As the story has grown, more and more non-hockey fans have been chiming in to voice their opinion on the Todd Bertuzzi cheap shot that broke Steve Moore's neck during Vancouver's 9-2 loss to Colorado Monday night. The sports pundits who never bother with hockey unless something like this happens have decided that Monday's turn of events, as well as McSorley's stick to the head of Brashear, is case in point proof for why the NHL should have a zero tolerance policy on fighting. Such pundits seem to think that cheap shots happen because of a sports culture where fighting is not only tolerated, but part of the game, and think that if fighting went the way of the dodo bird, cheap shots would as well.
Lets think this thing over. Bertuzzi's hit on Moore was a premeditated retaliation for a perfectly legal open ice hit that Moore leveled on Vancouver's captain, Markus Naslund, last month. The hit, while legal, resulted in a concussion for Naslund, causing him to miss three games. Traditionally, if your teammate gets knocked out of a game because they were injured by a check, the response is to fight the player who delivered that check. The problem is dealt with then and there, and that's that. However, with the advent of the Instigator Rule in the NHL, if a player instigates a fight, the fighting penalty is increased, making the marginal cost of fighting too great. This means that instead of standing up for your injured teammate in that game, if you are going to retaliate, you do so like Bertuzzi did Monday night--with a cheap shot. Nobody expected the cheap shot to break Moore's neck, but make no mistake, it was completely intentional, and Bertuzzi was just the messenger. If it hadn't been him, someone else would have delivered the retaliatory hit on Moore.
This brings me to the second reason why fighting is appropriate as a policing mechanism. Bertuzzi would have never delivered the cheap shot on Moore if he had expected to get beat up by the Avalanche if he did. That kind of hit is just asking to get beat up, but with the instigator rule, players can go around whacking people in the head with a stick like McSorley did, or slamming people's heads into the ice like Bertuzzi, and do it all without the fear of retribution.
A little fighting goes a long way, and the fear of retribution is a powerful motivator, raising the opportunity cost of a dirty hit. Doing away with the instigator rule and thus lowering the opportunity cost of fighting would go a long way toward cleaning up the game. There's a reason why dirty hits have been on the rise in recent years, and that reason is that the instigator rule removed a powerful disincentive agaist dirty cheap shots. If the NHL is serious about protecting players, the only options I see are either making it non-contact like women's hockey, or else doing away with the instigator rule to let players police the game themselves. As it is, checking without disincentive for dirty hits is a recipie for disaster. I for one would rather the game go back to the way it used to be played, with good clean hits, and fighting when necessary in order to keep it that way.
Posted by kathryn at Marzo 11, 2004 02:08 AM | TrackBackBut what is it about hockey that creates these problems in the first place? There are lots of contact sports that do not have a problem with fighting near this bad. Football involves much more contact than hockey, albeit at lower speeds, but fighting is remarkably rare.
Posted by: Matthew at Marzo 11, 2004 02:42 PMI don't watch Hokey but could before I would ever view NASCARR! Enjoy your writing, I mis Football, March Madness I guess I will go with Gonzaga University I think is how you spell it. Go guys and gals.
Posted by: Tony Campbell at Marzo 11, 2004 04:08 PMMatthew, fighting is, to some extent, part of the game of hockey (it doesn't happen with nearly the frequency that most non-hockey fans think it does, though). I don't know why fighting became part of the game, but it has been for as long as anybody can remember. Unlike fights in other sports, fighting in hockey isn't really about individual anger or hurt feelings, it's more of a team thing. If two players go at it in football, it's because one player got his feelings hurt by something the other guy did, and they fight for individualistic reasons. In hockey, most of the time fighting is a team thing. For example, if the team feels like their superstar isn't getting enough respect and is getting hit too much, a teammate may start a fight to say "hey, this is our house, and we aren't going to let our guy take a beating like that." So, it's really a way to keep the checking clean and to make sure that your guys aren't taking too much of a physical beating.
Fighting is part of the game, but hits like the one the other night aren't.
Posted by: kathryn at Marzo 12, 2004 01:09 AMThis "self policing" sounds a lot like the Mafia.
So they are fighting to prevent unnecessary roughness? I get it, but I am not persuaded that it is an adequate justification. The fact that it is a team thing does not make it any more palatable to me.
Posted by: Matthew at Marzo 12, 2004 03:11 AMMatthew, here's an example of when fighting is appropriate.
My sister played inline hockey on a highschool guy's team. Inline hockey is supposed to be non-contact (meaning, no checking), and is that way for the safety of the players--inline players don't wear shoulder pads, and additionally, because of the pace of the game, it can be more dangerous than checking in ice. Anyway, despite the fact that it's supposed to be non-contact, guys on opposing teams would play "check the girl," and more often than not, it wouldn't get called, for whatever reason. Most players would quit when they discovered she wouldn't back down and was as tough as anybody out there, but in one particular game, there was a guy who checked her several times (which, as I said, is pretty dangerous in inline). The general protocol in that situation, since it wasn't getting called and the reason it was happening was basically a lack of respect, would be for the player who was getting hit to drop their gloves and start fighting. If she had started a fight, I can guarantee you that nobody would have tried to play "check the girl" with her again. But, in the highschool league, the rules were that fighting got you immediately ejected from the game, which would have hurt the team. So, instead of dropping the gloves, when the guy checked her one too many times, she hauled back and slashed him across the shins with her stick. After that, she got the respect she deserved, along with a 2 minute slashing penalty. Thing is, slashing, which she had to resort to because of the fighting rules, is potentially far more dangerous than fighting, and hitting someone with a hockey stick could cause serious injury, depending on what part of the body is hit. You can debate whether or not she should have slashed the guy, but the fact is, as a 5'6" girl, the only way to get respect in a game like hockey is to not only be able to play, but to be tough, and to show everyone how tough you are. It would have been far safer though for her to drop the gloves and start punching, but when the choice is ejection or a 2 minute minor, you go with the 2 minute minor.
Posted by: kathryn at Marzo 18, 2004 05:15 AMPlease tell me that your sister Rebekah is the "hockey slasher" mentioned above :)
Posted by: andy at Marzo 25, 2004 12:59 AMone and the same :-)
Posted by: kathryn at Marzo 25, 2004 07:16 PMHa ha... that is great! I had no idea she was so friggin' tough! :)
Posted by: andy at Marzo 26, 2004 04:03 AMJust don't get on her bad side in a hockey game :)
When she started playing hockey, very few people thought she'd last, because they'd look at her and think she was quiet and demure all the time. My brother's rec league coach tried to discourage her from moving from rec league to the highschool league because "those highschool boys are pretty tough," and she was quite thrilled to see his jaw drop when she ran into him some months later and told him who she was playing for.
Posted by: kathryn at Marzo 31, 2004 03:47 AMI play for a no contact team PE-WEE. My town has both non contact and contact PEE-WEE. On contact teama kids have gotten hurt already like one boy got a bloody nose from a check from behind, one other kid got a concashion. I think that checking is dangerous at times. Our town has a gentlemens leage. My dad was a coach of one of
the teams, but he quit because of the figths. He was the coach for 18 years. When he stared there were bearly any fights. Then the last 3 years they have been fighing like dumes. So now my dads coaches novices thats non-checking.
The funny thing is though, in all of my brother's years of playing hockey (allegedly non-contact inline, but there was an awful lot of contact going on) he never once got hurt, but playing Ultimate Frisbee he ended up with a herniated disk in his back. He and an opponent were both jumping for the frisbee, and the other guy, who was probably 70-80 pounds heavier, came down and landed on my brother's back.
Posted by: kathryn at Diciembre 9, 2004 02:21 AM