Hockey Need Not Be A Blood Sport
From his wheelchair, Travis Roy watched Mitch Vig skate. Once upon a time, Roy, a quadriplegic, could skate like that.
But on Oct. 20, 1995, in his first varsity game as a freshman forward for Boston University, Roy crashed headfirst into the boards at Walter Brown Arena in Boston and did not get up. He had shattered the fourth vertebra in his neck.
His team was playing North Dakota, and 19-year-old Roy had just finished checking Vig, a defenseman for the Fighting Sioux, before losing his balance.
“It was an accident. That’s all,” Roy has said many times since.
The other day, at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee, North Dakota defeated Boston U. for the national collegiate championship. Vig was skating for the victors and Roy was watching. He was the undergraduate in the wheelchair at the mezzanine level.
He and Vig had a friendly chat the day before. As he has said many times, “It was an accident. That’s all.”
Accident or not, there is too much violence in hockey at every level - from peewees to juniors, from college to the National Hockey League.
Little can be done about the pros because fighting has long been a marketing arm of pro games.
Following the recent bloodbath between the Colorado Avalanche and the Detroit Red Wings, one in which goalies Patrick Roy and Mike Vernon opened facial wounds upon one another, commentator Stan Fischler wrote:
“The hits and the punches provide a pungency that has made hockey special for more than a century. I say leave the game alone.”
At the intercollegiate level, however, something ought to be done. That was the consensus among coaches and officials at the championships in Milwaukee.
There is an equipment dilemma, however. Most coaches claim that mandatory face masks have given the skaters a feeling of protection - so they throw their bodies around indiscriminately.
They swing their sticks high and deliver checks from behind without fear of wounding retaliation.
Red Berenson, the Michigan coach and a former NHL player, claims that hitting from behind was unknown in college hockey before adoption of the mask a decade ago.
Jack Parker of Boston U. says the plastic full mask limits views from the side. “Kids get blindsided all the time. We have people in wheelchairs, and that’s because of face masks.”
Yet the face masks remain because no one wants to go back to the days when hockey players were distinguished by facial scars and lack of teeth.
Also, says Parker, there are “the lawyers.”
“Besides,” adds Charles Holden, coordinator of hockey officials for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, “if you take the face masks off tomorrow, that doesn’t mean automatically the sticks are going to come down.”
High sticking amounts to waving the sticks near opponents’ faces. Holden and other NCAA supervisors constantly urge their referees to assess penalties for high sticking and for checking from behind, too.
Some referees do more often than others. If they call too many penalties, the referees will say, then the coaches get angry and give them bad marks in their reviews.
At Milwaukee, members of the Dartmouth and Michigan teams in the first championship game were back to help celebrate this 50th one.
Some wince at the big hits in the semifinal match between Boston U. and Michigan.
“That’s not the way we played the game,” says 74-year-old Bob Amirault, one-time Dartmouth center and retired IBM executive.
“I want to see plays, not hits,” says Bill Cleary, the former Harvard coach and player who is now athletic director there.
Cleary, who was voted to the 50th anniversary all-time team, is often outspoken about the turn his favorite sport has taken. “Concussions,” he says, “too many concussions.”
Statistics are hard to come by, but there is a perception that teen-age and even pre-teen hockey players are being knocked down too frequently.
Ken Hanson of Colorado Springs, a former college player and now a junior team coach, says he believes there were more than a dozen concussions this season in a program of about 250 players.
When kids put on their armor, plus the face mask, and then step on the ice, he says, it is more likely they will seek out another skater to bang into rather than learn the fundamentals of stick handling.
Hockey reflects the violence in our society. Too often, a televised hockey highlight focuses not on the perfect transition pass to set up a goal, but rather on two guys without the puck colliding to prove how tough they are. This noble sport deserves better.
xxxx