The question is prompted by this article . It seems silly for one player to sue another player for sucker punching in a game characterized by assault and battery.
My question is, why is this violence so widespread and (to an extent) tolerated in hockey, as opposed to other sports? Isn’t the sport violent enough without resorting to fisticuffs? Football is pretty violent, but you generally don’t see fistfights. I’ve seen interviews with hockey captains where they more or less said it was part of their jobs to start fights now and then (he called it “showing leadership”).
As a life-long hockey fan, I stand by my assertion that hockey will ***never ***be taken seriously as a sport in the US until they ban outright fighting.
No other professional league tolerates it, and it makes the NHL come off as bush league.
The answer to your question is actually simple. It’s widespread because it’s tolerated (in the NHL anyway). That’s it. There are actually a level of players whose sole job it is to get into fights (not usually the team captain, btw… “enforcers” they’re called). Sometimes it’s to intimidate the other team, sometimes it’s to protect the finesse players from injury and sometimes it’s for no other rreason than to get the fans “into” the game.
Quite frankly, if you need to have a fight on the ice to get the fans to cheer, your on-ice product sucks to begin with -but that’s a whole different rant. :dubious:
I thought that ice hockey was something to fill in the time between the punch-ups. Like real tennis is what you play while working out what the score is.
I suspect the level of violence may have something to do with the ease and force with which you can run into someone while on skates. I just have a feeling that from the earliest times in hockey (before fighting was well-established as “part of the game”), players would run into one another, and would be taken up for having done so intentionally, whether or not they actually did so. Since it’s a highly competitive sport, with big burly players keyed up to a great extent to begin with, you can see how this would easily lead to fights, especially since every player is armed with a stick.
As to why it’s tolerated? Obviously because people like it well enought that they keep watching. If the market weren’t there, pro hockey players wouldn’t be allowed to fight.
It’s part of the mystique of the game, and there are plenty of fans who like seeing a fight.
In addition, it is a sport where people crash into each other, creating bad will. And the referee can’t see every time this happens. (The NHL used to have only referee in a game; the rules now indicate one or two, so the next game I see I’ll have to see if that’s every game or just playoff games). With only one official able to call penalties (the linesmen can only call a handful of penalties, none of which involve player interaction), illegal actions can easily be missed. The referee is naturally concentrating on action around the puck, so you can do a lot of things if the puck isn’t near you and get away with it.
This leads to tempers flaring and fights breaking out. The first step toward reducing them would to simply allow the linesmen to call minor penalties.
It’s an interesting contrast to football. The NFL is also a contact sport, but there are very few fights. They also have a lot more officials on the field, and each official has a small but specifically defined area they watch. If you try something against the rules, you get penalized, and this prevents most blowups.
I agree with Oy! (Ake!). I think it was a result of the fact that violent collisions happen when skating on ice with 11 other people, most of whom are chasing after a puck the size of a buscuit. Eventually, this led to fisticuffs, and over time the fights just became part of the game. I also agree with RumMunkey that hockey won’t be taken seriously until it’s banned and the banning enforced.
I’ve played hockey my whole life. There are 2 major contributors to the fighting. First you are told from day 1 to go flat out as hard as you can for a 90 second shift. You have to get yourself psyched up for that. You skates touch that ice and it’s huge adrenaline rush. In that 90 seconds you are likely to be hit 3-4 times sometimes hard and clean. Others not so clean (elbows up). It’s very hard to control that rush. Most of the time I can use it to give me that extra umph to get an advantage but other times it gets the best of me.
The second thing is the culture of hockey. You have to prove how tough you are in order to make it. If you’ve ever been around hockey players you know this. Everybody has got their story. I’ve seen guys get hit in the face with a puck lose teeth (called spitting chicklets) and not miss a shift. Early in 1 game I got slashed on the hand. Broke 2 bones. I wrapped it in duct tape and finished the game scoring 2 goals. Yeah I paid for it later but I gained the respect of every one there.
You combine these things which are ground into your head from day 1 and you get fights. That being said the leagues could get rid of it with fines and suspenions like the other sports and the game would be better off by forcing the players to use that energy for scoring goals.
