The Athletic Hockey Show - Evolution of fighting in hockey: a roundtable discussion

Episode Date: April 1, 2023

On this special edition of The Athletic Hockey Show, Julian McKenzie is joined by The Athletic NHL’s Sean McIndoe, Dan Robson, Daniel Nugent-Bowman, Robert Rossi, and Kevin Kurz to discuss the evolution of fighting in the game of hockey, the physical, mental, and emotional toll fighting can have on the combatants, whether it’ll ever be completely removed from the sport, and more.Subscribe to The Athletic Hockey Show on YouTube: http://youtube.com/@theathletichockeyshowGet a 1-year subscription to The Athletic for just $1 a month when you visit http://theathletic.com/hockeyshow Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is The Athletic Hockey Show. Welcome to a special edition of the Athletic Hockey Show. I'm Julian McKenzie. Today's show will focus on our series of feature stories about fighting. For the last few days, we've had pieces on the evolution of fighting at the NHL level, the mental side, how fans consume fights online, and so much more. Throughout all of our pieces as well, we've managed to get thoughts and opinions from as many perspectives around the league as possible.

And today, we're going to go more in-depth on. our stories while also having conversations about fighting and its place in the sport. Part one of our show will feature Dan Robson, Sean McIndoo, and Daniel Nugent Bowman. Part two, we'll have Kevin Kerr's and Robert Rossi. We hope you enjoy our conversations, and if you haven't already, we hope you read our stories. Now it's time to start the show. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedules, guys. How are you guys doing?

Doing good. Yeah, doing great. Thanks for having us. Yeah, can't complain. That's good. That's good. The goal of this is for everyone to just kind of talk about the stories they've been working on in order to make this series happen. And we're also going to get into a little bit of a discussion about fighting as well, just in the game today, how we may feel about it. But also some memories we have associated to it.

We're all hockey fans here. We've all seen a good share of fights in our day. We'll start off just going individually one by one with some of the pieces. I'll start with you, Sean. You've worked on a few. There's one, as the fighting era fades, is it worth asking what the H.L. It's lost. Also a piece on the sports bare knuckles legacy, and why fighting will always essentially be a part of the league.

Just to start with you, man, can you take us through your process with working on these pieces and writing about fighting and just kind of get us started here? Yeah. So the first piece, the piece that kicked off the week, which was the one that I did with, with Rob Rossi and Joe Smith. And essentially what happened there was, I came at it from the history point of view. I'm the history guy. You know, I wrote a book on the topic.

I work it into everything I do. I love talking about the history of the game, how it's evolved, how it's changed over the years. So I sort of came at it from that perspective because it's really fascinating to look at the different eras of fighting in the NHL and how it's, you know, how the enforcer evolved, how the levels of fighting went up and down

and what contributed to that. And then Joe and Rob, with all their connections to the various people around the league, reached out and talked to a whole bunch of people who were involved in various areas. They talked to Scotty Bowman. They talked to Bill Garron and Craig Barubi. And they right up to a lot of the players

who were still active today, Ryan Reeves, among others. And basically just got their thoughts on how it's evolved, what they had been through, and all of that. And it was interesting because I can tell you, sitting on my couch, even as, you know, even with the historian hat on, even, you know, all of that, it's a different perspective. And the thing that really stood out, and, you know, if people are reading the piece, these guys almost unanimously absolutely believe that fighting is a necessary part of the game. They absolutely believe that the ability to go over and punch somebody in the face

keeps the game safer. It keeps the dirty stuff out. And, you know, they, even as they will acknowledge that the safety concerns and a bunch of the other stuff and will in some cases say, hey, the reduction, the fact that we don't look like the 80s anymore is a good thing. They don't want to see it go anywhere. And, you know, these are the guys in a lot of cases. They're the guys getting punched in the face.

And they're saying, don't take it out of my game. Yeah, it is interesting. It's funny because Ryan Reeves is in the story of hockey's bare knuckles legacy. And in my piece that I wrote this week about hockey fights.com, I remember asking him straight up, like, you know, what do you say to all the concerns about CTE and head trauma with regards to the sport and also just fighting? and he just looked at me and he just said, play volleyball. Like, to your point, like, there are a lot of guys who definitely want to uphold fighting. And I think that I wouldn't surprise me if that's a prevailing theme in everyone's story. Yeah, and look, a lot of people will say, well, yeah, I mean, it's Ryan Reeves.

