After reading my deconstruction of the Doug Murray/Eric Lindros/Krys Barch incident on Thursday night in San Jose, Chuqui had this to say*:
Teams don't need to get rid of the instigator to "protect honor" and their elite players. they simply have to play smart instead of stupid. Don't beat up on a 4th line player and take stupid penalties, take a number, pick your spot, and find one of their guys and give them a reason to encourage their goons to not be quite so stupid next time.But no, once again, we see hockey rush into beserker "mongo hunt!" mentality, something you simply don't see in ANY other major professional sport, except perhaps some fringes of NASCAR (eat paint, sucker! bwa ha ha).
What about Major League Baseball? Didn't Ozzie Guillen blow a gasket just last season when one of his pitchers refused to retaliate in a beanball exchange? That pitcher, Sean Tracey, was demoted to the minor leagues after the incident.
If any hockey player failed to come through the way that Tracey did for the White Sox, I don't have any doubt he'd be on a shuttle bus back to the AHL -- perhaps even before the game ended.
Elsewhere in his post, Chuqi also mentions how offensive lineman won't retaliate after seeing their quarterback suffer a late hit. True enough, we don't see lineman taking things into their own hands like that. But do we really want to believe that nobody ever has?
Denver Broncos defensive tackle Gerard Warren prefers not to discuss the misery in those stacks of flailing arms and legs as players grab and grope for the ball. Ask about pileups, he shakes his head. "Man, the bottom of the pile is a place you don't want to be."His reticence is understandable, given the details that come with full disclosure. Consider Miami Dolphins defensive tackle Vonnie Holliday's account of a below-the-belt play early in his nine-year career.
"I remember one time an offensive lineman grabbed my genitals," Holliday says. "I mean, he grabbed my genitals. I couldn't believe it."
[...]
When bodies fly to grab a fumble, [Mike] Golic says, "Quite honestly, anything goes."
"You do what you've got to do, and anything is open, if you know what I mean," he says. "A finger will get bent back, and some guys will break it."
In light of information like that, a stand-up fight can seem awfully civilized, can't it?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not endorsing what we're seeing here -- something I thought I made clear in the last two lines of my first post on this topic. What I am trying to do is understand the game and see if for what it really is. And the conclusion I'm coming to, one that I've hinted at before, is that no matter what team sport we watch, we tend to sanitize what we see lest we realize just how horrible it can really be at times.
Perhaps hockey's problem isn't that it's rituals and mores are more violent, perhaps it's just that the folks who market other sports do a better job of bleaching that violence out in the wash.
*There's a lot more to Chuqui's argument than just that one paragraph. Please be sure to read the rest.
