Hockey Fights

[rehmwa 2]

It's the action that matters, this example was intentional and should be acted on whether someone was hurt or not. And, yeah, establish the lines, even if that does mean formally allowing the pro-leagues to be self regulating on the matter unless injury actually happens.....

These are adults, not little boys, they are (supposed to be) responsible for their actions. If they had consequences for misbehaving in a criminal fashion rather than just league penalties, then it wouldn't happen so often. Or maybe the league can establish their own jails and have courts and judges....

The excuse that it happens all the time is lame, it's still wrong.

The excuse that the courts don't 'want' to cross some line is lame.

The excuse that a criminal act is only examined because a neck is broken is more than lame, it's just plain sad.

"It's wrong to come down hard on this man for doing what has been allowed for many many years. " I think you can see what's wrong with this position.

Why do think that blindsided punching/hacking is acceptable in the sport?

What about a couple years ago when that guy swung his stick like a bat and hit that other player in the neck/head? What do think of that situation? Can you draw a line on either side of that?

So I guess high powered businessmen should just be allowed to shoot each other in the boardroom in order to win business arguments too? If Davis Love gets a little wound up during the Masters, I guess he should just take a seven iron to Tiger?

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[murrays 0]

Quote

What you will see most likely is the NHL come down hard and possibly ban fighting. We'll see how that plays out.

Don't think so.....check out Cam Cole's column in the National Post...and Colin Campbell's (of the NHL) comments.

Hockey will stay a violent sport

No punishment can curb game's emotion, adrenalin

Cam Cole - National Post

Friday, March 12, 2004

Colin Campbell is the National Hockey League's chief justice, and if I read him correctly, he sees his job as the same one he would like the striped-shirted constables on the beat to perform.

They are out on the ice, in the heat of it, and he is in an office, most nights, in front of a bank of TV monitors. But the principle is the same. The idea is to keep a lid on hockey, but only just.

The good referee is the one who understands that anarchy is bad, but something just short of it often produces the very best hockey. The good NHL senior vice-president of hockey operations, who usually inherits the mess only after a referee has accidentally let the pot boil over, has the same understanding.

It comes from experience. From context. From knowing, as Campbell pointed out yesterday, that hockey is not more violent now than it was 10 years ago, or 25, or 50 -- a thing you would expect Canadians to know, but which we constantly seem to forget.

Context comes from knowing that it has always been a bloody, brutal game and, in some ways, is less so now. That there always were, and always will be, wanton acts of lawlessness that would be outside the rules even if the rules prescribed lethal injection for high sticking or the gas chamber for drawing blood.

Todd Bertuzzi is gone for the season and playoffs and maybe a little longer than that, and loses US$502,000 in salary, because what he did -- sucker-punching Colorado's Steve Moore from behind and leaving him in a pool of his own blood with chip fractures of two cervical vertebrae and a concussion -- was deplorable, and possibly criminal. And the Vancouver Canucks were fined US$250,000 more because they didn't "do enough to take the temperature down," as Campbell put it.

But get this straight: Bertuzzi could have been ordered hanged by the neck in front of Denver city hall -- and it still would not stop, a year from now or three, the next overheated, under-disciplined boob from snapping and doing something utterly beyond the ability of any rule or code of behaviour to prevent.

And that context seems to be the principal quality missing from the debate over Bertuzzi's unpardonable assault, and what caused it. As if something caused it other than a big lummox's misguided ideas of somehow helping his team by hurting an opponent.

In the lust to see Todd Bertuzzi's head on a spit for what we all agree was an unconscionable assault, we seem to have got ourselves caught in an argument about post-game threats, and fighting's place in hockey, and whether we spend enough time teaching our kids skill, and too much teaching them hitting, or whether they get too much sugar in their diets.

"If we didn't allow fighting in the game, he could still do this," Campbell said yesterday to one questioner.

"So that's your answer? This had nothing to do with a fight?"

Campbell sighed. Let me answer that: Yes. It had nothing to do with a fight.

But we get swept up into this artificial hysteria, fuelled by the crime being replayed, over and over and over and over, all day and all night, on the 24-hour highlight reels, in a lot of places where hockey is not even on the radar screen unless it makes CNN for some oddball reason.

This is not to say that the pictures lie. Bertuzzi's act was just as gruesome as it looked on the first viewing or the 32nd, as gruesome to Canadians as Americans. But oddly, for a country that grew up with the game, we seem a little too willing to believe the worst about hockey, and forget what we used to know about its decades of blood-stained history that came before Headline News.

