries (27 players are currently listed as out with concussions, and that doesn’t even include Sidney Crosby, who is listed as having a neck injury that is symptomatic of his concussion issues), Gary Bettman and the league office need to crack down on hits to the head. Currently, a hit to the head is only a minor penalty according to Rule 48.1, with the provision for a match penalty to eject an offender at the referee’s discretion. However, the use of this provision has been sparse, with the concussed far outnumbering the ejected. If the league doesn’t want to mandate that any real or perceived checks to the head warrant ejection, it should at least put the option in place to give an offender a major penalty. Without strict enforcement from the refs to protect the players on the ice, the players have to take matters into their own hands. And with too few sanctions to deter goons from headhunting, enforcers must respond with their fists.
It’s a travesty, but where the league stands right now, the only option after the injury-inducing hit is the fight: the big guys stick up for the little guys by dropping the gloves so that maybe next time the other big guy will think twice before trying to knock someone out of the game. It’s simplistic and barbaric, but that’s the only form of policing in place right now. The fighters take their five minutes in the box, their teammates graciously tap their sticks in honor of the sacrifice, and then the puck is dropped and play resumes. Do the fighters repent? No. Do the hits stop coming? Briefly, maybe, but not really. But players have become conditioned to believe in the fight as a momentum shift, with two pugilists occasionally going so far as to drop the gloves right at faceoffs, even at the start of the game. Maybe players really do get fired up by their teammate beating up on another guy, but when we learn more and more about head trauma and the effect every little hit has on a player’s well-being, justifying fighting as a defensive mechanism of the game is unacceptable and unconscionable.
Hockey is not a game for the weak, nor should it be. As elegant as it can be when played well, if beauty and precision on the ice is all you are looking for, I point you in the direction of figure skating and wish you good day. The beasts of the NHL who grind out every minute on the ice and add that degree of ruggedness to play are just as big a part of what makes hockey great. But the beast in hockey cannot be allowed to run rampant to the point that its beauty is trampled underfoot. Because when the casual fans turn off an NHL broadcast after witnessing two men pummel each other to avenge a concussed teammate, who can blame them when they question what they are fighting for?
1 Comment
NotPartoftheGame
Fighitng is unneeded violence that does nothing for the game. It doesn’t impact momentum – studies by hockey experts (PowerScout Hockey) have proven that it has no impact on strategy or the outcome of a game. If enforcers make players accountable then let’s look at the 70’s and 80’s when every team had multiple enforcers on their team. With all those “policemen” skating a regular patrol we should have expected no cheap shots, very few injuries and good clean hockey. Instead those decades were some of the most violent in NHL history; stick swinging, elbows, butt ends and slew foots. Enforcers don’t work.
I posted about these issues in my blog – http://itsnotpartofthegame.blogspot.com/. You can’t have players acting as police based on some mythical set of rules, “the code”, that is not written down anywhere. In the heat of the battle they start enforcing clean hits or game blow-outs, and try to send messages at the 2 second mark of the game. They are acting with emotion and bias and that’s how you end up with ugly incidents like McSorley/Brashear and Bertuzzi/Moore. Let the referee police the game, with increased penalties if necessary, and the players can focus on playing.