Deking the issue of a cruel code
At the risk of trivializing the extremely serious issue of head injuries in sport, one can’t help but wonder if the hockey insiders who defend on-ice fighting in the NHL have themselves been in one too many altercations.
How else can we explain a business that, while otherwise obsessed with presenting a positive image, allows its employees to commit assault and battery in full view of children for whom it hopes daddy will buy expensive jerseys during breaks in the “action”?
Think about it. These talented young men fill their spare time with community good works, arrive on game nights looking clean-cut in their suits and ties, and then go out on the ice and deliberately stage fist fights. Even the Romans ultimately decided that throwing Christians to the lions was a public relations problem — and they weren’t investing millions of sesterces on the participants being put in harm’s way.
As if helplessly bemoaning the weather, observers occasionally sigh that real action against fighting in the NHL will only come when a player dies.
But even when that awful result briefly seems a real possibility, as it temporarily did after a fight between two “heavyweights” in Montreal on Tuesday night, it doesn’t take long for defenders of the indefensible to swing into action.
They cite hockey’s unwritten “code” of self-policing and accountability, argue the game would be fundamentally changed without the tolerance of fisticuffs, and fill the air with protestations about how the injury was an “accident” that the opponent felt badly about. And if folks who aren’t members of the fraternity dare to suggest that this absurd behaviour could safely be abolished, they are treated like little children who just don’t understand, and told to run along and play.
The weird thing is, hockey’s precious code doesn’t even work. Did worry about a future on-ice fight make Vancouver Canuck Zack Kassian more careful with his stick in that pre-season game against the Oilers, or save Sam Gagner from having to eat through a straw for several weeks?
In the fight that has reignited this perennial controversy — one in Montreal between George Parros of the Canadiens and Colton Orr of the Toronto Maple Leafs — Parros’ stomach-turning face-first impact on the ice was arguably an accident, the bout was between two members of the enforcer brotherhood who “knew” the risks, and Orr showed he had no wish to injure Parros by immediately waving to the benches for medical help.
But none of these points have relevance when the risk itself was unnecessary in the first place.
The fact is, if fighting carried with it multi-game suspensions that led quickly to lifetime bans for repeat offences, the accident of the fall to the ice wouldn’t have occurred — just as the fight-related injury to the Oilers’ Taylor Hall wouldn’t have deprived fans of his exciting play for several weeks two years ago.
Yes, the game might change a bit if fighting were removed. So what? Surely saving the occasional life, improving the medical outlook for retired hockey fighters and improving the role-modelling of hockey heroes is worth a little risk.
And who knows? It might make things better. There was a time that granting women the right to vote or abolishing slavery seemed almost as threatening to our North American way of life as making hockey players stick to hockey. And those changes worked out pretty well.