Has fighting become outdated?

DALLAS — Debate about the role of violent play in hockey is older than the NHL.

It resurfaced this year after a fist-fest between Philadelphia and Ottawa on March 5 resulted in an NHL-record 419 penalty minutes. It intensified after Vancouver star Todd Bertuzzi attacked Colorado rookie Steve Moore on March 8.

The criticism usually fades with time. Fans have consistently delivered a message that they like fighting and hard hitting.

But the debate over safety in the sport has continued in Canada even during the playoffs, when fights are usually mothballed because each victory is so important.

Last month, Canada’s national Globe and Mail newspaper called on the NHL to ban fighting as part of a four-part editorial aimed at “saving” the league.

Friday, the American Hockey League suspended Hamilton forward Alexander Perezhogin through next season for slamming his stick into the face of a Cleveland player April 30. It’s the longest suspension in the AHL’s 68-year history.

And national hockey icon Ken Dryden told a recent symposium the game “is at risk of becoming an extreme sport” and it needs “a complete, ambitious and fundamental review.”

Some who call for the elimination of fighting and overly violent play – hockey’s tree huggers, their critics say – believe the environment is unique for change.

“For the first time in my life, they’re seriously questioning the whole notion of how the game is played,” said Roy MacGregor, author of some of Canada’s most popular hockey books.

Bertuzzi’s suspension through the Stanley Cup playoffs was accompanied by an unusual $250,000 fine to the Canucks. In a league in which “sending a message” can be a motivation for fisticuffs, the fine’s message was just as forceful: Team management was being held responsible for Bertuzzi’s act.

Major penalties for fighting have decreased greatly since their peak in the early 1980s, but the number is up 30 percent from when they bottomed out at one a game four seasons ago.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, staring down the possibility that a work stoppage will cut down or eliminate the 2004-05 season, said recently he’ll appoint a special committee to examine increased fighting, among other issues, this summer.

“We need to talk about it,” he said.

Bettman said media debate about fighting has far exceeded discussion of it in the league office, where it’s noted that almost 60 percent of NHL games this season were fight-free.

Said Bruce Hamilton of Kelowna, executive of the year last season in Canada’s major junior Western Hockey League: “I don’t think … (Dryden’s opinion) is necessarily the opinion of everybody that’s in the game.”

Most who support fighting in the sport cite two main points. One is a sort of hockey infinity – “It’s always been part of the game.” They also say it prevents other, more serious injuries that would be caused by frustrated players using their sticks instead of their knuckles to exact revenge.

Dallas Stars president Jim Lites counts himself among that group, though he said it shouldn’t be labeled as pro-fighting.

“It’s more being not anti-fighting,” said Lites, a part of NHL management since 1982. “The game would lose its edge. If our game loses its edge, it loses that which defines it.”

NHL leadership has long held that fighting is part of the game’s fan appeal. According to Canadian author Lawrence Scanlan’s 2002 book on hockey fighting called “Grace Under Fire,” former Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe said of fighting during the 1950s: “We’ve got to stamp out this sort of thing or people are going to keep on buying tickets.”

NHL fan Barry April has followed hockey in Vancouver since before the Canucks entered the league in 1970. He believes fighting has a part in the sport.

“The media just gets globbed out on it,” said April, 52, a sales representative. “Actually, all of the better safety gear added through the years has kind of backfired and led to looser play with sticks.”

Susan Milne, a 43-year-old human resource manager, has attended Canucks home games frequently during the last 25 years and has done a little unscientific research of her own on fighting. Her conclusion: “When a fight breaks out, I think I’m the only person that doesn’t stand up. To be honest, I just don’t like it.”

The majority of NHL players past and present haven’t publicly questioned fighting’s place. Dave “Tiger” Williams, the Hank Aaron of NHL career penalty minutes, once said: “You consent to assault when you lace up your skates. It’s what hockey is all about.”

Then there is Toronto’s Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie who helped Montreal win six Stanley Cups during the 1970s. In his talk at the symposium in New Brunswick, he attacked the argument that practices such as fighting or finishing checks should remain because they have always been part of the game. Changes even for safety’s sake haven’t always been readily accepted. Before most skaters wore helmets, Minnesota’s Bill Masterton died in January 1968 when his bare head struck the ice. It was 12 seasons later that helmets were made mandatory, and the new rule applied only to incoming players.

According to The Hockey News, 31.9 percent of NHL players wore visors this season, up from 14.2 percent in 1995-96.

Tony Curtale, general manager of the Texas Tornado Tier II Junior A team in Frisco, said he doesn’t understand why hard checking isn’t appreciated as a skill. He compared it to the combination of timing, speed and force found in football pass plays.

“You have to learn to catch in traffic, or else you’re not a great wide receiver,” said Curtale. “… Peter Forsberg’s the best player in the league because he has skill and can play in traffic.”

