Long Wants Stiff Penalty For Attacker

Maybe this time hockey will get it, though that’s a sentiment sodden with naive trust.

When it comes to crime and punishment and hockey, the rare flash of reason is almost always extinguished quickly, with plenty of ash but no embers.

Not that we’re suggesting Jesse Boulerice burn for this one.

But his victim, Andrew Long, can at least allow himself to imagine the consoling properties of being the poster child for hockey getting it right.

Just this once.

Today, Long’s Guelph Storm teammates open their run at winning the Memorial Cup against Portland. Long’s contribution will be restricted to the emotional, though he could set a Cup record for most miles logged on a stationary bike.

A little skating and a little conditioning are all Long is up to since an April 17 onice assault left him with a concussion, three broken facial bones, a fat lip, two black eyes and 20 stitches - and a growing void.

“It’s taken away the biggest opportunity of my life,” Long said. “That’s the biggest thing. It’s not even the pain or the soreness. It’s the fact that I can’t play here - for no good reason.”

He can’t play because in Game 4 of Guelph’s sweep of Plymouth in the Ontario Hockey League semifinals, Boulerice - a 19-year-old defenseman from Plattsburgh, N.Y. - took a baseball grip on his stick and slashed it across Long’s face in an act Guelph coach George Burnett insists was more cold malice than hot temper.

“He’s a rugged, physical hockey player,” Burnett said of Boulerice, “and we expect that, but this is far beyond being a tough, rugged player. This in not right. I’ve never seen anything like this in a game. It would be among those hits that would be deemed the worst in the game.”

If not for a videotape he watched at the OHL hearing into the incident, the moment would remain a mystery to Long.

“I was right behind the net, playing position on Boulerice,” he said, “and the next thing I knew, I was screaming in an ambulance. Then I woke up in a hospital with a neck brace on.

“It was about midnight and the first thing I asked was if we won the game. The second was, ‘What the heck happened?”’

The tape told him. As action moved the other way, Boulerice looked at Long, then at the referee, and then clubbed the Guelph center viciously.

“It was disgusting to look at,” Long said. “I didn’t realize until I saw it that the intent was so high. He really had time to think about it - it wasn’t a reaction thing.”

Even more mystifying to Long was the fact that the players “had no history. I never made eye contact with him, never even talked to him. I’ve hardly been on the ice against him. I do my hits and I get in a couple of fights a year, but that’s it. I’m not a chirper, I just play the game.”

Not anymore. Doctors have ordered Long to avoid contact for three months. A fifth-round draft choice of the NHL’s Florida Panthers in 1996 who has signed, Long’s rehabilitation will basically take him up to training camp.

In the meantime, Boulerice’s career - he’s a Philadelphia Flyers draft choice who signed with their American Hockey League affiliate - is on hold under different circumstances.

The OHL quite properly suspended Boulerice for a year, though it’s a toothless penalty. Unless an OHL team wants to bring him back as an overage player, his junior days are over anyway.

The AHL, to this point, has not committed to honoring the OHL suspension.

So it’s possible that Boulerice’s time will total exactly two periods.

This is light even by hockey standards. In the NHL, hardened toughs get at least a couple games off for crimes described in league reports as “deliberate intent to injure.”

The notion of an eye for an eye is problematic - and easily dismissed by the pros, who have considerable capital tied up in thugs. But if, say, Phoenix’s Rick Tocchet takes a knee to Edmonton’s Ryan Smyth and knocks him out for six weeks - and does it again to Detroit’s Steve Yzerman days later - what possible deterrent is there in a two-game suspension?

The hockey answer? Goons will be goons.

In the same vein, hockeycrats can probably come up with dozens of reasons why a suspension like the OHL levied against Boulerice can’t automatically be recognized in any North American league.

Just let them explain it to Andrew Long.

“If he doesn’t have to pay for something like this, there’s something wrong,” said Long, who is aware that justice may have to come outside of hockey.

Bright and candid, Long will admit that his toughest rehabilitation from this ugliness will be mental - trying not to flinch the first time he sees a stick carried high. He appreciated Boulerice’s attempts to apologize, but understood that “he probably had to do something like that.”

But that’s about all he understands.

“Something just wasn’t working there,” he said of Boulerice’s slash. “You give a guy a chop to the shin pad or try and knock a stick. You can throw checks, tough body checks. If he wanted to kick the crap out of me, fine, no problem, do your best. But to do that …

“It’s not ‘Why me?’ anymore. It’s just ‘Why?’ period. It’s so outside the boundaries of the game. It’s not hockey.”

No, it’s not. Maybe this time, hockey will get it.