The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (8 page)

"We're not talkin' if you're here to be negative," he said, air-poking his index finger at my chest. Brad relaxed when I told him that I was just here to learn, play hockey, and understand the culture. "Okay, good," said Brad, and he began explaining what it's like to play pro hockey before an indifferent audience in the tropics.

Trevor finally arrived. He was in his mid-twenties, tall and fit, with a cherubic face. He was dressed in red plaid shorts and a horizontally striped shirt, a set of dueling patterns that gave him the power to induce nausea in others when he moved. On his head was a
Hockey Night in Canada
ball cap with Oakley sunglasses perched above the brim.

After exchanging hellos, he walked us to a counter at the entrance while a few more kids bustled through the door. Trevor launched into a soliloquy that was bookended with "we're striving to be the best" and "this is a classy school." Eventually his spiel found its rhythm, and Trevor properly explained himself. "If you're a high-end prospect at a [tryout], guys are out to get you. And if you lose a fight, you lose confidence. You could perform badly at the camp. Then someone on the ice owns you, maybe for the camp, maybe for your career. Wait ... have you met your fighting partner yet?" he asked.

I hadn't. Trevor looked past the narrow-shouldered kids loitering in the hall, awkwardly waiting for the school to begin. He pointed at a six-foot-four, 220-pound eugenics experiment wearing a smirk.

"That's Dominic. He's only 16. You're fighting him."

 

Trevor greeted a few of the latecomers at the entrance and ushered me into a small conference room next to his office. In the room, a few copies of
The Hockey News
were stacked neatly on a long table with foldable legs. A 14-inch television perched on a high shelf. Trevor turned it on and slid a home-burned DVD into the machine. He folded his arms and told me to watch. Onscreen was a shaky homemade highlight reel of Derek Parker, a veteran of three seasons in Quebec's Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, picking fights and finishing them. In 2006, Derek set a league record with 508 penalty minutes in 51 games. After flirting with retirement to train for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Parker returned to hockey and racked up 145 penalty minutes in 35 games for the IHL's Dayton Gems.

"He's the other guest instructor tonight," said Trevor, who began explaining the three-part structure to the clinic: video analysis, fight theory, and on-ice instruction. He left the room to let me study the clips by myself.

Derek arrived in person a few minutes later and sat down at the table. His nose began near the equator of his forehead and plumbed a lazy arc to the southeast. He too had a buzz cut and stood about six feet tall, his wide shoulders housed under a turquoise track jacket with
Muay Thai
printed on the back. We exchanged hellos, and he immediately began scrawling coaching notes, ignoring both the parents who'd walked into the room and his own highlight reel playing behind him.

Onscreen, Derek and his team skated in a pregame warm-up pattern, arcing a long circle that started behind the goal and notched its widest diameter near center ice. The other team skated the same circular path on the other side. On one pass, Derek lightly whacked one of his opponents on his shin pads with his stick, just a tap, and it sparked a scrum. While the other players grabbed jerseys and exchanged face-washes, Derek and his opponent sneaked out of the fray and skated to center ice, purely for the showmanship of fighting at center ring. They dropped the mitts and removed helmets without taking their eyes off each other. Derek brought his fists up to his temples, weaving each hand as though it orbited a tiny, invisible planet. After 10 seconds of staring each other down, Derek reached for his opponent's right shoulder with his left hand and then threw a right at the other player's left eye. The blow connected, and Derek unleashed three more punches, missing two. Derek's opponent staggered and fell to one knee, but Derek kept punching until the referees intervened. The crowd went nuts.

Derek looked up from the table then, seeming for the first time to notice the parents, whose facial expressions were stuck somewhere between awe and horror. There was a palpable awareness that this man was going to spend the next three hours with their children. The room was quiet.

A few minutes later, Derek excused himself and left the room. I took the opportunity to ask some of the parents why they had taken their children here. Duke Prendinchuk, father of 13-year-old Tyson, told me his son had played tier 1 hockey, the highest level for his age, his whole life. Tyson's participation tonight was "more my idea than his." He was in a transition year between Pee Wee (ages 12 and 13) and Bantam (ages 14 and 15) and it was time to "toughen up." "He's gotten into fights in the last couple of years," Prendinchuk said. "It's for self-protection because people come at him. That's part of the game. He's in games where he gets hacked and one thing leads to another."