He's in the league primarily because he can fight. So, of course, he's going to say that. Of course, Darren McCarty is going to say that fighting is good. Darren McCarty was in the league largely to fight. That's, you know, that's where he made his career. but it's not just those guys. You know, Scotty Bowman,

you know, a guy like Brayden Shen, who is nobody's idea of a tough guy, is out there too. You know, the Nick, sorry,

Marcus Felino, you know, same deal, a hard-nose player, but this is a guy who would absolutely be in the NHL and be a frontline player

if there was no fighting. So it's, it's not just the enforcers saying, we got to keep the enforcers. I think we would expect them to say that. It's,

it was very it was pretty unanimous of the guys that we talked to it. I'm not saying that's everyone. I'm not saying that's every player in the league. But NHLPA has done surveys. They did a public survey a few years ago. They said, you know, do you want to keep fighting in the game? And I mean, it was some ridiculous number like 98% of the players said keep it in the game.

You know, I imagine that's lower now. And it's probably going to keep getting lower. But, you know, in this, with social media and everything. Like, I think there's a lot of fans out there going, man, nobody wants fighting anymore. And I can tell you, among the, you know, the players, the people in the game,

there's still a real voice out there saying we need this. That's true. Anything else you want to add before I move on to Dan Robson? I mean, I guess that was sort of everything from the first piece that I worked on with Rob and Joe. And the piece that I have coming up later in the series, is the one that's a little bit more, it's a little bit more personal, maybe a little more nuanced. And this is the one where I sort of look at it from, I'm taking off the media hat and the historian hat.

I'm just going to edit as a fan. Because I grew up with this stuff and I loved it. I made no bones about it. I was a Don Cherry disciple. I loved, you know, the fighting in the video games. I had the VHS tapes and all of that stuff. And the thing that I wrestle with, and still do to this day, is, you know, look, I understand the injuries, what we know now about concussions, what we know now, you know, and Dan will speak to about, you know, mental health and that sort of thing, there's no way we could ever go back. Nobody could want us to go back.

There's no way that you could look at what the game was in the 70s and 80s and 90s and say that was better. You can't say that. And I would never say that. But was it more entertaining? Was it more fun as a fan to watch hockey when you knew that, hey, oh, what's this? It's five to one in the third period. Uh-oh. Something crazy might happen.

Let's, uh, you know, let's keep tuned in. I don't know. And I don't even know how you say that because it sounds awful to say. You're talking about, you know, a lot of cases guys with significant damage, significant influence on their health. I mean, you know, some of these guys aren't with us anymore. Of course, you don't want to go back. but at the same time the NHL as an entertainment product okay if we've lost a chunk of that and I know from hearing from other fans there's a lot of them out there who would absolutely say

that we have what did we replace it with if anything or is that even a question that you can bother asking and and I wrestle with that in the piece and I think as people will see when they read it I'm not sure I actually got to an answer but I think it's worth at least putting it out there because, man, there just seemed to be a lot of fans out there. A lot of fans who are happy that this stuff is gone out of the game. They're saying, this was always garbage. I'm happy to get rid of it. The game is so much better now.

But there's also a lot of fans out there going, man, you know what? I miss those days, even if I know that we can't ever go back to it. Well done, Sean. And also a hat tip to Joe Smith and Robert Rossi, who you're working on with your work as well. Absolutely. Let's go to Dan Robson, who worked on a piece with Max Bolton, about the mental side of fighting. What can you tell us about what you worked on?

Max and I really wanted to dive into, I think, an element of fighting that is often overlooked. Something that I've written about in the past, about individual fighters who dealt with mental health issues, as Sean mentioned, and I've struggled with the role and the toll that it took. And in this case, we wanted to really dive into sort of what it was like in that moment, like the game, the days before a fight, especially in the era, when you had enforcers that, you know, when they met, you knew they were going to collide. You knew there was going to be a fight. It was almost an era of stage fighting, almost scheduled fighting, right? When you had, you know, a guy like Bob Probert on the ice or George L. Rock, Duke Grimson, both of whom I spoke to for the story.