The Bertuzzi Affair isn't that complicated. He went miles over the line, everyone knows it, and yesterday the NHL slapped him down for it, using the Marty McSorley benchmark, to a 'T.' Simple, really.

From McSorley's 23 regular-season games with a bullet -- meaning the possibility of more being tacked on later (which is what happened, four years ago) -- Campbell deducted a few games for the fact that the perpetrator, in this case, was not an acknowledged enforcer with a rap sheet as long as his arm. It deducted another smidgen for the fact that the assault weapon was not a hockey stick, but a gloved fist.

It added a few for the fact that his victim was not another goon, as was McSorley's target, Donald Brashear, but a real hockey player, from Harvard, even. It added a few more for the extent of Moore's injuries, and left the punishment open-ended in case he didn't come back so well from the concussion.

And, presto! Thirteen games, and as many more as the Canucks might play in the playoffs -- and if that doesn't feel like enough when next fall rolls around, well, commissioner Gary Bettman has the option to improvise.

To his great credit, Campbell did not take Bertuzzi's teary-eyed televised statement of remorse into the equation. Not that Bertuzzi wasn't genuinely remorseful -- if I'd had a Kleenex handy, I'd have had to dab at my own eyes -- just that it was a little late for remorse.

Nor did he allow himself to be influenced by the road rage of rush hour at the NHL's Toronto offices. He didn't look at the 24 camera crews and reporters jammed into every nook and cranny of the biggest conference room the league could find in its headquarters beside the Air Canada Centre, and say: "Wow, we better throw them some meat."

Instead, he tried to put the crime into context, and not get dragged off-topic.

"I hate to say this, but I've been around too long," said Campbell. "The other day, [hockey operations VP] Mike Murphy and I were discussing this lack of respect thing, and having played -- both of us -- in the '70s ... there is much more respect now among players than there was then, I can guarantee you that. Things go on in games that we don't like, but there were things that happened back then that would never happen today. I think you have to look at the coverage of hockey, and what gets seen, and what is hardly ever missed now.

"In monitoring that particular game, when this happened ... it was wrong," said Campbell. "It wasn't anything else but wrong."

As we knew would happen, there are large pockets of observers who believe the punishment was too lenient, and another large pocket who think it was too harsh. And we're not even sure of the full extent of the suspension, yet.

Canucks GM Brian Burke, Campbell's predecessor as league disciplinarian, called the fine "despicable" and blamed everyone and everything for the severity of the penalties -- the media, society, the league, the lunar tides -- everyone but Bertuzzi, whom he stopped just short of nominating for sainthood. I think, at one point, he implied that Bertuzzi's good works in the community ought to get him off the hook for breaking Moore's neck.

But that's Burke. He can be a "good of the game" guy when he wants to be, but in this context, he had to be a Canucks guy. And more than anything, he is an emotional, passionate Irishman with a permanent chip on his shoulder, who blows up and then, 10 minutes later, forgets why he was angry. This, I have a hunch, may take more than 10 minutes. But he should probably consider himself lucky that he and coach Marc Crawford weren't suspended, as well, for tacitly encouraging the poisonous atmosphere that resulted in Bertuzzi's rash act.

If there's a contradiction that stands out a mile in the Campbell decision, that's it: the league's maddening refusal to hold coaches and managers -- including Ken Hitchcock and Bobby Clarke from last week's Philadelphia-Ottawa revenge-fest -- accountable for their teams' behaviour, as if they are a special class, above the players.

"When it was 5-0 after the first period, [NHL director of officiating] Andy Van Hellemond made a call to the officials room [in Vancouver], which isn't normal, and I made a call to the officials' room. When the score is out of hand, as this one was early, you worry about what could happen," Campbell admitted.

Why do you worry? Because that's when a coach lets loose the hounds. Campbell knows it, he just can't prove that Crawford said anything.

"I'm not saying I accept it, but these things do happen, and when you play 1,230 games a year, and you have 700 players doing this, you may reach a point where one of those players -- and I'm sure it happens in all the leagues -- at one moment makes the wrong decision," said Campbell.

"We're in a fast game that has hitting involved, and temperatures get raised. And when it happens, you deal with it. We feel we've dealt with it right here."

Some will say, are saying, that they haven't done anything of the kind. That there will be more acts of violence, more injuries. And they're right. There will be.

But not because the penalty wasn't severe enough.

On that score, Campbell understands what all his johnny-come-lately critics seem to have forgotten:

Anarchy, bad. Edge of anarchy, good.


