Well, there’s now two questions in this thread, the first being the OP’s question (Why is there fighting in hockey?) and a second (So does hockey need fighting?)
1. Why is there so much fighting in hockey?
Contrary to popular belief, sports are not getting more violent. They are in fact getting LESS violent, and almost every major sport has less outright fighting than it used to. Even hockey has fewer fights than it used to. Hockey has only about half as many fights as it did 30 years ago; the 1970s were hockey’s absolute peak of fighting major penalties, never equalled before or since. It’s telling that many people today who claim that fights reduce high sticking have as their formative years the time in hockey history when fights were at their highest. But hockey was certainly a very violent game prior to the 1970s, with lot of fights (as compared to today) and - contrary to what people opposing face protection will tell you - a LOT of high sticking and facial injuries.
That’s true of almost all sports. Baseball was an astoundingly violent sport for the first fity years or so of professional play, and up until the 1950s in-game fights were far, far more common than today. Football used to be far more violent than it is now, and basketball (despite what people would have you believe around the Ron Artest incident) used to be VASTLY more violent than it is now; the NBA began cracking down on fighting in the late 70s, after the Kermit Washington incident.
But hockey has retained the outright fighting that baseball more or less got rid of post-WWII, and that football and basketball banned long ago. This is in part due to three main factors:
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It’s codified. Hockey allows fighting to be punished in-game, rather than by ejections, because hockey codifies in-game punishments for physical transgressions; two minutes for this, five for that. Fighting simply slips into the same realm as hooking and elbowing.
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Hockey is a more marginal sport, and it’s just more DIFFERENT. Hockey, despite its pretensions to being a Big four sport, is a very separate thing; it absolutely requires a skill no other team sport does, it was historically played in different places, and it’s got a very different, focused fan base.
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Unlike any other major pro sport in the USA, hockey is played by men from another country - most of them from a small (population wise) country where hockey is of vast and deep cultural importance. While most hockey teams are in the United States, hockey players are from Canada (most of them, anyway.) The direction, style and and format of hockey is decided by Canadians, while the business direction of the NHL is primarily decided by Americans. It is difficult to explain to an American how important hockey is to Canadians; if you can imagine the USA having a sport with the same importance and cross-cultural connection of baseball, football, basketball and NASCAR combined, that’s what hockey is to Canada.
So hockey is separated from its own audience, and is nurtured and furthered along its evolutionary path in the small towns, house leagues and junior teams of a foreign, arctic country. It’s easier for hockey to choose its own path than it would be for baseball or football, because it’s separated from them.
Hockey has therefore continued on with fighting because the men who run the sport think it needs fighting, and there’s little societal pressure on them to stop it.
All sports have their weird conservative carryovers; in hockey, it’s fighting. Baseball teams actively prohibited their players from training with weights right up to the 1980s, based on a century-old and stupid belief that weight training makes you injury prone. Pro football still does not use professional referees.
2. Does hockey actually need this?
Of course not. It’s preposterous to think you have to have fighting in hockey, for any reason.
The problem with arguing that hockey needs fighting is that *most hockey leagues don’t have fighting. * Fighting in hockey is essentially unique to the NHL and its direct player development leagues. It is nearly unknown in college hockey, European hockey, or minor hockey. Most hockey in the world is played without fighting; it is North American arrogance, and ignorance of people who are unfamiliar with any hockey that doesn’t appear on Sportscentre, that fighting is a common element of hockey. If hockey can be played at the University of Minnesota or in Moogsblatto, Sweden without fighting, then it can be played in Edmonton and Detroit without fighting.
Now, there are two common arguments to support fighting; the less common is that eliminating fighting will reduce fan interest. I think that’s complete baloney inasmuch as most fans who like fighting aren’t even aware there is less fighting now than there used to be. I simply don’t believe for an instant that this will happen. So that’s that; I don’t know what else to say, and if you disagree, well, more power to ya.
Anyway, the most common argument is that fighting reduces other, less desirable types of violence, such as high sticking.
This is simply, flatly untrue. Nobody has ever demonstrated a correlation between fighting and high sticking penalties, or fighting and cheap knee hits, or fighting and any sort of penalty except fighting penalties. There IS limited evidence that high sticking has gone up in the last twenty years, but the reducing in fighting mostly predates this and in any event, high sticking wasn’t higher BEFORE the 1970s fighting peak. High sticking as also been blamed on the introduction of face protection in the minor system and college system; however, to be honest,
a. Since proper face protection essentially eliminates any risk of eye injury, so what? And,
b. The increase in high sticking is better correlated with the allowance of hooking, which causes sticks to be carried at waist level more often.
The notion that one thing must inevitably lead to another is a variation on what Bill James called the “perfect machine” theory, where the assumption is that the way the sport is played now represents a perfect balance of things can should never be changed.
Look, hockey is not something we discovered, like the atomic weight of antimony or the quadratic equation. Hockey is a sport, a human invention, and we can change the rules and the nature of the game at our leisure. If you want to get rid of fighting AND eliminate high sticking AND reduce facial injuries, just do four things:
i. Impose game misconducts and progressive suspensions for fighting.
ii. Impose major penalties for all high sticking, and game misconducts and suspensions for intential high sticking. Start calling it.
iii. Call all hooking penalties and cross checking penalties, which started not being called in the late 80s, so that the sticks will come down.
iv. Make players wear CSA approved face protection.
It’s within our grasp to change the sport.
As for the general notion that fighting regulates violence, I will just point this out; Steve Moore, the marked man, had already fought a Canucks player before he was assaulted. The in-game check and balance that all the fighting advocates SAY is supposed to happen had happened. Moore, who the Canucks thought had pulled a cheap shot, had been given a few knuckle sandwiches. So it was supposed to be over and done with. But what do you know; it’s bullshit. Bertuzzi, who has a long history of trying to injure people, attacked Moore anyway. The notion that fighting prevents injury by preventing cheap shots is simple nonsense.