One of the mothers, a pretty blonde wearing irony-free acid-washed jeans, wouldn't talk because she was worried the camp might be shut down if I wrote about it. She seemed legitimately afraid for its future. She turned her attention back to the fight reel and resumed ignoring me.

Trevor walked in. I asked him when the video analysis session would officially begin. "You just had it," he said. "Go get changed into your hockey gear with the kids."

 

Derek and Brad stood in the middle of the dressing room, surrounded by 13 kids and me. We were all wearing hockey pads and sat on a narrow bench that wound around the room. Tall wooden cubbies with hooks were attached to the wall above the bench, a feature typically found in dressing rooms of elite teams. Trevor told me that it was flourish he had insisted upon because he believed it settled players into an elite frame of mind before they went out to skate.

Trevor introduced Brad, who was in full hockey equipment. Then he introduced Derek, who, for reasons clear only to him, was wearing a teal-colored martial arts gi, only one made of terrycloth. Tonight, the terror of the Quebec league would be teaching us to fight in his bathrobe.

"These guys are true experts," said Trevor. "Derek, how many fights would you have in each season? What, about one every other game or so?"

"No. I'd say more than that."

"Like ... one fight a game?"

"No. About four."

"So you'd spread them out during the game?"

"No. I'd fight all four in the first period."

"So you'd spread them out ... in the period?"

"No. I'd fight them all during the first minute, though sometimes during the warm-up."

Derek then went around the room and asked each kid why he came to the camp. Most of the kids said they were here to learn how to protect themselves, but one kid, a skinny teenager with a short mop of blond hair, said he had come "to learn how to be a complete player." Derek commended him on this answer.

"That's right. Fighting pumps up your team and gets you in the game," he said. "It's about doing what it takes to win though it's never about hate." Derek then added what he considered the final proof: he and Brad had twice fought during junior hockey and yet here they were, kibitzing. The kids seemed impressed.

The lecture then shifted from motivation to fight theory and rules of engagement. "The number one rule with hockey fighting," Derek said, then pausing for effect, "is don't get hit." Taking a bare-knuckle punch is an unacceptable risk. "I'd rather have a fight where neither of us lands any," Derek added. "In my mind, you still win. You've sent a message."

Though the video portion of fight camp was a disaster and possibly optional to attend, the mood had shifted inside the dressing room. The kids were rapt. All of them watched Derek, except for the eugenics experiment, who was sneaking evil looks at me.

I was being sized up.

 

Fighting will never return to the levels set during the nightly benchclearing shitstorms of the 1970s. Still, it will never go away, and for a number of reasons. For starters, hockey fights win hockey games. Unlike fights in football (silly, considering the helmets stay on) or baseball (born of errant pitches) or basketball (rare, but fight-to-injure situations), hockey fights are strategic. Success hinges on a team's will and the liveliness of the crowd. If the home team is down by two goals in its own rink, the fans have essentially paid for a $200 nap. At this point, a coach will assign his designated pugilist to fight, or the fighter will take his own initiative. In theory, the fight should shake the crowd from its slumber and get things loud. The home team will then convert this fan energy into momentum and, ideally, score. In 2008, the Detroit Red Wings fought more than they did the two previous seasons combined and won the Stanley Cup. The year before, the Cup went to the Anaheim Ducks, who had led the league in fighting.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Years earlier, the NHL had attempted to curb violence with the so-called Instigator Rule. Adopted for the 1993 season, the rule adds two extra penalty minutes to the player who starts a fight. The penalty initially dissuaded teams from fighting, but it since has fallen out of favor with referees. In 2007, only 18 instigator penalties were issued—one in 18 fights—while the 2008 season spawned 339 more fights than the previous year.

