Canadian newspapers (and American sportscasts) last week were full of news about legendary Montreal Canadiens hockey goalie Patrick Roy and his son Jonathan being suspended for their part in a brawl. Here’s video of the incident so we know what we’re talking about:

Roy Sr., “St. Patrick,” is the coach of the Quebec Remparts of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey league. Roy fils, a chip off the old block, is the goaltender. By my viewing of the clip above (and from a bunch of other angles), here’s what happened: in the midst of a brawl involving all the skaters on the ice, Jonathan skated out to centre ice hoping to trade punches with the opposing goalie, Bobby Nadeau of the Chicoutimi Saugeneens. A referee restrained him and skated him back to his own end. When the ref was distracted trying to pry apart some of the other players, Dad made a motion from the bench encouraging his kid to give it another go. So Jonathan skated the length of the ice and, encountering Nadeau leaning back and clearly planning to refuse the invitation to tangle, grabbed him, tore his mask off and punched him 16 times. By my count, 10 of those punches were landed after Nadeau was on the ground. Nadeau made no attempt to fight back, and didn’t even take his gloves off (he tried to use them to defend himself).

As Roy was making triumphant and obscene pro wrestling gestures on his way back to the bench, Sebastien Rioux of the Saugeneens jumped out of the penalty box in order to take violent exception to the pounding of his goalie. As they fight, in some of the video clips available, you can see Nadeau still lying on the ice in the background.

So: as always, this brings out the chorus to deplore fighting and the culture of violence in hockey. And as usual, a counter-chorus of Neanderthals talk about how hilarious and gratifying the beat-down was.

Before I get into that mess, let me make a general comment on men and fighting. I think a willingness to fight, if one must, is an important if much-maligned quality of manliness.

The importance comes from the fact that any given human interaction could theoretically end in violence and, knowing that, certain people will use the threat of it as a way to attempt to settle arguments. If you’re willing to concede a point because someone says he’ll knock your block off, then eventually you’re just willing to let every bully have his or her way. If you refuse to concede but then also refuse to defend yourself, you’re liable to have your block knocked off and let every bully have his or her way. If you refuse to be bullied and make it clear that whether you will win or lose, you plan to meet force with force and exact a price, in my experience, you deter violence in almost all cases.

It’s an interpersonal version of mutually assured destruction. See how Cuba, which is clearly a country incapable of defending against an earnest US military attack, managed to hold off full-scale annihilation for generations because of its friendship with other global bullies and its demonstrated willingness to go down fighting, if it came to that. (The closest geopolitical alternative practice I can think of is passive resistance. However, if you’re facing an opponent unphased by the moral or societal consequences of inflicting damage on you, this soon becomes passive defeat, and even possibly passive death, as the Tiananmen Square protestors learned).

At the personal level, you can see this principle played out in all kinds of iconic pop-culture representations of men: Paul Newman’s character in Cool Hand Luke keeps hauling himself up off the ground and coming back for more, earning the respect of his tormentor Dragline; the title character in Shane has sworn off gunslinging until it becomes clear that it is the only way to save the lives of decent people he has come to care about; the narrator of “The Coward of the County” concludes, despite his lifelong devotion to non-violence, that “sometimes you have to fight to be a man.”

Kids of the 1980s could call it “The McFly Principle,” since one of the premises (and the conclusion) of Back To the Future is that if only George McFly would cold-cock Biff at the Under the Sea dance, he’ll transform a future life of snivelling, semi-impoverished servitude into one marked by wealth, fame and cable-knit tennis sweaters.

In the end, you can’t let yourself be pushed around.

The other side of this same principle is that violence should always and only be used defensively. Bloodthirstiness is not manly, it animalistic. An agressor is a bad guy, and worse than him is a bully, who will beat up on those who are defenseless or obviously incapable or unprepared to defend themselves. The worst, least manly kind of cowardice is the act of physically attacking someone who cannot fight back (see every villain and bully in just about every Hollywood movie). And the most virtuous form of violence is not only defensive, but is applied in defence of some other, weaker person or entity who requires shielding from a bully.

