Hockey violence skates offside

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2004 (7888 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FROM the day the National Hockey League played its first game, back on Dec. 19, 1917, its bread and butter have been non-stop action and — on an accepted level — violence.

Breakneck speed, aggressive hitting and often-savage collisions have melded together to create a game that has grown in popularity. A sparse crowd of 700 watched that first NHL game between the Montreal Wanderers and Toronto Arenas. Monday night, an overflow crowd of 18,630 packed Vancouver’s GM Place.

That game served up the NHL’s second major violent clash in four nights, and this one rocked the NHL to its foundation. There is a line between hockey’s accepted level of violence and criminal assault. Today, Canada and hockey fans everywhere are debating whether Todd Bertuzzi and the Vancouver Canucks crossed that line.

Bertuzzi, a 6-foot-3, 245-pound right-winger known in hockey parlance as a “power forward,” came up behind a 6-foot-1, 200-pound Colorado Avalanche rival named Steve Moore, tugged at his jersey and, before Moore could turn to defend himself, slammed a fist into the side of his head.

As Moore collapsed, face first, Bertuzzi rode him down, shoving his face into the ice. By the time the mayhem ended, Moore lay in a pool of his own blood with a broken jaw, a concussion and two broken vertebrae in his neck.

Bertuzzi’s attack on Moore was retribution for a bodycheck that Moore laid on the Canucks’ captain — and best player — Markus Naslund two weeks earlier.

Moore’s check, deemed “clean” by the NHL, went unpenalized but left Naslund with a concussion and sidelined him for three games.

The Canucks were furious. Bertuzzi himself was quoted as saying: “… if the referees aren’t going to do anything about it, we’ll have to take the law into our hands. Does that mean we’re going after him? Well, yeah, that’s what it means.”

Bertuzzi’s teammate, Brad May, said: “There’s definitely a bounty on his head. It’s going to be fun when we get him.”

The teams met again on March 3, playing to a 5-5 tie in Denver. There were no incidents. But back in Vancouver on Monday night, the atmosphere was electric.

Early in the game, Vancouver’s 5-foot-11, 205-pound Matt Cooke challenged Moore to a fight, Moore accepted and the two went at it. But with Colorado leading 8-2 in the third, that fight obviously wasn’t enough for Bertuzzi.

He followed Moore, calling on him to fight.

Moore ignored him. Bertuzzi grabbed him by the sweater and threw the shot heard ’round the hockey world.

Yesterday, the NHL suspended Bertuzzi for the final 12 games of the season and the entire 2004 playoffs. The suspension will cost the 28-year-old from Sudbury more than $501,000 US in lost pay.

Vancouver police are investigating. As with Boston’s Marty McSorley, who deliberately struck Vancouver tough guy Donald Brashear in the head with his stick back in 2000, there could be criminal charges.

Every couple of seasons there’s a beyond-the-pale attack that brings the same call from hockey fans, the media and the people who see the game only as a sick excuse for bloodletting.

“Ban fighting immediately,” they yell. “Call in the police,” they scream.

Maybe they’re right. I’m not so sure.

The Bertuzzi incident was one of two NHL black eyes during the past week.

Last Friday night, the Philadelphia Flyers and Ottawa Senators brawled their way in the third period to a league-record 419 minutes in penalties.

That game and the Vancouver attack had this in common: Both were acts of vengeance.

The Flyers were enraged at Ottawa left-winger Martin Havlat, who a week earlier had smashed Flyers’ right-winger Mark Recchi on the visor with his stick.

Havlat had become frustrated over the referees’ failure to call any of four hooking infractions that could easily have been called against Recchi or his Philadelphia teammate, John LeClair.

After that game, Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock said of Havlat: “Someday, somebody’s going to make that guy eat his lunch.”

Clearly, in both incidents, bounties were placed on the heads of NHL players and, in both cases, those bounties were collected. The threats were public and widely reported and they came well before the resulting fiascos. But the league chose to do nothing. It levied no fines, called no rabble-rousing coaches to account.

