NHL pre-season mayhem a disgrace
Re The fight: Blow by Blow, Sept. 24 The Sabres-Leafs game was ruined by the farce in the third period. There were no “fights,” there were planned muggings. The NHL is the only professional sport where coaches and players are allowed to circumvent the officials and take matters into their own hands.
This time it was made worse by the commentary of the likes of announcer Joe Bowen who clearly revelled in the mayhem. For the most part the “fans” on hand at the ACC were reminiscent of those that attended at the Coliseum in Rome. We sure know how to ruin what should be a truly great game.
The NHL is playing with fire. One of these nights the lunacy that is being allowed to happen is going to result in something that will shame the game. We just don’t learn. I guess it will take the death of an NHLer to wake people up. Roger Williams, Scarborough We’re not even into the start of the official hockey season and already the violence has begun. Players swinging sticks at one another, brawls and all sorts of other types of fights and violence — what a disgrace to the great game of hockey. Even worse, nothing is done to stop it. I played hockey all my life and I know that one can play great and hard-hitting hockey without violence. There is simply no need for the levels of violence that exist in the current NHL. The people want to see players like Sidney Crosby play, where skating, puck handling and a wide variety of skills would shape the game the way it should be played — like in Olympic hockey rather than the violent NHL style of hockey we still see today. I guess old-time goons like Don Cherry still enjoy this type of hockey. Michael Mueller, Cambridge Everyone says they want to stop the fighting in hockey, and then you devote more than four pages of your Sports section to a blow-by-blow description, complete with colour pictures, of a fight in a pre-season game. I rarely watch hockey anymore, in part because of the fights, and I don’t need to read all about it in my morning paper. Ellen Jaaku, Scarborough