Ex-ref backs NHL’s stance
Kerry Fraser is on the phone and talking about the time when he put away his whistle and fought a player. Well, jersey’d him, to be exact.
It was sometime around 1974 or 1975 and Fraser was officiating a game in the minors. He had just handed Nova Scotia Voyageurs forward Richard Lemieux his third penalty when Lemieux dropped his stick and kicked it across the ice towards Fraser, making contact with the referee’s skate. Fraser kicked him out of the game for unsportsmanlike conduct and Lemieux reportedly lost it.
“He threw his gloves down and started charging towards me,” Fraser said. “I put my hands in front of me, like a peace offering, and he threw a punch. I ducked it and grabbed his arm. He had one more punch to throw and I caught it and pulled his jersey quickly over his head.
“Ken Houston (who was a teammate of Lemieux’s) t hought I was going to smoke him, so he picked me up in a bear hug. Now, he’s 6- foot-2 and I’m 5- foot-7, so my little feet are dangling off the ice. Luckily the linesmen came in, because my arms were pinned to the side and Lemieux had a freebie if he wanted.”
Fraser, who has the NHL record for most games by an official, laughed into the receiver. Over his lengthy career, he’s has seen it all.
He’s been hit by errant pucks, punched in the head while breaking up fights and called every name in the book. One time, he was hit so hard from behind that he suffered whiplash and tore his rotator cuff. Another time, a player got so angry he spat right into Fraser’s mouth.
“It sickens me to this day thinking about it,” said Fraser. “It took every ounce of energy I had for me to hold back.”
So when Calgary’s Dennis Wideman received a 20- game suspension f or cross- checking linesman Don Henderson in a Jan. 27 game — a suspension that commissioner Gary Bettman upheld on Wednesday, but which could be headed toward a neutral discipline arbitrator — Fraser was pleased with the sentence.
It was not that Wideman was a dirty player or even purposefully meant to hit Henderson. It was that the NHL stood by its officials, who should always be offlimits regardless of the circumstances.
“It’s true, Dennis Wideman is not the type of player that is abusive toward officials. That’s my experience of him,” said Fraser. “But players make mistakes. Everybody does. This shows strong support for the officials.”
Not that the league had much choice in the matter. Had Bettman softened the term of the sentence, Fraser is confident that officials would have punished Wideman, the Flames and the league in another way.
“There would have been less tolerance for the player and the team,” said Fraser. “Not to say there would be penalties invented, but there would certainly be a more rigid enforcement of the rules standard applied. I think the league demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they support their officials and that they don’t accept any abuse of the officials. That message was made loud.”
It was not always this way. When Fraser started work- ing NHL games, the respect that the men in stripes had was minimal at best. Philadelphia’s Paul Holmgren once punched Andy Van Hellemond in the chest. Boston’s Terry O’Reilly punched him in the head during a scrum. And while the league issued suspensions, Fraser said they were not severe enough to act as deterrents.
“We were worried that the league wasn’t protecting us. We needed better protection and more meaningful suspensions,” said Fraser, who along with the league’s other officials staged a work-to- rule during a weekend in 1981- 82 where officials stopped policing the game in-between whistles.
“I had a game in Winnipeg and Bryan Maxwell got into a fight behind the net and we went to the referee’s crease and Maxwell and the other guy were slugging it out under the big picture of the Queen in the Winnipeg arena. As the punches started to slow down, they started to look for striped jerseys and there were none to be had.
“They eventually stopped punching each other, picked their sticks and gloves up and I blew the whistle and directed them to the penalty box.”
Out of that, the NHL passed Rule 40.2, which, in part, says: “any player who deliberately applies physical force in any manner against an official with intent to injure … shall be automatically suspended for not less than twenty games.”
Fraser said: “It was ( then player agent) Alan Eagleson who said, ‘ Make it 20 games. If you have that number of games for a suspension, it will never happen.’ Of course, the next year on Halloween, Tom Lysiak tripped an official and he was a client of Eagleson and he received 20 games.”