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One death on the ice is too many
After the recent death of Port Perry’s Don Sanderson as a result of a fight in a hockey game, the ongoing debate over the place of pugilism in hockey has been vigorously renewed.
Defenders of fighting in the game say the death resulted from a freak accident resulting from the loss of a helmet, that a death has not occured from a hockey fight for more than a century. And sure enough, the response of the Ontario Hockey Association was not to review the role of fighting, which the Association said is heavily penalized already, but to call for more stringent regulations on how to secure helmets.
Certainly helmets need to be secure. Players who slide into the boards or are crunched into the metal of the net need to be protected. But in the Sanderson case, the helmet is surely a side issue. If Sanderson and his opponent hadn’t been fighting, the headgear wouldn’t have come off, and Sanderson would still be playing.
There is no denying that bodily contact, along with the speed at which it occurs, is one of the great attractions of our national sport. Compared with hockey, most other sports move at a glacial pace.We would contend, however, that fighting severely detracts from the speed and
excitement of the game. So often, a game will be moving along at a sizzling pace, replete with breathless end-to-end action, great shooting, passing and defensive play, when all of a sudden two clowns who possess very few other skills bring everything to a grinding halt by indulging in a slow dance around the ice, mostly clutching at each other’s sweaters, but occasionally taking a punch at the other player’s helmet. BORING.
If you like boxing, it’s a sad imitation, but it also makes a mockery of hockey. So it severely detracts from the attractiveness of the game, but it also brutalizes it. It may seldom result in death, but we would like to see the statistics on crippling injuries, brain damage or other career-ending results. At least boxers wear gloves; hockey players drop theirs as soon as they begin to fight. Hockey fight fans point out that there is fighting in other sports. True, but in those sports fighting is a rare spectacle. In hockey, it’s institutionalized and expected. In no other sport is a general manager expected to take several million dollars from his annual budget for a player or players whose sole purpose is to physically intimidate the other team’s skill players. In Uxbridge, we are fortunate enough to watch dozens of exciting hockey games each week which don’t even allow contact, much less fighting. But we’re not advocating a ban on contact; a clean, hard, clever check is a beautiful thing to behold. What we are advocating are much more severe penalties for fighting. We’re talking immediate ejection from the game, and suspension from the remainder of the season after a third offense.
When a young man dies as a result of a hockey fight, we should be reminded that
fighting isn’t just a joke, it’s lethal. It puts hockey on a level with bear baiting. And that’s a shame for such a beautiful game.