I’d class hockey as my favorite professional sport. My wife plays hockey (she’s a goalie). It seems to me that the violence of other sports is rising (e.g., basketball and the Pistons/Pacers flair-up, baseball and the fans who jumped the ump, etc.) and that violence in hockey is falling (that’s my impression, anyway). That’s not to say hockey isn’t more violent at this time than other sports, just that the level of violence in sports is getting closer.
At any rate, I think one major difference between hockey and football is the pace. I’ve described hockey as “controlled chaos”; there’s almost never a break. Football, on the other hand, is structured such that there’s a play, then a pause, then a play, then a pause, etc. (It really takes away from the game, IMO, not that it could be changed). The dynamic nature of hockey is inherently less controllable. I don’t think more refs would change anything; I think it’d take a shift in the players’ actions. Because “enforcers” are so beneficial, I don’t see that happening, though.
Hockey is a great game when done right. My wife and I used to drive from West LA to the downtown Sports Arena by the Los Angles Colosseum to watch the old LA Blades hockey games. The sport is rough and there is contact, checking opponents into the boards, etc. but there was little fighting.
The NHL has ruined the game’s appeal for me by not throwing out thugs who don’t play hockey but rather engage in something else which interrupts the game. I wouldn’t go even as far as my own front yard to watch an NHL game.
Synchronized swimming is really physically demanding as well. It’s still effeminate, or at least perceived as such. Think about it, the only other popular spectator ice-skating sport is figure-skating, which is incredibly effeminate. Hockey has to be violent to distance itself from figure-skating.
It’s a bit like war. Now, if I were to sneak up on you in your pillbox, shove the end of my flame-thrower into the window, engulf you in flames, and then leave you to die in agony of third-degree burns, that’s OK. However, if I take you back to my campe and roast you alive on a spit, that’s not OK. Rules are rules. Get it?
I think the answer is entirely cultural. Why? Because people play the exact same sport in Europe and the game is far less violent. I believe the rinks are a bit larger and it’s more of a skaters’ game, and fighting and various other hits are far less tolerated. If the extra violence were instrinsic to playing the sport period, I’d expect that to be true in other parts of the world too. Perhaps in pick-up games in Russia and Sweden things get brutal, but it doesn’t seem to be tolerated as much in the leagues.
There’s probably something in the manly-man frontier cultures of rural Canada and the US where hockey’s popular which accounts for the difference.
Note also that hockey’s the only one of the 4 major team sports (the least of the 4 far and away) in the US without a national network TV deal; each team pretty much makes its own arrangements, and the games have traditionally been carried on UHF channels in between kung fu flicks, Munsters reruns and ginsu knife commercials. (There may be a few little pockets of the country like Minnesota, Michigan and parts of New England where there’s a more mainstream popularity, but this is a minority and they’ve been moving the teams south to chase general popualtion). The NHL, probably correctly, sees itself as counterprogramming, not competing so much with the other better established leagues. And they figure their viewers want punch-ups. If earnings drop enough I wouldn’t be surprised if they added clown make up and tazers.
There are players in the nhl now that serve no other purpose but to fight. They are encouraged to pick a fight at an opportune time in order to get the other players going. Kinda like, “He’s willing to put his body on the line like that. The least I can do is give it all I’ve got.” It works sometimes. Some of the best hockey comes directly after a fight. Everybody is fired up. Other times it deteriorates to an all out brawl. This is when the league has to step in and start fining and suspending. Repeat offenders need to be severely punished ie suspended for long periods of time. One fight happens they get the box. If a second happens we get into fines and suspensions. This keeps the fight happy fans happy but prevents an all out brawl.
It is part of the culture though. Legends of the game such as Gordie Howe and Cam Neely were known for their fighting as well as their hockey skills. Now it has been separted. You have skill players and enforcers. Until the GMs, owners and coaches stop putting these enforcers on the ice the fighting won’t stop. It’s their job after all.
As a matter of fact, the NHL has taken drastic steps, and as a result there has been a 100% decrease in the amount of violence in all NHL games played this season.
