by Ron MacLean
The lack of awareness on the ice is another big factor in players getting hurt. There is a false sense of security now. In the old days, you were constantly being tapped and hooked. You used to have tip-offs from an opponent’s stick that indicated you were in traffic. With the new crackdown on hooking, those signals are gone. Now, any contact between the stick and the body results in a penalty, so guys don’t do it anymore and the skater flows freely. And since he can’t use his stick on the puck carrier’s body, the forechecker has to make a hit. I agree with Brian Burke’s assertion that rather than plastering the defender, players should be allowed a limited amount of bear hugging or use of the free hand to guide him into boards.
By 2004 the hockey world was pretty much unanimous in the opinion that there was too much clutching and grabbing in hockey, which limited offence and stifled creativity. Rules were changed to promote scoring. Because nobody’s allowed to lay a stick on an opponent and nobody’s allowed to run interference, the players are flying at each other at unprecedented speed. And that has put hockey on a road to hell paved with good intentions. In my view, we have created a terrible element of risk.
Penguins GM Ray Shero responded to Sid’s hit with the remark that we should govern head shots the way we punish players for high sticks, whether careless or intended. And that is what happened. In June 2011, the NHL’s Competition Committee cleaned up Rule 48 at its Board of Governors meeting. A major penalty will be assessed in the case of “a lateral or blind-side hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principal point of contact.” But will it work? To borrow from a statement by Prime Minister Stephen Harper when confronted by ethical issues, “You have to change hearts, not laws.”
As a former referee, I prefer to change hearts. Rules tend not to grow the virtue in us. They curb crimes, so they serve a purpose, but in my view, new rules are not as effective as adjusting attitudes.
We now have two referees on the ice. One is always in the play down low—often in the way. It means another “moment of hesitation” for a defenceman who is already under pressure. If he shoots the puck over the glass, he’s penalized for delay of game, so he struggles to settle the puck down, making himself vulnerable. To corral the puck, he often has to keep his body between it and forecheckers, with his eyes down on the puck, which means his back is pointed at the danger. Guys come crashing in pretty hard, and if the hit is high at all, the defenceman’s neck and head have only one place to go—hard into the glass.
These changes in hockey are meant to increase entertainment for the fans. Let’s give them shootouts … let’s implement new rules to make the game faster. Speed is intoxicating. We see these guys going a hundred miles an hour and we think it’s more exciting. But is it? Wouldn’t a guy dipsy-doodling with great craft through a team be more exciting than a guy skating as fast as he can into the corner after chipping it in from the red line?
Perhaps we’ve taken away a bit of the playmaking because everything is happening at such a frenetic pace. It’s impossible to be in control of the puck the way players once were. So often a game turns into a predictable Ping-Pong match where guys make the “easy play.” Chipping it into the corner. Chipping it out on the glass. Back and forth.
A sport should evolve slowly. When you take a whole bunch of new rules and throw them at the wall, it changes the dynamic of the sport. And you set in motion the law of unintended consequences. One of which is concussions.
Maybe the biggest change in the NHL is the TV timeout. On October 17, 1991, I was covering an exhibition game at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, New York, between the Canadian and U.S. Olympic teams. CBS was also covering the game, and their director, Sandy Grossman, thought the idea of jamming eight 30-second commercials into each period was silly. So, that day we took four 70-second TV timeouts.
Not far away, in Pittsburgh, Scotty Bowman was salivating. He knew that if this format came to the NHL, Mario Lemieux could rest up enough during the timeouts to play an extra three or four minutes a night. The next year, the NHL adopted the new commercial format. It was soon modified to three 100-second timeouts.
I believe this change hurt the game. The stars are playing so much, they’re bound to get hurt, and the third and fourth lines play so little, they spend nearly the entire game watching from the bench, frothing at the mouth for ice time. It turns these players into time bombs. After fifty-five minutes on the bench, they aim to prove themselves. Their fights are terrifying now. You’ve got guys who are as big as six foot eight and 270 pounds launching bare-fisted grenades at somebody’s skull.
