Apparently I’ve been terribly naive about professional hockey.
I was under the impression that little boys with natural talent and parents who are willing to get up on frosty mornings and drive them to far away arenas, practiced their little hearts out and the best of them made it to the big league. And sometimes those boys got into fights because, well, fighting is a part of hockey.
After reading a fascinating series in the New York Times I now see that there’s another set of little boys who grow up to be very big and very strong. They might not be very good players or even excellent skaters but they make it to the NHL to become enforcers. And they are only there to fight.
The Times series centres on Derek Boogaard, the 28 year old player who died accidentally in May at the age of 28 from a mix of painkillers and booze. Tests have just been completed on Boogaard’s brain and it showed advanced signs of a condition similar to Alzheimer’s. It meant he was likely to have experienced early onset dementia, if he had lived. He had taken countless hits to the head and suffered several concussions.
His job was to fight, pure and simple. He wasn’t a very good skater, by all accounts, and he scored something like 2 goals in five years. But when a wrong against a star player needed to be set right, or a player on an opposing team needed to be taken out, Boogaard was the guy they sent in. His hands were wrecked from throwing so many hard punches. His knuckles would get forced back to his wrists and have to be pulled back in place. He had shoulder surgery and back problems and neck issues and was constantly in pain. He was being prescribed heavy-duty painkillers by several doctors and popping them like Tic-Tacs. Did I mention he wasn’t yet 30?
The NHL’s official line is that they police fights in hockey by putting penalties on players. They say there is no will among players, fans, sponsors or the league to prevent fights altogether. When players fight, fans jump to their feet and scream with glee. It’s all “part of the game”.
I don’t watch NHL hockey. Sometimes we go to a London Knights game where it’s teenagers playing and they move fast and play hard. I don’t remember seeing a fight but apparently the OHL is rife with violence, too. Derek Boorgaard wasn’t a good enough player to be in the NHL, at least, not in the way I thought it worked. And if he had been judged on his skills, aside from fighting, he would probably still be alive today, and without brain damage and ruined hands. It’s barbaric, Canada’s game.