Maybe this is better suited for GQ, but I don’t know if there is a factual answer to this. For those not familiar with the situation, Clemson college football players have been seen on TV grabbing/poking the opposing team’s players’ genitals during football games. Here are some clips:
There have been a few civil lawsuits, alleging assault and battery, in professional sports, when one player goes well beyond the boundaries. I can’t cite any, and I don’t know if any such suit has ever won.
(ISTR that a baseball player sued a pitcher for a deliberate bean-ball.)
(Hm… Maybe not; there’s a Supreme Court ruling – Avila vs. Cirtus Community College District, where they said getting hit by a beanball is “an inherent risk of the sport.” There’s also apparently NLB rules saying you can’t sue.)
It’s long last time for athletes to have some form of immunity from criminal assault charges. I would love to see local police come in and arrest entire hockey teams that get into brawls, which in my life seem to have become an “expected” part of the game.
Personally, I thought Bertuzzi and the Vancouver coach should have been charged with conspiracy to commit assault. The evidence seemed pretty clear that they went into that game planning a revenge hit.
Hockey seems to picked up a few of these. They are the most egregious assaults I can recall in sports. And it’s better now than it used to be. Philadelphia’s Broad Street Bullies got their name in the 70s after deliberately loading their roster with tough men after being physically beaten by the old NHL veterans on other teams.
Football has quite a checkered history also. I recall some NFL player mentioning that unspeakable acts occurred in scrums to recover a loose ball. (A scrum being what you get when you knock the OT out of a scrotum). The sport was nearly banned more than once in it’s early history and I doubt any contact sport has as big a list of career ending injuries and deaths. The days of the Flying Wedge may be long over but attempts to knock quarterbacks out of games and retaliatory hits still exist.
If you stab someone in your local bar, you’ll do ten years in prison … stab someone in a hockey game, you’ll do five minutes in the penalty box … what a game !!!
I’ve heard hockey has gotten less violent recently, but I stopped watching years ago. I used to think it was a beautiful, even elegant, sport, but it just got too ugly. I had no interest in gang boxing.
At rugby union in the UK there was an epidemic of “bag snatching” many years ago. It ended when any player who got a reputation for it could expect to have a broken bone or two put him out of the game for months. Collar bones proved to be especially vulnerable,