William McMurtry, a Toronto lawyer, recommended the elimination of NHL fighting 30 years ago in a government report on youth hockey violence in Ontario. He said he doesn’t understand why hockey justifies venting frustration in a manner different from other highly physical sports.

“I played rugby,” said McMurtry, 69. “It’s a tougher game. After the whistle goes, you don’t start shoving somebody. You don’t think you get a bit annoyed and it’s a bit passionate and emotional?”

Over the years, the NHL has added rules intended to curb fighting. In 1971, the “third-man-in rule” meant a third player inviting himself into a fight was ejected for the rest of the game. A 1986 rule change mandated a 10-game suspension for any player who left the bench to join a fight – eliminating bench-clearing brawls.

In 1992, the “instigator rule” assessed additional penalties to a player judged to have started a fight with an opponent who didn’t want to scrap.

Hockey’s on-ice hierarchy includes a few players on each team who do most of the fighting. Among the most benign descriptions for them are “enforcers” or “policemen.” The more unflattering would be “goons.”

Georges Laraque is Edmonton’s peacekeeper and said he fills the role reluctantly.

“I don’t enjoy it at all,” Laraque said. “It’s part of my job, and that’s all it is. I don’t even like to talk about it. I just do it.”

Adam Oates said he never did it in a 19-year NHL career that ended last month. But Oates – who scored 341 career goals and never had more than 45 penalty minutes in a season – supports fighting.

“I don’t think you need to be in a fight if you choose not to,” Oates said, “but I do think it’s needed. I don’t think the game is out of hand. But when you get one incident or another, the public perception changes.”

Enforcers are often the most popular players in the league. Toronto’s Tie Domi endorses numerous products on Canadian TV. Many Dallas fans cheer a little louder when Stars alumnus Shane Churla appears on the American Airlines Center video screen during a collage of fights and hard hits called “NHL Classics.” Churla led the NHL in penalty minutes during the Stars’ first two seasons in Dallas.

Interwoven into fighting’s place is an acceptance of an unwritten “code.” It deals with retribution, sending messages and protecting certain players, usually top scorers. The closest thing to it in other sports is baseball’s version of revenge: a pitch, and I’ll plunk one of yours.

The hockey code can be hard to understand, according to a former NHL player who has researched the sport during more than 20 years as a college history professor.

“Players don’t exactly know what specific situation they’re in, how it relates,” said Morris Mott, a professor at Brandon (Manitoba) University. He played for the old California Golden Seals during the mid-1970s. “And that’s what happened in this Bertuzzi thing. The Vancouver people were operating on some kind of revenge code, and I don’t think Colorado could understand what was going on in their minds.”

Bertuzzi was suspended for the balance of the season and all of the playoffs. Vancouver was upset in the first round, and Markus Naslund said afterward the suspension hurt the team’s focus.

The incident was a payback for Moore’s hit on Naslund, Vancouver’s captain, in a game on Feb. 16. Naslund was leading the league in scoring and was lost for three games with a concussion and hyperextended elbow. No penalty was called, and no discipline was meted out by Colin Campbell, the NHL’s sergeant at arms.

Two aspects of the Bertuzzi debate are particularly worth noting: 1.) Some NHL people said the incident wasn’t a fight, and Moore probably would have fared better had he treated it as a fight and responded when Bertuzzi first approached him; 2.) Colorado coach Tony Granato was criticized in some corners for not providing Moore with a bodyguard, specifically tough guy Peter Worrell.

Fighting is a nonfactor during the Stanley Cup playoffs by choice and in international play by rule. Fighting in the Olympics and similar competitions results not in penalty box time but in suspension. In 1999, former NHL referee Bruce Hood published a book in which he noted: “People don’t miss … (fighting) in the Olympics, playoffs or world championships. Nobody would miss it in the NHL.”

Canucks defenseman Mattias Ohlund from Sweden was quoted in a 2000 British Columbia report on violence in youth hockey saying:

“You see fights (in European pro league play), but you don’t see players throwing their gloves away. If you do back home, you’re going to get suspended for a lot of games. We’ve never had it back home, so it’s nothing they miss.”

Fighting and physical play are different not only overseas but at lower levels of domestic hockey. Fighting is first allowed at the junior level, like the Western Hockey League (ages 15 to 21, which includes some NHL draftees); body checking is introduced at the pee-wee level (ages 11 and 12).

Chuck Blanaru is one of the people in Canadian hockey who hopes to change the NHL game by changing youth hockey.

He is president of the minor hockey association in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Last September, his league instituted a no-violence code that applies to players, coaches and spectators. The association offers alternative divisions without body checking and is stricter in its approach to fighting, checking and stickwork.

“I think people are looking for help,” said Blanaru, a lawyer. “It’s very difficult when the kids that we’re talking to turn on the TV and see their professional idols doing everything we told ‘em not to do.”