RO O N T N P E O
The sickening sight of Senators f orward Dave Dziurzynski lying face-first on the ice at the Air Canada Centre courtesy of Frazer McLaren’s lethal right fist will, for a long time, be embedded in the minds of all of us who were in the building to witness it, if not forever.
In the aftermath, before the fighting vs. anti-fighting fraternities use this ugly incident as a stage to voice their own opinions, the most important thing, as former NHLer Nick Kypreos pointed out on Thursday afternoon, is that “the kid is OK and has a full recovery.”
We can all agree on that point, can’t we people?
After that, well, this issue gets as polarizing and as politically incorrect as possible, especially when Kypreos suggests that, as unpopular as the notion might seem, Dziurzynski could have avoided all of this.
All the Sens rookie had to do when McLaren asked him if he wanted “to go” just 26 seconds into the game was to “just say no.
“In this league, you have the right to wear or not wear a visor,” Kypreos said. “And you also have the right not to fight, even if someone asks you to.
“Twenty years ago, if you turned down a fight, you would be ridiculed in your own dressing room. You would be called a ‘chicken-bleep’ by your teammates. There was peer pressure to drop the gloves even if you didn’t want to.
“It’s not that way anymore. Now you can turn down a fight without any repercussions. Heck, you’ve got guys now who get high- fived by their own teammates for turtling. If you would have tried that crap 20 years ago, you would have got beaten up worse in your own dressing room”
Like it or not, Dziurzynski could have rejected McLaren’s offer to scrap. That’s what had Sens general manager Bryan Murray scratching his head after the game. Why did the kid agree to drop the gloves with such a renowned heavyweight in the first place?
Is it fair to make this a simple case of “just say no?” Maybe not. At the same time, it is the players themselves, as Kypreos
mentioned, who would rather have the right to make their own decisions rather than have their options legislated by the league, whether it comes to making face shields mandatory or taking fighting out of the game, staged or unstaged.
The Marc Staal example underscores the point. A day after the Rangers defenceman was horrifically smacked in the eye by a deflected puck, NHLPA head Donald Fehr said Wednesday that, while his constituents have been strongly advised to wear visors, the mandate of the union is to give players freedom of choice.
As long as the players association sticks to those guns, how do you get fisticuffs, staged or not, out of the game, especially when it does not appear many past and present players want it to leave?
Perhaps you adopt an Ontario Hockey League system where you are suspended after a certain number of fights. But that still does not differentiate between staged fights and those policing- type bouts which some of us still feel are needed to offset the number of cheapshots in the game from escalating.
Kypreos, for one, has every reason to want fighting banned after his career ended because of a September 1997 preseason scrap against Ryan VandenBussche, an incident eerily similar to the McLarenDziurzynski one. But he doesn’t. “It looked like mine in ’ 97,” Kypreos said. “I fell face first. I was embarrassed by it. My life changed because of it. And I can live with that. Guys get hurt. Careers end. It’s no different than someone who rips open their knee. It’s not a game for the faint of heart.
“I’d just say to the kid: ‘ It’s humbling, so take your time, make sure you get healthy and get over it and start again.’ ”
Kypreos believes even staged bouts serve as motivation.
“You can’t deny the Leafs have a new feel they haven’t had for a long time, thanks in part to the McLarens, the (Colton) Orrs, the (Mark) Frazers,” he said. “They feel taller.”
As for VandenBussche, he told Sportsnet The Fan 590 Wednesday that the Kypreos incident left him a more trepid pugilist.
“After that, I was a little more scared to fight,” he said. “You fear the consequences. You ask yourself, ‘Could that happen to me?’ ”
For Dave Dziurzynski on Wednesday night, it did. And the one aspect the fighting and antifighting debaters agree on is that he gets well soon.
Other than that, the fact that a player like Kypreos, whose career ended in a similar incident, still believes there is a place for fisticuffs in the game will only fuel the arguments for both sides.