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Tilting at windmills vs. the Great Canadian Hockey Fight Ritual
Perceptions by Gerry Warner
Here I go tilting at windmills again, but when you love something, you’ve got to try.
On March 8, I was in the stands at the Kootenay ICE/Regina Pats game and the whistle blew setting the stage for a few minutes of ugliness cheered lustily by what appeared to be all the fans in attendance except possibly me.
An ICE player and a Regina player dropped their sticks, ripped their gloves off and began circling each other amidst the melee of other players on the ice. What was about to begin was the Great Canadian Hockey Fight Ritual – a bare-knuckle, consensual fight in which they would attempt to batter each other’s brains out and the referees on the ice would help them to do it much to the delight of the fans in attendance.
For you gentler souls, who do not attend hockey regularly, there is not a shred of exaggeration in what I’m about to describe.
The referees ordered all the other players to their respective benches for the spectacle about to take place. The players dutifully complied because they and thousands of hockey fans from coast to coast know the script for the mayhem about to follow and they love it. Apparently that’s the kind of people hockey fans are.
Meanwhile the two combatants circled each other at a distance and one appeared somewhat wary, moving his closed fists erratically as he glared at his possibly more experienced opponent who was eager to rumble. And the referees, who could have easily stepped in at this point and denied the crowd its bloodletting? Well, I can’t say they waved them on, but they started to back away, which was as good as a wave, and just the signal the hyped up players were waiting for.
And then it was on.
Now you have to understand something about hockey fights. Unlike professional boxing, there are no Marquis of Queensbury rules. Anything goes. It’s much more like cage fighting except hockey pugilists don’t have any martial arts skills. They just flail away at each other while standing on skates sharp as razors on an ice surface as hard as concrete and very slippery. It isn’t pretty. In fact, it’s downright dangerous and can even be fatal as was the case in 2008 of Whitby Dunlops player Don Sanderson, 21, a kinesiology student at York University, who tragically died Jan. 2, 2009 three weeks after a brief skirmish with another player in the Ontario senior league.
“Both players fell and Sanderson struck his head on the ice. He was out cold briefly, regained consciousness, then fell into a coma,” is how the Toronto Star reported the story Jan. 3. During the brawl, both players lost their helmets as was the case in the Cranbrook punch-up that has the ICE player on the injury list for two weeks with an “upper-body injury” (concussion?) according to the team’s web page.
Yes, that’s what 2,200 ICE fans were cheering for like crazed Romans in the coliseum when the Regina player threw a wild overhand punch that caught the ICE player flush in the face crumpling him to the ice face-first like a deflated balloon. I’m not naming the players because it would only cause embarrassment though frankly I think it’s the crowd that should feel embarrassed. Mind you, maybe some of them did because the hush that fell on the crowd was almost audible as they watched the blood ooze out on the ice below the injured player’s face. It took game officials more than a minute to scrape the congealed blood off the ice and into a pan for disposal.
Lovely!
Then the game continued. The ICE won and all was right with the world. Or was it? I expressed my disgust with some fans after the game and was told that fights, regardless of which way they go, are necessary to “tune up” the opposition when they’re “pushing our boys around.” Or they are necessary to “fire up” the home team when they’re behind in a game or as a player from the opposing team said after Sanderson died: “If two guys want to drop the gloves, it’s totally up to them.”
But is it? Is this just “part of the game’ as so many fans insist? And more to the point, why do hockey officials willingly allow – indeed set the stage – for consensual fights between players?
I adamantly don’t think they should and I’ve filed a protest with the Western Hockey League against the potentially fatal scrap March 8. I’ll keep you posted. But in the meantime, what do you think? Am I, indeed, tilting at windmills?
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who played two years of minor hockey years ago, and is now a Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.
