As players get stronger, fights in NHL games become more vicious, and the league continues to condone aggravated, bare-knuckle assaults, it's only a matter of time.
When the inevitable happens, NHL owners and the players' union will quickly convene a meeting, and shortly thereafter, fighting in the NHL will cease altogether.
Or at the very least, fighting from that point onward will be dealt with in a serious enough way that teams will stop paying otherwise talentless players to provide entertainment to the blood-lust set under the guise that it somehow benefits the game.
The Official Response
The NHL will be swift in delivering a slyly worded, equivocating bit of nonsense regarding the tragedy. The ultimate goal will be to avoid liability and offer up some clever, nostalgic tripe about the passing into history of condoned fights in which players were allowed to drive their fists into each other's faces with little or no possibility of defending themselves, and with no worry of being penalized in a meaningful way.
The official response from the NHL will be quick for a simple reason: it is already prepared and ready to go for when the inevitable comes to pass. All large organizations prepare for crises, and the death of a player during an on-ice fight is something that the NHL has undoubtedly expected for some time now.
But until a death does occur in the inane and indefensible NHL sideshow known as hockey fights, the baboons in charge will continue deluding themselves into thinking that there is no good reason to take preventative action.
As the Bettman experiment of expanding the league into southern US states starts to collapse, the head clown and his band of little sycophants no doubt believe that pulling the plug on mutually agreed upon aggravated assaults would further galvanize his time in power as one of the strangest and most tin-eared that any professional sports league anywhere has ever experienced.
Frankensteins
As the corpses of NHL enforcers past and present continue to pile up in this most depressing of off-seasons, surely it must be dawning on the wackos in charge that there is something inherently warped in allowing the most amateurish, cack-handed aspect of the game to continue on unabated.
However, I'm guessing that the broken enforcer who is hanging by a thread in his personal life is a narrative that is far more familiar in the relatively closed world of the NHL than it is to the general public. Those at the top have known for a long time the all too predictable storyline that follows the enforcer.
"But the fans love it!" the mules shriek. Sure, people everywhere love unhinged displays of violence. If the NFL were to allow players to engage in fights during games in which they swung their helmets wildly at each other's faces, and then paid a senile old fuck a couple of million dollars a year to pander to ignoramuses while talking up the helmet-swinging sessions as being absolutely necessary for the integrity of the game, then it would likely be somewhat popular as well.
And let's be honest about the tragedies of Boogaard, Rypien, and Belak: they're good for business. Death sells. Tortured souls who died well before their time is an emotional narrative that will result in a deluge of "soul-searching" type articles just in time for the new season. And it will make many fans feel that they are part of something big and important that has real and tragic consequences. The bit of tripe vomited forth by Bettman and his boys in response to the deaths is as meaningless as all the other garbage they offer up when the heat is on.
The NHL policy of tacitly allowing on-ice assaults has helped to create these Frankensteins, most of whom likely suffer from brain damage and turn to booze and drugs as a way to escape the physical pain and/or to fulfill their anti-hero, hard-man roles.
No doubt their off-ice woes are also related to the effects of knowing they have to attack and defend night after night. The possibility of being humiliated, injured, or severely damaging another player has got to take its toll. Add into the toxic mix the fact that enforcers often have a tenuous hold on their jobs with NHL teams, and the pressure has got to be at times overwhelming.
Let the Shrieking Commence
And when the expected happens and a player is finally killed in an NHL fight, the shrieking from all sides will reach a fever pitch. Cherry will exploit it for his own gain and his legions of moronic followers will regurgitate his every incoherent utterance as they face the reality that one of their beloved outlets for their sociopathic tendencies is coming to an end.
The entire nation, except for family and friends of the dead player, for those are the only people ever truly affected by a death, will experience a collective exhilaration stoked on by unctuous journalists, politicians and other self-serving pukes.
The most apoplectic of the NHL fight crowd will scream with renewed fury that those who oppose fighting "just don't get it" while being utterly incapable of articulating the rationales that they claim they understand so well. But more than that, the fighting proponents will state outright that anyone who says fighting should be banned in the NHL is somehow less of a man.
For that is at the heart of the visceral passion that so many have for watching other people attack and assault each other: feeling like a hard-man by proxy. Like chicken-hawks who lust for war while those who have experienced its horrors are always more circumspect and cautious, I've always had the suspicion that those who love hockey fights the most have rarely, if ever, been involved (with many exceptions of course) in arranged or spontaneous fights.
Just as watching other people self-destruct is sublime and romantic, seeing other people assault each other and hearing of complete strangers dying is a strangely satisfying tonic for human beings. It reminds us that we are alive and that something horrible has not happened to us yet.
So the spectacle of NHL fights will continue. Bettman and his yes-men have apparently convinced themselves that the end of condoned fights on their watch is not a legacy they want. Presumably, the death of a player during an NHL fight is something they are more comfortable with.
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