After Derek Boogaard died, from a combination of prescription pills and alcohol, it appears, the Minnesota Wild held a tribute to their former enforcer showing video clips from his career, including all three goals that he scored over seven years. It showed him interacting with fans and children, checking opponents hard, skating, shooting.
The tribute video–five minutes long– didn’t show a single fight.
Didn’t Don Cherry have a say in the choice of clips to show? In the context of what happened to Bob Probert Rick Rypien, Derek Boogaard and Wade Belak, Cherry’s comments earlier this season are obscene.
It has become more and more evident with research that the brain damage suffered by many NHL “enforcers” is not the accidental result of the occasional bad hit: it is endemic to the role itself, to the battering that all enforcers endure on a regular basis. It is not a matter of if but when brain damage occurs, and once it occurs it spreads, and once it spreads it cannot be stopped or rescinded. It clots the brain cells, disconnects synapses, tears at the very fabric of the tissue. It is an enormous price to pay for the fans who sit behind the glass happily jumping and waving and hooting at the destruction of a man’s personality.
Hockey at its best is the best sport: nothing else has the sustained thrust and counter-attack, intensity, elegance, or flow of an intense contest between two well-matched teams. No other sport has faster breaks, more dramatic shifts of momentum, more sheer grace than hockey when it is at its best.
Why the league would choose to sell it on the basis of grown men battering each other’s faces into oblivion is beyond all sensibility.
In my opinion, shoot-outs are pretty boring. It makes hockey more like football: let’s all just stand around and stand around and stand around– oh wait! Somebody…. never mind. Let’s stand around some more…