Years ago, to protect their star players, coaches started assigning bodyguards. Everyone was held accountable by the enforcers. Former Ottawa Senator Bill Huard dubbed them “hit men” or “gladiators.” Now, that player has seen his role reduced.
When Bill McCreary Jr. caught Wayne Gretzky with an open-ice hit on January 3, 1981, Dave Semenko was placed on Gretzky’s left wing. Gretzky stopped getting hit because Semenko would murder anyone who went after him. We’ve taken that out of the game in part because of the instigator penalty. But the disappearance of the enforcer is mostly a byproduct of TV timeouts because they limit the enforcer’s ice time. It’s too tempting to have your top six forwards play the bulk of the time and use the timeouts as rest periods. Consequently, the fighter has become obsolete. The enforcer no longer plays the role that he used to. It worked during Probert’s time, when the fighters played a huge role in protecting players like his star centre, Steve Yzerman. Today, who’s around to prevent Crosby from getting smoked?
Twenty-three years of reffing convinces me that the “threat” of a fight keeps everyone more honest. It’s interesting that, despite all these attempts to emphasize skill and scoring, hockey is still a rugged game. The Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup with the toughest team in the NHL.
For eleven years, beginning in the mid-seventies, my Hockey Night in Canada colleague Mike Milbury was a defenceman who could fight, but he was never really sold on fisticuffs. He’s totally convinced that the only reason we have fighting is for the spectacle. It’s a form of social policing.
The ice surface is too small. NHL rinks haven’t changed in eighty years, but there’s been an enormous change in the speed and size of the players. I like Finland’s experiment with a 200-by-94-foot rink, 9 feet wider than a regulation North American surface but not quite as big as Olympic ice.
I also believe the elimination of the red line for two-line passes was a mistake. It created the breakaway passes people expected, but it also created a way to ice the puck without getting a whistle in your end, by having a forward just across the centre line touch it on its way past. Hardly an exciting hockey play, but one you’ll see now maybe fifteen times a game. And that’s far more often than you’ll see a breakaway pass.
Most offence starts with a chip and chase, and once in the attacking zone the best option is to feed the point and have the defenceman shoot for a ricochet off either a forward stationed in the slot or one of the eight men clustered in front of the goalie. It’s a lot like table hockey.
Without the red line, forecheckers come in at full speed. If a defenceman like Calgary’s Mark Giordano or Chicago’s Duncan Keith goes back to get the puck, he’s taking his life in his hands. Remember that a puck can travel at least a hundred feet in one second. When the winger comes in that fast, he creams the defenceman.
In hockey at the moment, everything is about containment. Guys put their sticks in the passing lanes. It’s not aggressive at all. In game two of the 1987 Canada Cup, Wayne Gretzky had five assists, and on each of those he created the magic by throwing a little stick, jabbing, hooking and taking the puck. He didn’t sit back and wait for it. He didn’t say, “Let’s see … if I put my stick here, it’ll hit it and then I can take off.” Seeing guys do that today is not my cup of tea. It’s a way more passive game now, and yet the guys are flying around faster than ever—and killing one another. The speed is there, but scoring is up only h
alf a goal per game since the new rules came in.
Finally, the goal line is back to eleven feet from the endboards, versus thirteen feet at one time. Now the defenceman moves into an area the size of a phone booth behind the net, where visibility is extremely limited. The rule changes we’ve made recently are so stacked against that defenceman, it’s nearly impossible to play the game as it was meant to be played.
I understand that players with far greater credentials than mine are working tirelessly to make the game find the right mix. But my fear is that we go for offence at the expense of safety. The appearance of speed may come at a price that is just too high. Again, to quote U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, “Be careful not to admire the plumage and ignore the dying bird.”
36
SPORTS HAVE TO BE HONOURABLE
The city of Vancouver was Utopia for the sixteen days of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. And there was a joyous feeling during nine weeks of the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs. When I looked at the gatherings in the street of 100,000 or so, I thought, “Isn’t it grand?” But I also had to ask myself why 100,000 people would stand together to watch a hockey game on TV. And the ratings were crazy. Eighty per cent of all Canadians watching TV on June 14, 2011, were watching game seven of the Stanley Cup final. It was just amazing.
