Last night during the Leafs/Canadiens game George Parros fell during a fight and suffered a very scary looking injury landing face first onto the ice. I want to start by wishing him a very speedy recovery. From what has been reported this morning it appears as though he did not break any bones but did in fact suffer a concussion.



Despite the fact that it is the vogue thing to do, I will not be taking this opportunity to crusade against fighting. I have not ever taken an anti-fighting stance and I likely never will, however every opinion is subject to change. For me though, I’m not interested in changing the culture of hockey to such a great degree that we alter the game completely.

Full disclosure, part of the reason I’m not keen on changing hockey or attacking the role of fighting in the game is because of my personal experience in University. I majored in Anthropology and then did my Masters in Archaeology and found that there were 2 basic types of people I dealt with on a daily basis. There were the students who were genuinely interested in how and why certain cultural groups functioned and behaved the way they did, and there were the crusaders. I hated the crusaders.

Crusaders were the people who always had a cause they needed to be in the middle of. This really irritated me because I always viewed the goal of an Anthropologist as one that records and attempts to understand groups, not change them. Anyway, that’s a glimpse into one of the reasons I cringe when journalists try to tell me that fighting needs to be banned from hockey.

We shouldn’t be asking IF fighting is relevant. It IS relevant. As per hockeyfights.com, last season there were 720 games played and 347 fights or 0.48 fights per game. The 2012-2013 season only lasted 100 days, which means on any given day we were likely to see almost 3.5 fights. In what world do we question the relevance of something that happens 3.5 times a day?

Fighting is relevant. It happens all the time in hockey. The players who willingly participate in the sport believe it should remain a part of the game. George Parros is Princeton educated. He isn’t some knuckle dragging meat head who cant do anything else, he certainly hasn’t objected to fighting in the game of hockey. Why are we so quick to tell Parros that fighting has no place in today’s NHL?

Instead of grandstanding about fighting and taking the bleeding heart moral high ground, why don’t we spend some time trying to understand why it exists? It is a part of the game of hockey. It has been around for as long as anyone can remember, there are unwritten yet universally understood rules about it. It has a role and it has an effect on the game that its players feel even though attempts to quantify it have proved less than fruitful. If that’s the case then perhaps the answer is too obvious, the effect that fighting has on the game is in large part psychological and will not show up in Corsi events or any other measurable form.

When players, writers, or fans talk about hockey fights they often bring up things like “Momentum” or “Having someone’s back”, not generating shots. These are not “real” things, they are perceived. Players have been conditioned and taught from a young age to feel a certain set of emotions before, during, and after a fight. How each individual responds to the fight is going to vary, but in general there is clearly a set of expectations that most hockey players seem to keep in line with. It’s the fans and writers who (sometimes) are not part of the initiated that will respond differently to the act of the fight itself.

For most of us, we are not a part of the culture of hockey the same way an NHL player is. We are a part of it, but a different part. That is why PJ Stock will flatly tell the audience that you have to play the game to understand it. He isn’t trying to tell you that because he doesn’t have a good reason to defend Fighting. He is telling you that because in order to fully grasp what fighting means to hockey you have to have grown up playing the game and share in the experience of playing at the game’s highest levels to have access to the emotions and nuances of the hockey fight.

The fact is that Fighting is a part of hockey and the players understand the risks involved. We are in a society that brings up CTE at every possible turn. If your hat is too small you’re probably going to hear about how it’s ruining your brain. There is no excuse for anyone, especially professional athletes, not to know about the risks involved with playing a collision sport that also sometimes features fighting. They are accepted and ignored at their own risk. I would much rather spend the next several years trying to understand why they do it than trying to convince them they’re wrong for doing it.

I see this as being our problem, not Hockey’s. Hockey doesn’t need to change. It’s fine. We, however, need to come to terms with some basic facts.

1) Hockey is more than a Contact sport. It is a Collision sport.
2) It is played at an incredibly fast rate of speed
3) The game of hockey is dangerous
4) Hockey is played with dangerous equipment
5) Hockey is played on a dangerous surface
6) Fighting is a part of the game
7) The professional athletes who play the game at its highest levels are fully aware of the dangers and in no way need us to save them

Accept that the game of hockey and everything that it entails is incredibly dangerous and people subject themselves to those risks purposefully and for extreme financial benefit largely to entertain others, or don’t. But, please, if you don't accept these things then at least attempt to understand why the players feel that fighting is such an important aspect of the game before you crusade against it.

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