The thing, as serious movies examining violence from Straw Dogs to A History of Violence show, is that violence is seductive. Like sex and eating, fighting brings on a strong physical reaction, the adreneline generally more than compensating for whatever pain one feels, and it can be in some way addictive. And moreover, having come through a fight, a man feels like he has proved something to himself, something about himself. Something important. The narrator of Fight Club talks about “feeling alive” for the first time in his life. So the lines between nobly defending yourself and needless agression and bullying can start to get blurry for someone hooked on hitting and being hit, as you can see if you look at the apparently meaningless pissing matches documented on hip-hop records, or check out the big swingers arguing about who looked at whose girlfriend in what way in any given bar after midnight on a Friday.

So what does all this have to do with hockey? Well, as Nick Hornby and Nick Coleman write in their introduction to The Picador Book of Sportswriting, the magic of sport is that “It has all of life’s business in it and no meaning.” Part of that business is conflict resolution, refusing to be pushed around, protecting those close to you. And another part of life’s business obviously overrepresented in hockey is the visceral and the physical.

In hockey, traditionally, the rules are policed by referees, but when a two-minute penalty serves as an inadequate deterrent to slashing, elbowing, gouging or otherwise inflicting unfair pain on a talented player, an enforcer will use his fists to make such activity still less attractive. This is a matter of honour that is meaningless to society at large and almost indecipherable to those outside the sport’s world, but it is no less serious to the players and fans. To them it is existential.

This in turn creates a culture in which rival enforcers spend some time tangling with each other to prove their value as deterrent forces and to get the adreneline of their teammates pumping and to rile up the crowd and to generally sort out who is the toughest of all enforcers, which is something many of their fans and teammates find entertaining (for the same reason many find boxing entertaining) and many others find disgusting.

You can make a fair argument that this is insane, but hockey is a sport where physical dominance is as important as speed or agility, so the fighting culture is not somehow outside the realm of comprehension. If there were a culture of enforcers and fist fighting in a sport like relay racing, that would be less understandable.

Which is all to say that even if it is brutal (which it often is), and even if it is wrongheaded, there is a logic to the history of violence in the NHL. There’s even, as people like Don Cherry are always pointing out, an unwritten Code. Or there used to be. Those adherents to the Code make a semi-strong argument that hockey has become a more dangerous—and more violent—sport in many respects because of rules meant to deter fighting. I won’t go into it.

Instead let me come back to the point I wanted to initially make. This Roy attack has provoked the usual hand-wringing about the place of fighting in hockey. The last such bout of worrying that I remember came after this:

And the time before that, it was because of this:

Some would say that if you get guys all wound up and teach them that physical violence is a legitimate part of the game, then some are going to take it over the line. But none of these incidents fits into any reasonable person’s definition of what’s acceptable in hockey, or in life. Repeatedly punching a guy who refuses to fight back is not fighting, it’s a savage attack. Same with hitting a guy in the head from behind while he’s trying to ignore you and then smashing his head into the ice with the full weight of your body. And with clubbing him in the head with your stick.

Don Cherry, who many people see as the biggest apologist for the culture of hockey violence and machismo (he thinks the guys who wear visors to protect their eyes are wimps) suprised many by condemning Roy’s attack. (Bertuzzi, for his part, is still trying to blame his coach for his own lapse into thuggery.)

Discussing these events is not a discussion of the acceptability of fighting in the game, any more than discussing alcohol-induced beating of children is a discussion of corporal punishment. It’s not even a discussion about fighting. It’s a discussion about bullying.
And here’s how it ends: these guys are not showing how tough they are, they are showing what kind of cowardly bullies they are. They’re not displaying their manliness—in fact, they’re displaying just the opposite.

Photo by Erik Holladay from the Flint Journal

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Posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 10:27 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.