And I wanted to get a sense of, you know, what went through their head. And I thought it quite fascinating because what I didn't really anticipate was just how much anxiety intention would build up before a fight. You know, you think about goalies constantly worrying about letting in goals and kind of the mental side of that game. And you think about forwards, thinking about, you know, visualizing. But thinking about how fighters actually planned out their fights, how they thought in advance about who they were fighting, who they were likely going to have to tangle with and how they would approach that and how they could be, you know, hurt in that sense. I thought it was quite, it was quite eye-opening. And, you know, I think there was mixed

reactions to it. There was, what I found fascinating was that, you know, there was, in some cases, a discussion of the anxiety that it caused and how it negatively affected them. And in some, you know, in some cases, it was just sort of the actual thrill, the sense of pride that came in, you know, sitting on that bench and knowing that because of an act you could do by getting on that ice, you could change the tenor of a game. You could basically change the mood on your team just by by getting in their winner lose, putting yourself on the line physically and within the culture of the sport and within the way that your team has reacted, knowing that you had an impact. And it was absolutely true. I mean, this is, this is fighting didn't,

wasn't just about entertainment. It also was about momentum. It was about, you know, changing the narrative in a hockey game. So it was interesting to learn a lot about the, the psychological mindset of a player as they led up to a game, as they sat on the bench, you know, in some cases,

you know, Stuart Crimson talked about, you know, the worst part was just sitting there cold. And then all of a sudden, having to turn it up the temperature from zero to 100 and going out and fighting their biggest guy right away

and knowing that was your job, that was your role. Other guys talked about knowing that their job depended on getting in a fight. So, you know, an interesting element to knowing that, you know, their dream was to play in the NHL. No one, no one, you know, puts on skates when they're six years old and thinks, I'm going to go up and be, I'm going to grow up to be a fighter.

No one ever did that. That's not, that is a component of the game that comes later on. And usually players that are larger and less skilled got pushed into that role. And that's been the experience I know in speaking in the past, we're sorry about Donald Bashir and guys like George LaRoc. You know, these were skilled players. And you've had to be, you have to be skilled to play in the NHL. You can't not be skilled, even though we look at, you know, all of these enforcers, especially, you know, back in the 90s and, you know, early 2000s and 80s as sort of just fighting being the only skills they had.

They were actual hockey players. And so I think that for these guys, knowing that at some point, if they wanted to make that living, they wanted to get a paycheck. And Ryan Vandenbush mentioned that to me at some point, it became about a paycheck. It became about sticking in the NHL and not being sent down to the minors and being able to support their family. and knowing that to do that, they were going to have to physically, you know, get into an altercation with somebody else.

I thought that that, to me, was interesting because a lot of these guys that were fighters are on the bubble. They're not, you know, they're not the players that are scoring tons of goals. And so I think for them, the pressure to fulfill that role

was a lot more overwhelming than I think a lot of fans and people watching realized. And that's not, again, and not in all cases. I know talking with Cam Jansen, he was quite clear about he loved the role. I mean, it certainly caused him a great sort of anxiety, mostly a fear of being embarrassed in front of 20,000 people and knowing that if you lose and you're not doing the job in a successful way, you're going to lose your position. But that's a struggle that, you know, any positional player has, I know what their skill set is. But some loved it, some hated it.

But I think all that we spoke to spoke very clearly about the anxiety that. it caused. There was nobody that I spoke to or that Max spoke to that said, you know, this is just, I love this. I walk in there and I'm never worried about anything. It wasn't necessarily about getting injured, but there was a tension that came with the anticipation. And then, you know, as a lot of these players carried on in the years after, I think reflecting on the role, while there was still pride in it, there was still, there was a lot of questions about sort of, you know, what their position was and what it did to them. Well said. I should also mention, for those listen to the podcast who have not read Dan's feature on Donald Bashir from about two years ago, protecting the child inside of me, Donald Brasier's toughest fight. It's worth your time. I think I remember that piece kind of came out just a little bit before I actually joined the athletic, and that's one of the best features I've written. So I just want to plug that as well. Anything else that you want to add before I move on to Daniel Nugent Bowman?