Granted, after the Bertuzzi incident, the league fined the Canucks organization $250,000 because, according to NHL vice-president Colin Campbell, “we did not feel the Canucks turned the temperature down on the situation.”

Too little, some say, and maybe that’s true. But it was too late for sure, and that’s why the NHL is licking its wounds today.

From 1963 until 1971, John Bowie Ferguson was “the heavyweight champion of the NHL.” The Montreal Canadiens’ left-winger was a fearless 5-foot-11, 190-pound bodyguard for the likes of Boom Boom Geoffrion, Henri Richard, Jean Beliveau, Yvon Cournoyer and Jacques Lemaire. By the end of his career he had also developed into a pretty solid hockey player, scoring 29 goals in 1968-69 and playing in the NHL All-Star Game in 1965 and 1967.

Ferguson, now 65 and a special consultant to the general manager of the San Jose Sharks, watched Monday night’s game on television from his home in Windsor, Ont.

“Hockey is a violent game — we know that. It always has been,” Ferguson said. “But there is a code of honour in the game and Bertuzzi did the most dishonourable thing — he punched a player from behind. As soon as it happened, I said to myself, ‘He’s going to be suspended for a long, long time.’

“What he did was wrong, but while people scream we should ban fighting, I think it’s important to point out that what Bertuzzi did had nothing to do with fighting.

“The problem with violence in hockey is not fighting, but the cheap shot and the terrible stickwork. We have to get stick violations out of the game.”

Ferguson argues that when fighting is a set piece between two tough guys in the heat of a particularly aggressive game — the usual circumstance — it can release tensions and defuse ugly situations.

“And fights seldom, if ever, result in injuries, let alone serious injuries,” he added.

“But what happened in Vancouver and the results of what happened in Philadelphia were disturbing for one reason: There were bounties on the heads of two players and the league did nothing to stop it. I remember bounties being placed on the heads of players in only two other times in my life — when New York Rangers president Bill Jennings put a bounty on the head of Boston’s Ted Green, and when Eddie Shore, coaching in Springfield of the American League, put a bounty on the head of Cleveland’s Aldo Guidolin. But those were the only two other times in my life, in 45 years of pro hockey. And here we have two bounties in two weeks.

“That’s a problem and the NHL has to do something about it.”

On the other end of the violence scale from Ferguson is sports psychologist Dr. Cal Botterill of the University if Winnipeg.

Botterill was a star junior player in the 1960s who often had to ride the bus into one of the most violent hockey towns on the planet — Flin Flon.

There, Flin Flon Bombers coach and GM Paddy Ginell had created the toughest, nastiest atmosphere in the game. It was so frightening that players would get a case of what was called the “Flin Flon flu,” and be too sick to get on the northbound bus.

That’s the atmosphere in which Botterill played and that’s why he admits he discouraged both of his children from playing.

“You can see that did a lot of good,” Botterill saidd yesterday.

His 6-foot-4, 220-pound son Jason has played for four National Hockey League teams and is currently in the AHL. His daughter Jennifer, a Harvard graduate (like Steve Moore), is an Olympic ice hockey gold medallist, a Canadian national team member and a former player of the year in U.S. women’s college hockey.

“I didn’t want either of them to play,” Cal Botterill said. “The game is almost unreasonably violent. As a parent, you’re scared every day they play.

“And don’t think women’s hockey is any different than men’s hockey. I wrote a letter to the NCAA after Jennifer graduated to tell them they’d better police their sport or it will turn out just like the men’s game. It’s going down the same road. If they don’t start calling infractions in the women’s game with much more authority, there will soon be far more thugs in women’s hockey than talented players.”

Money’s partly to blame. As Vancouver’s Mike Keane, an NHL veteran who came out of Winnipeg’s Monarchs and Blues programs said: “If a player makes $50,000 in the American Hockey League and $500,000 in the NHL, he’s going to do whatever it takes to stay in the NHL. If a coach says, ‘Go out there and hurt that guy,’ chances are good a fringe player or a young player will go. If it makes the difference between $50,000 and $500,000 a year, he’d be crazy not to.”

