Issue iii: Blue Line Beat-down [was it worth it?]

Well, it's halfway through February and time to take stock of the sporting world. The Super Bowl is over and the Pittsburgh Steelers have been champs for a little more than two weeks. Baseball spring training is still months away, and the NBA is preparing for a post-season push. Takes care of it all, right?

Not even close.

Being halfway through February means that time is dwindling for teams in the NHL to position themselves for the playoffs beginning in April. The shifts start getting longer, the goals are more valuable, the checks start getting harder.

And tempers get even shorter.

As the anger flares, incidence of the most controversial (and drawing) aspect of the sport begins to rise. As the pressure builds, players from every team in the league drop gloves and take the sport of boxing to a more dangerous level. There's nothing that gets the home crowd and the team more riled up than the sight of two enforcers squaring off for a good blue line beat-down. Most of the time, the men rough each other up until one falls and the referees break up the fight. The crowd goes wild, a major is handed out for fighting, and business continues as usual.

Not so much on December 12, 2008.. An amateur hockey player named Don Sanderson fell during a fight, hit his head on the ice, spent three weeks in a coma, and eventually died without ever waking up on January 2, 2009.

While fans of the sport may have been shocked, the people that spend most of their professional career covering and coaching the sport believe otherwise. Ken Campbell, a writer for the publication The Hockey News is among those that believed a player dying on the ice as a result of a fight.

"It was not an accident," he wrote. "An accident, by its very nature, is something that can't be foreseen, but we have seen this coming for years."

And while the most extreme case of injury has happened, even after Sanderson's death there have been incidents of minor leaguers being seriously hurt. On January 23, 2009, American Hockey League player and enforcer Garrett Klotz had a seizure on the ice after hitting his head on the dash and ice during a fight that started immediately after the opening face off. He had removed his helmet before the fight. Broken noses and bones are more common when players drop gloves and square off.

Perhaps the critics and writers that felt the same way that Campbell did struck a cord with the minor leagues. The Ontario Hockey League (a major junior league) immediately banned the removal of the helmets during a fight. But while smaller leagues have been quick to act, the most recognizable and powerful hockey league in the world has been slow to act.

Officials for the NHL discussed the matter during the All-Star break on January 25th. Some of the managers, such as Brian Burke of the Toronto Maple Leafs, defended fighting in the premier league.

"If you take fighting out of the game, you eliminate the player's ability to regulate the violence in the game," he said. "Fighting to me is the self-policing mechanism in the game to prevent the head shots, the hits from behind, and I will never vote to have it eliminated."

Burke quotes the logic of having fighting in hockey: If someone hits your star player of specialist too hard, or takes a shot at his head, or deliberately tries to take him out of the game, the offending player must be willing to deal with the consequences. Which usually means having to go toe-to-toe with an average or below average enforcer with heavy hands and a short temper.

Even Klotz acknowledges fighting and its place in the sport, and subsequently his own, "I know the risks that I'm taking when I go out there and I'm willing to take that risk," he said. "It's not too often that this happens."

Advocates of fighting offer the argument that without these enforcers (or, as the less talented players are referred to, goons) their star players would be vulnerable. Their opponents are just as vocal about the fact that they don't buy into what they perceive as fuzzy logic.

Charles Gillis, a writer for Maclean's Magazine doesn't believe that fighting reduces dirty play. He believes that enforcers and goons are responsible for the cheap shots that lead to fights in the first place. "The league is trapped in a vicious cycle, where fighters are doing the cheap shots, the cheap shots are leading to more fights, and the officials have given up trying to stop them."

And there's no denying that fighting has certainly gone up. According to HockeyFights.com, a website devoted to tracking fighting statistics and crunching the numbers, have kept track of the number of fights in the past nine seasons. During the 05-06 season, the number of fights occurring was 466, with 29.02% of games having a fight in them. In the 06-07 season of 1230 games, there were 497 fights, with 31.22% of the games played having at least one fight in them.

In the 07-08 season, the number jumps to 644 fights with an increase of 38.46% of games having a fight. And as far as this season goes, at the time of the last count with 824 of the 1230 games played, there have been 517 fights. That's an increase of 4.74% to a final figure of 43.2% (It should be noted that the website only considers a fight a fight when at least one player receives a hefty major penalty for fighting. It doesn't keep track of the minor scrums and shoving matches that occur during a game.)