© National Post 2004

--
Murray

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Thanks for the post Murrays ... that was a good read.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[ArcAngel0223 0]

I am a hockey player. I've been playing since I was 8 years old. I spent 7 years in the Irish Youth Hockey League over here in South Bend, its the same deal as a little league baseball set up, we just play a diferent game. After that I went over and played two years of high school hockey for South Bend Riley, an even more enlightening experience.

In my 9 years of competitive play I've seen just about all you can see. I've seen fights break out because of school rivalries rather then game score, I've seen a stick come down hard on a fallen kids neck, it was an accident, but thats not the way the crowd or the opposing team saw it. They had him removed from the ice, an ambulance was called and the police were involved, and we had several pairs of parents come back behind our bench and ask us "what the f*ck is wrong with you kids? What are they teaching you here!?!" And ya know my team was just made up of a bunch of 11 year olds. We'd never seen anything like this.. we didn't konw what to do or what to say. Nothing really big came of this, and it was deemed as a misunderstanding, and the two kids involved in the accident are still friends to this day as I have been told.

And I've done some stupid shit too. When I was in my second year in the IYHL I cross checked a kid in the back of the neck.. not because we were opponents and it was the thing to do, it was because he checked me from behind, and the refs didn't call it. And when your on the ice, you believe yourself to be biggest baddest meanest motherf*cker in the valley. So it wasn't something I let go,.. "He hit me!?! He's got the balls to hit me?!? He's gonna PAY!"... and so I made him pay, not thinking of the consequences. He wasn't hurt, but he didn't end up paying.. I did. I had my first 10 minute misconduct, we lost the game and my parents were very dissappointed in me.

Basically what I've learned through this story in a nutshell, is that you do NOT think about anything when your on the ice except from scoring, or current grudges you have with anyone on the opposite team. Nothing is brushed off, or taking with a grain of salt. If you are hit, embarrased, made a fool of, made to look weak at ANY point to anyone on your team, the crowd, or worst of all the opposing team, your going to keep that guy in the back of your mind, and just wait to line him up for the perfect hit, and redeem yourself as a man.

It sounds stupid but thats the mindset all hockey players really carry with them.. I know, cuz I've played, I've got that mindset,.. but I've learned through experience how to control it and just let stuff go. Other times people just let their emotions get the best of them, and bottom line, they only think of revenge. The idea of reciprocity is so wonderful it blinds a man to the consequences of his actions.. and its a whole different feeling, because on National TV, you've got a much bigger audience.

I don't think he should be thrown in jail because he didn't have intent to damn near kill him, but I believe that his suspension should stand, and that the NHL should adopt a No Tolerance policy.

Jourdan

[Ducky 0]

Wow what emotions expressed on something so few people know anyhting about. Sure what the heck let's press charges and make an ass out of the prosecutors. We all know how good the conviction rate is for pro athletes off the paying field. Let's try to walk the line on a cloudy prosecution case and make an ass out of all legal parties involved. Make another greasy lawyer a superstar defense attorney cuz he gets good press.

Who am I to say what to do in this case?? I only played for 10 years as junior and never got into the politics. I have attended over 500 NHL and IHL games and only 300 of those were while covering the NHL for a news publication bith a s a writer and photographer. With my unqualified resume I am not about to tell the NHL or any jumpy prosecutor what he should do.
The whole thing is quite funny to me. It's kind of like reading a bunch of whuffos opinions on skydiving just after they read or hear about the latest fatality. "his chute failed to function properly..." ugggh you mean the dumbass hook turned at 80ft. w/ 60 jumps flying a 79sq.ft. eliptical??



kwak

Sometimes your the bug, sometimes your the windshield. Sometimes your the hammer sometimes your the nail. Question is Hun, Do you wanna get hammered or do you wanna get nailed?????

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Hopefully you are not confusing me with the people who want criminal charges pressed against Bertuzzi. I feel that the NHL did the right thing (suspending Bertuzzi for what should be the same amount of time that Moore is out of action). But no way do I feel that criminal actions should be persued.

I still say the Dave Brown/Thomas Sandstrom incident was worse than this.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[Ducky 0]

Oh def not Cannuck I think your on the money. Just responded to your post cuz you seemed to be on the right page and didn't want anyone thinking i was attacking or singling them out. Dave Brown? well nevermind agreed.


kwak

Sometimes your the bug, sometimes your the windshield. Sometimes your the hammer sometimes your the nail. Question is Hun, Do you wanna get hammered or do you wanna get nailed?????