But after partying for eight hours in the sun, that crowd in the street saw their beloved team trounced. This was a team that had held a 3–2 stranglehold on the title, a team celebrating its fortieth anniversary, a team that for nineteen of its first twenty-one years endured losing seasons, a team now poised to return the Cup to Canada. That win would send a message to the Eastern media, which too often ignored them. It was payback for all those years when the coverage slighted Vancouver’s best—the Sedins, Roberto Luongo, Alex Burrows—and for insults like the time Brian Leetch beat Trevor Linden for the Calder Trophy. Suddenly, the bubble burst. And it ended in a riot. Sure, it was troublemakers who ignited the problem, but frustrated fans became cheap accomplices. They were easy to bail in the swirl of anger and alcohol.
We loved the Vancouver crowds at the Olympics, we loved them during the playoffs, and then, when they acted up one night, what? Our garbage doesn’t stink?
I think the reason people got upset is that they are proud Canadians. I’ve never believed in proud Canadians. I believe in grateful Canadians. Most of us have no choice about where we were born and raised. We are blessed, we are lucky. It was neither a black mark for Vancouver nor for Canada. It was human fallibility, nothing more. This notion that we are somehow better than the rest, thanks to this lucky twist of fate, has to stop.
We in the media ratchet up the tension and hype, and then when people snap under the weight of it all, we’re surprised. We are culpable. At the end of the Stanley Cup final, the CBC took out a full-page ad in The Globe and Mail with a picture of the Vancouver Canucks, saying, “Thanks for the ride.” No mention of Boston, who won the Cup. So it turns out it wasn’t Boston versus Vancouver, it was the United States versus Canada. But the players don’t play in that world. When we wrap ourselves in the flag this way, it becomes an isolating shield. This is why Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, frowned on medal standings. He thought there was no room for nationalism in sports.
Gary Bettman was booed mercilessly, and when he presented the Cup he had to duck water bottles and empty beer cups. Then the crowd broke out of booing Gary and started cheering Boston goaltender Tim Thomas as he stepped up to receive the Conn Smythe Trophy. Later, while interviewing him on the ice, I asked him if it felt good to be cheered after all that booing. And instead of revelling in that moment, he said, “You know, Roberto Luongo, he’s a great goaltender, and I have nothing against him.” Luongo had opened a can of worms during the playoffs by saying he’d pumped Thomas’s tires and complaining that it hadn’t been reciprocated. And the fans jumped on Luongo for it. And here was Thomas, stopping right in the middle of celebrating to ease Luongo’s pain. That is hockey. That’s sports. Winning is so elusive. The minute you win, you just feel … relief. The real reaction is to think of the other side—”Those poor pricks. I’ve been there and I know how bad that feels.”
I admired the Vancouver police, too. They were even-handed. They had almost everything back on track within three hours. There were a few broken windows and some looting, but no one died.
Facebook frontier justice came rifling through the next day. People were pleased to see the city getting into trouble. Twentieth-century writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard said, “Anyone who idolizes you is going to hate you when he discovers that you are fallible. He never forgives. He has deceived himself, and he blames you for it.” So many were condemning the city. I didn’t want to see that from us, I wanted to see “us.” Not “he went wrong” or “she went wrong,” but “we went wrong.”
I didn’t witness any of the rioting that went on in the streets of Vancouver after the game. We rolled out of the Rogers Arena about 9 p.m., and because the police had tear-gassed everybody out of the core, it was eerily quiet. I sat in my hotel room on the twenty-third floor, looking at the sun setting over English Bay, and it was beautiful. The TV was next to the window, and I turned it on and watched images of the riot replayed.