The question that writers and fans of the sport (people like me) have to consider is whether to lobby for the elimination of the sport. With players knowing the risks and rewards for duking it out with another enforcer and the coaches neither publicly condemning the fights nor condoning them, it makes for a tough question.

Part of what makes hockey so special to me is the intensity that the players attack the game with. The season is hard, the post-season brutal, and the teams full of men who genuinely have to earn their money with punishing checks and exhausting shifts. I believe that no other sport requires conditioning like that of the modern hockey player. They are elbowed, they are checked, they take pucks to the face, and deliver bone quivering hits to other players. And they do it for sixty minutes a game, over 80 times a year, not to mention the best of seven game series a player hopes to take part off during the playoffs. The NHL is probably the most underrated of the four major sports in the US, and the emotionality is matched perhaps only by football.

But what perhaps is the most special part of the sport is the way that players can regulate the actions of each other in more effective ways than a referee can. I do support fighting in hockey, not only because of the draw to the sport, but also because it is a deeply rooted tradition. Removing the ability to stick up for your teammates and yourself by dropping gloves by suspensions and bans would be just as offensive if the NFL decided to clean up the sport by suspending players after a touchdown celebration or a shoving match on the field.
The value of fighting in hockey extends not only to the physical part of the sport, but also to the traditions of the best enforcers and the camaraderie that should be inherent in the team locker room (a quality that is in woefully short supply in the modern era of free agency and the mercenary mentality that players in all sports have).

There have been tragic incidents of injury and death, but not all terrible moments have occurred during fights. During a game on December 10, 2003, a Buffalo Sabres goalie named Chuck Malarchuk got his throat cut by a teammates skate. He lifted his helmet off and immediately sprayed arterial blood all over the ice. He almost died.

The risks of the game are not only inherent in the fights. While there is a difference between Malarchuk's accident and Sanderson's, both players recognized they could get hurt. What I do support however, is what the OHL did in banning the removal of helmets. What others don't recognize is that there even seems to be a unwritten code of fighting. Some of the rules I've researched and found are as follows:

The most important aspect of this etiquette is that opposing enforcers must agree to a fight, usually via a verbal or physical exchange on the ice. This agreement helps both players avoid being given an instigator penalty, and helps keep unwilling participants out of fights.[49]

Enforcers typically only fight each other, with only the occasional spontaneous fight breaking out between one or two opponents who do not usually fight.[50] Enforcers spend time researching the techniques and weaknesses of other enforcers, and many carry on long-standing rivalries.[51] There is a high degree of respect among enforcers as well; they will respect a rival who declines a fight because he is playing with injuries, a frequent occurrence, because enforcers consider winning a fight with an injured opponent to be an empty victory.[52] This is also known as granting a "free pass".[53]

Long-standing rivalries result in numerous re-matches, especially if one of the enforcers has to decline an invitation to fight during a given game. This is one of the reasons that enforcers may fight at the beginning of a game, when nothing obvious has happened to agitate the opponents.[54] On the other hand, it is bad etiquette to try to initiate a fight with an enforcer who is near the end of his shift, since the more rested player will have an obvious advantage.[55]

Another important aspect of etiquette is simply fighting fairly and cleanly. Fairness is maintained by not wearing equipment that could injure the opposing fighter, such as face shields, gloves, or masks,[56] not pulling the opposing fighter's jersey over his head, and not assaulting referees or linesmen.[57] Finally, whatever the outcome of the fight, etiquette dictates that players who choose to fight win and lose those fights gracefully. Otherwise, they risk losing the respect of their teammates and fans.[58]

In any case, I believe that fighting in hockey should continue with a greater emphasis on player safety. Helmets should be kept on. Etiquette should be followed. Enforcers shouldn't wait until they've spilled the blood of others until they stop. To remove the longstanding tradition of fighting would be more detrimental to the sport than any rules change in quite some time. If more concern towards fighting and its related etiquette, maybe writers and critics wouldn't have to write in their newspaper columns, "Was it worth it?"

OVERTIME: Here's a new feature to the blog in which I examine the fallout from previous stories. A-Rod admits to using performance enhancing drugs during his time at the Rangers. I'm proud that he had the honesty to own up to it. We're all watching to see what the commissioner is going to do with the tainted numbers and records. And I'm very interested to see if Rodriguez has a chance to get into Cooperstowne. Jamie Moyer doesn't seem to think so. In an interview with ESPN, he said that he didn't believe A-Rod had a chance to get in now. I guess we'll see if the pitcher is right.