By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
Demonstrating again his stranglehold on the obvious, National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman said the other night in Tampa that he will not be engaging Penguins owner Mario Lemieux in any further debate on the fighting issue or the discipline issue.
Really.
Lemieux is more likely to frequent a karaoke bar than debate anything publicly. He said his piece to the relevant factotums, and that is that.
But that doesn't mean the NHL can plan on a long-term future in which fighting maintains its dubious status as one of the game's essential entertainment elements. Cooler heads with bigger brains eventually will rid the league of its fistic profile, and don't be surprised if that political effort isn't led by the Penguins.
For the moment, however, we're again in this rhetorical hockey ditch where people are trying to explain why such things as assault and battery are somehow impossible to disentangle from the game's heavy historical fabric.
Trouble is, we're really overcomplicating it.
Just as a matter of taste, in the interest of full disclosure, I've always been generally OK with situations where players are battling for the puck, become frustrated, and sometimes fail to control the competitive instinct to lash out, especially in a league where the fist is an honored tool. When on-ice officials arrive at this kind of scene and immediately try to separate the combatants, if a punch or two lands, I can attribute that to the game's great passion.
But that's not the answer to why fighting exists.
The answer to that is, because the NHL wants it to exist.
Otherwise, you would not see two players squared off, their gloves on the ice, and not three but now four officials standing around waiting for some mysteriously prescribed number of permissible punches to land.
Could you maybe step between these guys?
Some nights, I think they're waiting for a ring card girl.
In the HBO series 24/7, the exquisite four-episode look at the Penguins, the Washington Capitals, and the Winter Classic, part of the early game footage shows a fight involving Penguins forward Arron Asham. As Asham comes out of the corner to engage his opponent, the referee actually moves the net from its moorings and instructs the other players in the vicinity to give the assailants room.
That is the National Hockey League, in the person of the official, clearing ice for boxing. Not figuratively, literally. If the league didn't want fighting, how could that happen?
Obviously, there are penalties for fighting, but they are clearly not deterrents. Micheal Haley, the minor league pit bull unleashed on the Penguins on Long Island last weekend, put up a rap sheet that read:
Roughing.
Fighting.
Fighting.
Instigating.
Misconduct.
Fighting.
And he was still in the game in third period.
The problem is, Haley had been prosecuted to the fullest extent of NHL law, the fullest extent being three five-minute fighting majors. By contrast, Penguins enforcer Eric Godard was automatically suspended by 10 games for leaving the bench because Rule 70.11 states that a player can't do that to engage in an altercation.
Well, there's an idea. Maybe there should be some rules regarding the other stuff. I know why the NHL is apparently serious about not wanting players leaving the bench. They might break up a fight.
The NHL needs completely overhauled protocols for discipline when it comes to fighting, unless it is perfectly fine with television ratings that still settle somewhere between soccer and auto racing.
Someone in the league office has to have noticed that, in the so-called major sports, players who punch people are immediately ejected and/or suspended, not sent to a neutral corner for five minutes again and again and again.
Research has shown that American audiences, which represent the majority of the still considerable potential to grow the game, are not only intolerant of the fighting, but confused as to the ethos of hockey fights and retribution, the so-called code. They don't want to be excluded. They want things in black and white. They want rules that make up the law of the game. In this aspect, there is too much gray in the NHL.
All of which makes for an interesting if tedious cultural tug-of-war.
In Canada, the game was not diminished by an ounce as a result of the Penguins-Islanders mayhem, because the NHL's popularity virtually saturates the landscape. Similar was the nonexistent impact on the popularity of the NFL owing to James Harrison's escapades last fall.
But Canadian teams now constitute only 20 percent of the league. If the game is going to grow, and there are progressives in the other 80 percent who'll demand that it grows, it has to grow clean. No head-hunting. No head hits. No fighting.
It's not just time to grow, it's time to grow up.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11051/1126421-61.stm#ixzz1EWQYTiKt
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