Not a hockey fan myself, but in all the fight footage I’ve seen, the refs circle the combatants like hawks and wait until they spill to the ice (or, rarely, until someone lands a KO punch) to separate them. This is the polar opposite of most other sports fights I’ve seen, where teammates and refs dive in to separate the fights almost before they start.
So, is fighting sanctioned by hockey rules? Is it just a “culture” thing where fighting is acceptable in hockey?
Fighting is against the rules. I don’t think refs diving in to separate fighters is a good idea, they are under no obligation to put themselves at risk of injury.
The way to stop fighting completely is to stop treating fighting as a “boys will be boys” penalty and instead give fighters game misconducts and in egregious cases multi-game or even season suspensions. Y’know, like what happens in other sports. In most sports a player who starts a fight gets kicked out right away and usually for more than one game. No player is going to risk their career by fighting if they actually faced serious consequences.
So, why doesn’t this happen in hockey? Because the powers that be believe that fans enjoy a certain amount of fighting, that it sells tickets. They may be right or wrong in this belief, but in any case, they’ve decided that fighting should not be a serious offense, the players know this, and respond accordingly. Fighting in hockey would stop overnight if players got a multi-game suspension for fighting.
Watch this
ALL THE WAY THROUGH
Cite? A Google search turns up nothing.
Fighting’s part of hockey mainly because it always has been and the NHL isn’t interesting in changing it. Fighting is also part of lacrosse (which deliberately apes hockey) but not part of football, which is just as violent; that it’s part of hockey and lacrosse but not football is purely because the history of those sports led football to bad fighting outright, and didn’t lead hockey and lacrosse to do so. Fighting used to be a part of baseball, basketball and Aussie rules football and was banned from those sports as well.
Hockey could get rid of fighting in two weeks with no ill effects if it wanted to. But it doesn’t, so it doesn’t. It’s part of the sport’s history and appeal.
One of the ongoing debates around this centers around what the effect of banning fighting would be. The traditional Canadian answer is that existing fans would be turned off by hockey without fighting. The progressive answer is that fighting turns away potential U.S. fans, so banning it would bring new fans aboard.
Personally I think both arguments are absurd. There’s simply no way devoted hockey fans in Canada of the U.S. hockey hotspots will turn away from hockey because it stips having 0.8 fights a game or whatever it’s down to now; it’s telling that we love hockey now as much as we did 30 years ago when the NHL had more than twice as many fights. On the other hand, I think it’s nuts to pretend that the arenas in Nashville and Ft. Lauderdale will swell with new fans saying “Gosh, I never was interested in this unusual Canadian sport played by nobody I have ever known, because it had too much violence, and as an American I hate seeing violence in the media and would never watch a violent movie or TV show or a good NASCAR wreck, but now that fighting is banned, I raced to the arena as quickly as possible!”
The other argument, of course, is that high sticking will increase if fighting is banned. I’ve never understood why anyone would say that when players in the old days were so famous for high sticking each other, and anyway even if it is true you can immediately solve that problem by requiring players to wear full face shields.
Hockey folk are convinced that eliminating fighting is eliminating sefl policing, and that the consequnces will be lost eyes and other career ending injuries as the players use their sticks and other surprise tactics to exact retribution.
(Please don’t shoot me, the messenger).
In a hockey fight, both parties are willing participants. When revenge is extracted during play, it is dangerous and often brutal.
Don Cherry is Canada’s drunken, loud uncle with no fashion sense. Taking him as a representative of anything but the stupidest fans is misguided.
It is also part of marketing. I remember that our local minor hockey league team acquired a new defender. He had a major write up in our local newspaper. The angle of the whole article wasn’t his athletic prowess. The whole angle was about how mean and crazy he was and that he was an enforcer. Somebody bumped too rough one his team mates, he was supposed to pay back in kind. :rolleyes: As long as the owners allow it and the players let it go…fighting will continue.
True. In fact, I believe that international hockey has barely if any fighting. They decided to ban it long ago, and it isn’t really part of the culture of the international game. (Does anyone know if there used to be fights in non-North American hockey, and if so, when it was eliminated?)
Now that’s something Don Cherry would whine about! 
Emphesis mine.
I don’t entirely agree. Having played both hockey and football, I can say I have never been tempted to take a swing a someone during a football game, but I have playing hockey. It’s not because of the violence, its the nature of the game. Football is played on a larger field, with generally half the players trying to get away from the other half. In hockey, all the players are going after the puck, sticks and elbows flying. It’s easy to get carried away.