For another thing, there is the equipment. Underneath their colourful uniforms, NHL players look like knights in armour.

Decked out in lightweight, space-age padding, the players are covered from head to toe in hard plastic. Wearing it, a player feels invulnerable and his opponent, armoured the same way, looks like nothing could hurt him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Able to hit harder, they hurt and get hurt like never before.

The NHL currently has the longest injury list in the history of the game and, for the first time in decades, many of the players on that list are the game’s stars. Right now, it includes Detroit’s Robert Lang, New York’s Eric Lindros and Pavel Bure, Los Angeles Kings star Zigmund Palffy, St. Louis’s Al MacInnis, Montreal’s Alexei Kovalev and Philadelphia’s Jeremy Roenick.

“I’d been working on my sticks and I walked into the dressing room and (Pierre) Turgeon was reading a list of players,” Dallas Stars centre Stu Barnes said the other day. “I thought it was the list of players who had been added to the All-Star Game, but then I found out it was the NHL injury list. It was scary.”

“The game is being played on the same ice surface we played on in the 1960s,” Ferguson said. “But today I’d be a small player. There are players in this league who are huge and they work out with professional trainers and on state-of-the-art apparatus 12 months of the year. The Maple Leafs have seven guys over 35 who are big, strong and in perfect condition. I was too old at 32.

“Not only are the players bigger and faster today, but their equipment is lightweight, rock-solid and can be used as a weapon.”

“We don’t wear equipment, we wear weapons,” said former NHL defenceman Grant Ledyard. “Our elbow pads could kill somebody. There is no fear, because when you look at our equipment, there appears to be no need to be afraid.”

Poor officiating aggravates the problem. Ever since the league went to the two-referee system, it’s become apparent that there aren’t enough quality, experienced officials to go around. Too many rule infractions are ignored or let go. Too often, that means the players mete out their own rough justice.

Had the officials called just one of four hooks on Havlat, he almost certainly would not have hit Recchi with the two-hander.

In the hit that injured Naslund, Moore should have been called for interference. A two-minute penalty would have been at least an acknowledgement that something outside the rules had taken place and there would have been no need for revenge.

Hockey is the only sport, boxing aside, in which fighting is allowed. It’s penalized, yes, but it’s also institutionalized. Rule 56 of the NHL’s Official Rules, outlines all the ways in which “fisticuffs” are a part of the game.

While it certainly can be argued that fighting is an integral cultural aspect of the game of hockey, it can also be argued that violence simply begets violence and therefore a deliberate violent act has no place in the pastimes of a civilized society.

After all, Canadian hockey fans are wild about the World Junior Hockey Championship and international hockey almost never has fights.

Granted, a Russia-Czech or Russia-Finland international match can often deteriorate into a stick-swinging war, but that’s more a result of historical international events manifesting themselves on the ice than of pure hockey violence.

The past eight days have shown the NHL that it has a credibility problem. In Canada, where the game is revered no matter its warts, the Bertuzzi incident will be debated to death for now and then all but forgotten when the playoffs roll around in April.

But in the United States, where the league is still trying to make inroads into wealthy but non-traditional markets, the game has taken a serious hit.

Here’s yesterday’s USA Today:

“Hockey is a complete joke, with sucker punches for punch lines,” wrote the paper’s Ian O’Connor. “It is a cartoon sport with a cult following that cheers from the fringe of relevance. Vince McMahon will become commissioner of the NFL before the NHL is accepted into the American mainstream, at least an NHL so violent and gruesome it could make Mel Gibson flinch.”

The NHL has to change its image and therefore it may have to change its nature, especially if it wants acceptance in the world’s ultimate sports market, the U.S.A.

How the league ultimately responds to the Bertuzzi and the Ottawa-Philadelphia incidents will go a long way to determining if it has a real future as a major-league sport.

scott.taylor@freepress.mb.ca