by Chris Bodenner
A reader pivots off the football debate:
Something that hasn't been brought up yet, probably because the sport has a much smaller audience in the US, is the way in which the NHL has dealt with head injury and brain damage issues. Hockey, like football, involves large men colliding with each other intentionally at a very high rate of speed. Hockey, unlike football, also involves the occasional bare knuckle brawl between two (or more) players on the ice. Because of the nature of the game, malicious hits are far more obvious than in football, and the fisticuffs are front and center.
"Enforcers," or guys who are on a team primarily for their fighting skills and not their grace with the puck, are on every pro team, and their job is to protect star players from "dirty" hits, which the refs often can't see. They protect players by fighting other enforcers (who often aren't even the ones who perpetrated the hits). Last summer, there was a rash of tragic deaths involving current and former NHL enforcers.
Two active players committed suicide. One active player died of an alcohol and prescription drug overdose. He had come to rely on the pills over the course of his career to ease his anxiety and pain due to fighting. Another retired player died at 45 of a heart attack. The Times did an excellent series on Derek Boogaard, the young man who overdosed, examining the complexity of being an enforcer in the game of hockey, also going in depth about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy's effect on the brain. The deaths left the community of players, fans, and franchises reeling as they happened in such rapid succession.
The NHL this season has taken some steps to make the game safer. First, it has ramped up its efforts to punish dirty hits. With the use of video technology, questionable hits are reviewed by a league office headed by a former NHL tough guy named Brendan Shanahan (though he was not himself an enforcer, it should be made clear). There are now stringent financial penalties for illegal hits, due to multi-game suspensions. Hits to the head or where one "launches," leaving the ice to launch oneself at an opposing player, are the most strictly penalized.
Second, they have become much stricter about players being able to return to the ice after suffering a concussion. Concussions are extremely frequent in hockey. Anyone who follows the game knows that players of all levels of ability and toughness routinely miss long stretches of games with concussions.
Third, they've tried to breed a culture where the game is more about skill and grace that brute toughness, although this runs counter to what many see as the game's roots. This is an especially big issue in Canada, where hockey and national identity are so intertwined that elements of the game have become major political issues.
As a fan of both games, I have to say that while the fixes have not been perfect, I'm much impressed by the NHL's tackling of these issues head on. To some extent, they were forced to by the rash of surprising deaths of players, but there has been real soul-searching not just by the league, but by the community at large. An older generation who really prized fighting and hard hitting and "getting your bell rung" as just a part of the game is giving way to a younger generation that is looking for a better balance between speed, finesse, and brute strength. They will soon eliminate fights out of junior hockey leagues. (I, like I imagine you do, cannot believe it has taken this long to outlaw fighting at a level of the game played primarily by teenagers, but it goes to show how entrenched theses institutions are.)
The NFL, by contrast, has merely paid lip service to the damage being done by the game, while still trying to exploit their players for larger profits. They have debated adding two more games to the regular season, which would definitely increase head injuries by extending an already grueling season. They have instituted rules to protect star players, like quarterbacks, from getting hit and injured while doing nothing to examine the players whose bodies bear the real cost – the linemen.
Until NFL fans start mobilizing to push back the way NHL fans have done, I fear that the only thing that will change the league's position is a rash of tragic deaths like there have been in hockey. I hope it doesn't come to that.
But what about reforming the most superfluous form of violence tolerated on the ice – fighting?
Yet Gary Bettman, the N.H.L.’s commissioner, refuses to take the natural and necessary we-can’t-have-this step for his sport: banning fighting. Fighting is not the only source of brain damage in the game—but it is an inevitable one. … No sane argument can be made that fighting contributes anything of value to the sport. The proof, definitive, is that both Olympic hockey and women’s hockey are played without any fighting at all, and delight far more than the N.H.L’s ever-more corrupted form of play. The great Hall of Famer Ken Dryden has called for a ban on fighting…
The Dish 