I knew this would be huge news in the week to come, but time heals. I got thinking about how, just a week earlier in Detroit, Darren McCarty and Claude Lemieux co-hosted a fundraiser for the police in Michigan. There is quite a history involving the two of them. In the 1996 Western Conference final, Lemieux hit Detroit’s Kris Draper from behind and into the boards at the Detroit bench. Draper was badly hurt, with a broken nose, a fractured cheekbone, a fractured upper jaw and thirty stitches on the inside of his mouth, and five of his teeth were pushed down and pressing into his throat. Lemieux received a two-game suspension.
The guy who rode with Draper in the ambulance was Darren McCarty. When they left the hospital, the doctor handed McCarty a pair of pliers. Draper’s jaw was wired shut, so if he threw up there was a chance he would aspirate his own vomit and die. McCarty was to loosen the wire clips if Draper got nauseous or passed out. This ordeal created a real connection between McCarty and Draper. And so, on March 26, 1997, in a regular-season game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche, McCarty unleashed a year of pent-up fury on Lemieux. He absolutely rag-dolled him. Lemieux turtled, which was embarrassing for him and his team.
That fight was considered the tipping point for Detroit. They had long failed to live up to their potential and had blown chances to win the Stanley Cup in 1993, ‘94, ‘95 and ‘96. But what Darren McCarty did to Claude Lemieux that day brought the players together as a team. And they did go on to win the Cup that year.
All these years later, with all the shenanigans going on in the Boston–Vancouver series, when the police came to McCarty and asked him to appear at a fundraising event with Lemieux, there was forgiveness.
The first call McCarty made was to Draper, asking if he was okay with it. And the answer was yes.
As I sat on my bed and watched clips of the riots on one side and the warm, peaceful glow of the setting sun on the other, I thought about all the layers in the game, and decided that it comes down to virtue. McCarty and Lemieux. Sikharulidze and Salé. Tim Thomas. Sports have to be honourable.
I turned off the TV and sat there staring out the window for a long, long time.
37
WHERE SHALL WISDOM BE FOUND?
Some people get into trouble when they drink. I get into trouble when I read. In searching for answers, I read contemporary philosophers, financers, bloggers, novels, fairy tales, the classics, you name it. Lewis Lapham’s book Lights, Camera and Democracy is my bible on how to approach what I do for a living. His essay “The Road to Babylon: Searching for Targets in Iraq” was the reason Don and I got into our infamous Coach’s Corner debate over the Iraq war in March 2003. It’s not as though I came up with the argument on my own. Most of the arguments I get into, I’ve stolen fr
om some expert.
I have asked myself, “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?” I decided I would get rid of gluttony. I’ve struggled with some of the seven deadlies, but especially that one.
One of the best essayists I’ve ever read is Joseph Epstein. I bought his Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins as my entrée into his writing. When I am asked what I would do if I could change one thing in the world, I say that I would eradicate envy. It’s the biggest impediment to a happy life. Epstein’s book was from part of a lecture series for the New York Public Library. It’s brilliant—written with rapier-like wit, and no piety. Epstein says envy is the least fun of all the major sins. He tells a good joke about it. There’s a genie who offers a wish to an Englishwoman, a Frenchman and a Russian farmer. The Englishwoman says that her friend has a charming cottage in the woods, and she would like one like it, but wants two more bedrooms, an extra bathroom and a brook on the property. The Frenchman says that his best friend has a beautiful blonde mistress, so he’d like one too, but he wants his to be a redhead who is more cultured and has longer legs. Finally, it’s the Russian’s turn. He says his neighbour has a wonderful cow that gives the richest milk that yields the heaviest cream and the purest butter. The Russian tells the genie, “I vant dat cow … dead.”
There are days when I wonder, “What becomes of us?” I’m pretty pragmatic. Ed Whalen used to say, “They throw us in the ground, and that’s that, Kid.” I kind of agreed with him, yet I liked the idea put forth in the book God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams. He’s the guy who created the Dilbert comic strip. The book is a parable. God blows himself up, and we’re all pieces of God. It was one of the neatest ideas I’ve heard on the subject of life after death. I don’t necessarily expect to see Mom when I die, but I hope I do.