A Gladiator Culture Without Brutality

As a society, we seem to speak out of both side of our mouths when it comes to the often contradictory desire for civilized and safe sportsmanship in our athletic competitions and our appetite for intense physical battle. It's the same contradiction that we see when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell takes a hard line on potentially brain damaging hits to the head in an attempt to curtail an epidemic of football players and veterans developing debilitating neurological disorders, while they simultaneously hawk videos such as "NFL's Greatest Hits" depicting football players getting smashed and crushed with a background of heavy metal music.

Those of us who love sports love the intensity of the competition, but something that I've never understood is the insistence of some "hockey purists" that fighting should continue to be "part of the game", which means that those who fight are given token "in game" penalties as opposed to lengthy multi-game suspensions as they would in major sports (yes, I'm deliberately excluding hockey as a major sport) such as baseball, football and basketball. Here are three of the stupid arguments which are often used, gleaned from a quick search of pro-fighting articles.

1) It's part of the game. One pundit equated fighting in hockey to sacking the quarterback. This is clearly a false comparison. Sacking a quarterback in football changes the field of play by loss of yardage and down. Fighting is neither prevents goals or score goals, unless the hypothesis is that a legitimate strategy should be to beat up the best scorer on the other team. Really?

2) It's part of the tradition. Another pundit equated it to hazing rookies and other time-honored traditions. Other time-honored traditions in sports included not using helmets and padding and playing outdoors on top of ponds, but shouldn't the game evolve as our society becomes more enlightened?

3) Self-policing is most effective. So they best way to regulate fighting is to supposedly sent another "goon" out to the ice to beat the crap out of the opponent who instigated the first fight? The problem is, neither team can really agree on "who started it", leading to escalating beatdowns that lead to people getting hurt.

And that's the thing that drives me nuts about hockey. Marty McSorely swings his stick and hits Donald Brashear in the head, Todd Bertuzzi sucker punches Steve Moore from behind and crushes him on ths ice, and most recently, Brent Johnson lays down fellow goaltender Rick DiPietro with a single punch - each incident landing the victim in the hospital and forcing them significant amounts of time. What can you say about a sport in which somebody can, outside of the rules, physically harm a co-worker and disable them from physically doing their job, without any more repercussions than getting suspended for the day? For most of us, such conduct would lead to immediate termination. For the NHL, you've just summed up a job description.

In the McSorely and Bertuzzi incidents, criminal assault files were actually filed. But what does it say about a league which creates an atmosphere were workers can routinely incapacitate other workers with head and brain injuries with many of these incidents bordering on criminal assault? I like competitiveness in sports, but it seems to me that a humane society can live without the vicious beatdowns.