I’m not trying to justify it, and I agree that hockey’s ‘powers that be’ could easily stop it if they wanted to, but I can see why it happens.
Nothing to add, just a quick note that most hockey videogames (from a few years back, when I cared about sports videogames) included fights and you even controlled the fight on some of them. I say that makes it part of the culture.
Better yet, in the classic NES game Blades of Steel, regardless of who started a fight, the loser of the fight was sent to the penalty box. I always thought that was hilarious, getting penalized for having your ass kicked.
Best hockey game ever. If for no other reason.
That’s true, but it’s also the product of a hundred years of the evolution of those sports. Football, in its infancy, had terrible brawls on a regular basis. Baseball in the first few decades of professional player was extremely violent - right up into the early 20th century it wasn’t unusual for players to fight each other, fans, and/or umpires, and sometimes a combination of those at the same time.
Consider basketball, which like hockey involves players all going after the ball and bumping the elbowing each other. I can tell you it’s a sport that can make you REALLY pissed off. And the NBA did in fact used to have a lot of fights. But after “The Punch,” there was a concerted effort to get rid of it.
The fighting issue in hockey cannot reach a consensus, it can only be decided by siding with one opinion in the argument.
On the surface, fighting is stupid, unnecessary and detracts from the game. Then, if you play and watch the sport long enough you start to waver in the other direction. There are a lot of players that don’t fight and a lot of coaches that teach skills that don’t want fighting eliminated. They feel that it maintains a level of self enforcement that protects the more skilled players from cheap shots and opponents that intend to injure. The referees can’t see and penalize everything so there is that unstated level of enforcement that actually does serve a purpose.
People tend to think that fights are instantanious. That is not usually the case. A lot of stuff builds up to it that often goes unnoticed. The camera only catches the grappling.
If you can get some college coaches to talk (where fighting is not tolerated) they would tell you that they would love to have an enforcer that could help protect their more skilled players. They get sick and frustrated at some of the liberties that some player take knowing that nobody is going to exact any justice.
It’s a tough issue. Yes, it could be eliminated but would it make the game better and attact more interest? Probably not. Does it look stupid to someone that has never really watched or played the game? Yes. Who’s right and who’s wrong? It’s tough to say.
P.S. This is not to excuse leagues like the AHL that require a fight within the first 10 minutes of the game in order to draw and satify the drunks in the stands.
Part of the nature of hockey is that the play is continuous and physical. Basketball is continuous, but not nearly as physical. In football, play stops constantly, allowing the players’ tempers to cool down.
In hockey you can have a ‘pest’ shadowing you, elbowing you, nattering in your ear about your wife, tripping you up, and generally making your life miserable in a very personal way. Tempers fray. Fights start. It’s not unreasonable to say that if you made the punishment for fighting severe, players would be goaded to even higher levels where they do something really dangerous like take a run at a play and board him, or cross-check him in the head. So I think it might be fair to say that fighting might be a valuable escape valve. At least, it’s not an absurd proposition on its face.
The other argument hockey fans make is that having ‘enforcers’ protects the smaller skilled players, allowing them to use more of their skill and keeping them safe from the kind of abuse and wear-and-tear from hits that ends careers early. So it’s all about giving the skilled players room to do the exciting goal scoring and passing, and the fighting/enforcing aspect of it adds a completely new dimension to the game that the fans like. It’s not just the fight - it’s the thrill of seeing your enforcer stand up for your favorite skilled player when someone takes a cheap shot at him.
But anyway, why shouldn’t there be fighting? Boxing is nothing but fighting. Martial arts combines grace and skill with fighting. Why shouldn’t hockey? Is there some golden rule of sport that says fighting must always be removed from it, unless fighting is all you’re doing?
I read an anecdote that it was “acceptable” as long as there were only two players involved and they had their helmets and gloves off, any truth to this?
I’m not a hockey fan but I attended a local WHL game once. A fight broke out and the arena staff killed the lights and two spotlights were focused on the players and the music switched to the “Eye of the Tiger” intro. You know, “Duh…Duh, Da, Duh…Duh, Da, Duh…Duh, Da, Duuuuuuuuuh…” :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Hockey suxs.
Take your eye-rolling and shove it where the sun dont shine; hockey rules. I’m not an expert on the game, but I fully support Sam Stone’s post.
Relax, I was just being facetious.
Ah, my apologies. I’m a little punch-drunk at the moment and I let my emotions get the better of me. My bad :smack: