It might not seem particularly festive to begin this final column of the year with the story of a man currently fighting for his life, but in two weeks' time Don Sanderson may no longer be alive. Since hitting his head on the ice on Friday night following a fight with Corey Fulton of the Brantford Brass, Sanderson, the 21-year-old Whitby Dunlops player, has been lain in a hospital bed in Hamilton, Ontario. Sanderson remains on life-support systems and in a critical condition.
Both Whitby Dunlops and Brantford Brass play their games as part of Ontario's Major League Hockey (MLH), a semi-professional organisation largely populated by players who have given up on full-time hockey but who still wish to play the game at a high standard.
According to The Hockey News website, MLH is not normally an old-style hockey, teeth 'n' knuckles kind of a league. Instead, Major League prides itself on its finesse, with many of its participants simply players who are tired of fighting in the pros and grinding out a living somewhere on the fourth line.
For the parents, family, friends and teammates of Don Sanderson, the state of affairs in which he finds himself are tragic. I'm writing about these circumstances solely as an extreme example of what can sometimes happen to people should they choose to play hockey. I do not intend to use Sanderson's story as the springboard for a polemic proposing the banning of fighting in the sport. Regular readers will know that I am queasy on the matter of hockey players dropping the gloves. But on this occasion, this is not my point.
My focus is the human head, and the dangers that can face it when it's flying about at 30 miles an hour on a surface as unforgiving as frozen water, playing a sport as inconsiderate of personal space as ice hockey. Whichever way you look at it – and you better be looking every way – there's bound to be bother.
If it's bother you're looking for then you will be familiar with what happened to Carolina Hurricane Brandon Sutter while playing against the New York Islanders at Nassau Veterans' Memorial Coliseum earlier this season. Skating by the benches in the neutral zone, Sutter shimmied to retain control of the puck and was hit by Islander veteran Doug Weight with such force that a word with more industrial strength to it – atomised, perhaps – is required to best describe what really happened.
All Sutter did was move his eyes to the ice for a moment of time so brief that it can hardly be measured on the clock. But that's all it took for Weight to manouvre his armoured shoulder into his opponent's unprotected face at considerable speed and with maximum force. It was, in many ways, a thing of beauty; it was a split-second miracle of execution that left its victim motionless and concussed.
But it didn't half get everyone talking. On one Canadian broadcast the sadists in the video booth played the clip a dozen times, while the men in the studio used expansive language to say very little indeed. They agreed that Doug Weight is not the kind of player who indulges in cheap shots, but that was about all. Then again, short of calling for hits to the head to be outlawed – and all TV hockey men are too intuitively conservative to do that – what else is there to say? (Actually, they might have mentioned it was the fact that Brandon Sutter's head was positioned so low at the point of impact that rendered the hit a head shot. No amount of rule changes will legislate for that.)
The tone of voice used to accompany the pictures of the prone Carolina player left the viewer in no doubt that the matter of hits to the head was a Very Serious Business indeed. This much is obvious; many are the players who have been forced to retire due to concussion-like symptoms, and one athlete (Florida Panthers defenseman Noah Welch) even plans to donate his brain to the Sports Legacy Institute, an organisation that specialises in sports-related brain injuries, after his death in order that more can be learned about a subject is still shrouded in mystery and the hot air of hockey machismo.
This, no doubt, is progress. But if the hockey community gets all serious and stern on the subject of head shots, when it comes to fighting it's all of a sudden just one big laugh. Don't believe me? Switch to a game on TV and wait for a fight (fighting is up as well, so you won't be waiting long). Combatants engaged, now listen to the purrs of pleasure as the commentators describe the action. It's a philosophy of violence that can be boiled down to the following sentence: if the boys want to fight, you better let them.
Once again, the point of this column is not to propose that scraps in hockey be banned; I did that last season and I didn't make very many friends (in fact, I made none). But fight fans, ask yourself this: why is it a grave and serious matter when one player is hit in the head by an opponent while carrying the puck (which is perfectly legal) yet is nothing more than red-blooded ribaldry when one player hits another in the head with his fists (which is perfectly illegal). The point of the first manouvre is to get the puck, even if it's by getting the man. But the point of the second is simply to get the man. Fights are not started by players who have the puck.
At their most cynical, head shots are a dangerous and brutal example of what Sports Illustrated once called "the moral vacuum at hockey's core", a phrase that cannot be bettered. But not all head shots are of this nature, or even most of them. However, throwing a fist at someone's face is also a head shot, and the fact that it isn't viewed or described as such amazes me. What other cause can a punch possibly serve than to damage its recipient? What other role does it serve within the game?
Anyone who proposes banning hits to the head is by definition proposing the banning of fighting in hockey. I am amazed that more people haven't pointed out this blatant and obvious fact.
I would like to wish this column's readers a chaotic Christmas and a noisy new year. Next week I will be flying to Chicago for the Winter Classic at Wrigley Field between the Blackhawks and the Red Wings. I'll be writing about that next time, and using language such as "freezing my bollocks off", a phrase I can guarantee won't crop up on ESPN.com.