Moreover, fighting sells tickets. Never mind that I went to college and know which one is the salad fork: when a fight breaks out, I'm on my feet and high-fiving strangers. And I'm aware that fighting makes hockey seem as legitimate a sport as
American Gladiators.
I know that fighting is a zero-sum game for global audience development; that it appeals only to the passionate few while marginalizing the sport to the masses; that fighting has killed a player and injured countless others; that the Montessori/Whole Foods set would sooner let their children watch Glenn Beck before teaching them these values. I and my hockey-loving tribe are supposed to know better. Because there isn't a hockey fan on earth who hasn't been subjected to the dog-pile journalism devoted to the social and physical pathologies associated with hockey brawls. But that's not for us. We dismiss the hysterical nanny-state politics because we recognize excitement when we see it. And more important, we understand that hockey is a momentum game. You have it, you win. And short of scoring a goal, fighting is the surest way to gain momentum. We know that it wins games and Cups. So we tolerate fighting. Love it, even. It's a big part of why many of us go to the rink. In January 2009, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who sought to complete the Disneyfication of hockey into good, clean family fun, admitted it for the first time. "I believe that most of our fans enjoy that aspect of the game ... It is a part of the game," he said. Paul Kelly, formerly the head of the NHL players union, agreed, stating in a February 2009 television interview that fighting actually mitigated violence in the game and that star players needed protection. Kelly told the Versus network that Gretzky would have played "several hundred" fewer games without Dave Semenko's help. No stars, no face of the game, no product to sell.

Two recent studies support Bettman's and Kelly's assertions that fans like what they see. In a 2009 survey, 63 percent of Canadian fans opposed motions to curb fighting while another survey found that 70 percent of Canadians who iden tified themselves as "passionate" hockey fans said they supported it. Hockey broadcasts, most notably CBC's
Hockey Night in Canada,
which attracts some 1.8 million viewers out of 30 million Canadians during the playoffs, have embraced hockey fighting.
Hockey Night
features two theme songs prior to the game, one of which is Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright (for Fighting)," albeit performed by Nickelback to circumvent either royalties, fey association, or both. The song is set to clips of recent fights and especially violent hits. CBC is hardly alone in its fight treatment. Thirty years ago, broadcasters cut to commercial during fights; today, TV crews give every fight play-by-play commentary, reverse angles, and the gratuitous slow-mo treatment.

All of which has fortified the role of fighters in the culture. Derek Boogaard, the Minnesota Wild's designated fighter and the guest instructor at Lakness's first fight camp, has never scored more than six points in an entire season. Yet his replica jersey used to outsell all of his teammates' shirts but one. This fight culture is even stronger in the minors. It has become ironic and cult, and moved far beyond the decades-old shadow of Paul Newman's Charlestown Chiefs in
Slapshot.
In August 2005, organizers held a hockey fight tournament in Prince George, British Columbia, without pucks, sticks, or teams. Most competitors were brawlers from the minors. The tournament was attended by 2,000 locals and filmed by a Canadian documentary crew. Four fights broke out in the bleachers.

This was a one-off, however. The only alternative for fight fans is to attend a minor league game. Minor leaguers scrap partially for the support, but mostly because it can launch a professional hockey career. A 1995 York University study of young hockey players found that "increased levels of violence [fistfights], more than playing or skating skills were seen to lead to greater perception of competence by both team mates and coaches." In some cases, fighting can vault a player to higher levels and higher-paying leagues.

This is true for Jon Mirasty, an enforcer for the AHL's Syracuse Crunch and recipient of a fawning profile in
ESPN The Magazine.
In 2007, Mirasty, who weighs 220 pounds despite standing just five-foot-ten, had retired from low-level pro hockey and was set to coach in an obscure league in northern Alberta. Due to his reputation, Mirasty was recruited later that same year to try out for the Crunch, then a minor league affiliate of the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets. He made the team and has since played NHL exhibition games for the Jackets. Mirasty, who was well into his sojourn to nowhere, now fights for a decent living. He has a following. He is a staple on
hockeyfights.com
, a video and chat forum with user posts such as "Guys you want to see get beat up" and "Who's the biggest puss?"—each answered with remarkable wit and sincerity. During the hockey season, the site draws nearly nine million page views each month.