No, I just, I think that this series I think is really interesting in that so many components to this topic are being discussed and have been discussed through what we've written. And I'm glad that we did it because it really is one of those conversations that, you know, could just, there's so many angles to and obviously in passion perspectives on. So I found it really, you know, eye-opening and lightning to report, but also to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to report. but also to read about. Absolutely. So Daniel Nugent Bowman, you're next. You have a piece dropping tomorrow about feeder leagues, junior leagues, specifically with the Ontario Hockey League and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League

and how they've dealt with fighting with continually stricter penalties. And even in the case of the QMJHL, they're expected to ratify a rule that will essentially give a match penalty to anyone who engages in a fight. I'm curious about your process with your story. Yeah, so I grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, and, you know, my neighbor was a guy named Ryan Douglas, who was a backup goaltender for the Peterborough Pete, at the same time, like Chris Pronger actually was a Pete. So my first junior game was watching Chris Pronger play in Newmarket, back when they had a teamie royals. And I think I've been pretty much infatuated with junior hockey ever since. You know, again, I grew up in Mississauga, so I was there for the birth of the ice dogs under Don Cherry.

and those games, like Don Cherry did not allow Europeans on his team, and those games, they would get blown out, and the ends of the game would just take forever because it would be fight after fight after fight. And, you know, I've seen a lot of different things in junior hockey. I covered the Saskatoon Blades in the Western League from 2011 to 2015. And until, obviously, I cover the Edmonton Oilers now, I saw Vander Cain's gruesome injury this year.

But until that, the most gruesome thing I'd ever seen was, you know, a player named Jesse Astell who played for the Blades. He fell after a fight and stepped on his wrist. And it was a similar type of injury to Evander Cain where he was out for months. And so, you know, I've always kind of wondered about fighting in Major Junior Hockey and in feeder systems at large. Because, you know, we know that, you know, the NCAA does not allow fighting. You get kicked out. There are suspensions, mandatory suspensions.

Major Junior has never been that way. And it's kind of changed. The grounds changed in 2012, 2013, when the Ontario Hockey League, rather, instituted a fight cap of 10, meaning that if you had more than 10 fights, you'd start to get, you know, mandatory suspensions. And Quebec League followed suit. And now they're down to three. And as you mentioned, Julian, the plan that as has been announced, it's that the Quebec League will start, you know, they call it a ban on fighting. We're not exactly sure what that means because fights will.

inevitably happen in the way that this game is played, but the goal is to not, you know, not allow fights anymore in that league. And, you know, it's weird you can have a player, you know, depending on his birthday, as young as 15 years old and as old as 20 or 16 and 21, depending on birthdays, you know, seldom do those players, you know, go on the ice against each other. But I think there's the optics of having players of that, wide an age gap at that, you know, important age and life fighting each other and the you know the damages that that could happen to the younger player especially so yeah it's ever since those fight caps have been put in place by the Ontario League and the Quebec League which are two of the biggest feeder

leagues to the NHL it's not only changed the game at that level but it's had a ripple effect toward the NHL where you know guys just aren't fighting anymore you know certain I shouldn't say anymore, but to the same degree that they once did. I talked to Darnall Nurse, who plays for the Oilers here, and his draft year, which was the, I believe, I remember correctly the year before the fight cap was put into place. Actually, I think it was that same year. He got into six fights, which is the most he'd ever got into an particular league, or sees him rather.

Nurse is the type of guy that, you know, he fights a couple times a year once, twice. It's mostly to stand up for his buddy Connor McDavid or maybe somebody else on the Oilers. You know, these guys still think that there's, fighting has a role in the game. As Sean mentioned, keeps guys honest, those types of things. So I don't think it'll ever be eradicated completely in the NHL. But Nurse was saying, you know, a couple of years ago, he went up to Sucet, where he played his junior hockey before the year and skated with the Greyhounds, the junior team there that he was once a part of.

And he said, you know, all the guys could skate, all the guys could play. You know, the fourth line was way better than the fourth line that he, you know, when he was in the league. And so the game is moving in a, certainly in a direction of, um, a more skill of speed and, and kind of make the,

the game better from that perspective. Uh, the commissioners of those leagues, the Ontario League and the Quebec League are, are unapologetic of, uh, what their fighting rules could have done to the game. They're more obviously concerned about their league.

Um, but, uh, you know, the, you talk to the interim commissioner of the Quebec League and he was saying that if, if, if they've done something,

uh, to, to better the game, then they'll gladly, you know, take any credit for that because, you know, that's, the ripple effect is, I think, pronounced that the, you know, toward the NHL level. Again, I don't think fighting will ever go the way to the way of the Dodo Bird, but it will, you know, we've seen over the last decade since the Ontario League put in that rule, that, you know, things have changed.

And I would say, in my opinion, for the better. And now we can get into the more roundtable discussion part of the show, where we just Talk about fighting. We've gone through our pieces. Let's talk about the actual concept of fighting. How do you guys actually feel about it? We can start with Sean and then we could all kind of go one by one and kind of make it like a discussion. But how do you guys actually feel about fighting in general in the NHL or just in hockey period? Yeah. I mean, like I said, I grew up absolutely loving it. And not just loving the fights, but rolling my eyes at anyone who would tell me that, you know, we should get fighting out of the game. I would have been. been right there with Ryan Reeves. You know what? Go watch figure skating. Go watch ballet if you want to, if you don't like fighting. You know, this is what sets hockey apart. This is what makes it entertaining. And it wasn't, you know, I knew every tough guy in the league, not just on my team, not just on the Leafs. I knew every player in the league. I could rank them for you. I could, I could give you all that information. And I would have been, you know, teenage me or 20-something

year old me would have been shocked to hear today me say that I don't think it really has much of a place in the game anymore. Now, that version of me also didn't know about concussions. I didn't know about the mental aspect. You know, the two things we always told ourselves to justify fighting back then, from Don Cherry on down, two things you always heard was nobody gets hurt in a hockey fight which you know I mean we knew guys got black eyes they got a you know

toothed out or something like that but compared to getting hit from behind into the boards or cross checked in the mouth where you could get really hurt nobody got hurt in a hockey fight and the other thing was these guys love it these guys love doing it they're they love being there for their teammates and all of this stuff

and you know we've since found out that I mean the first thing was a total lie and the second thing was not true for many many of these guys you know I remember hearing stories, you know, as a Leaf fan growing up, years after the fact that, you know, John Corkic, he's one of the scariest guys in the whole league. And, you know, he was, he was an enforcer. He was one of those guys.

He was just there to fight. And apparently he would end up after games. He'd be on the phone to his dad in tears because his dad didn't like the way that he played. His dad didn't like that his son wasn't a hockey player. His son was just a thug. And he'd be in tears because his dad wasn't proud of him. We didn't hear those stories back then. We didn't know about it.

So that's why we cheered it. And that makes sense, except there's a part of me that looks back and goes, well, what did we think was happening? These guys are punching each other in the face. Did we think that was fun? We didn't think anyone got hurt, really? Or did we just not want to ask the questions? It was one of those things where, you know, we just won't poke the hornets nest and think about it too hard. It's more fun to just sit there and cheer.

And, you know, and I've wrestled with that. I wrote a piece for The Athletic a few years ago where I said, you know, like all these guys who are coming forward now with CTE, with, you know, personal problems, we're hearing about addiction, mental health problems. I was the first one up out of my seat cheering these guys on back then. So where does that leave me now? And I'm still not sure on the answer with that. But I do know that I don't buy this idea that you need fighting to keep the game safe. I just don't buy it. I used it for years to justify what I was cheering for. I don't buy it anymore. And I'll tell you right now, in the 80s, in the 90s, and even as recently as 10 years ago when Brian Burke was in Toronto,

and they had cold and ore and all those other guys, and eventually had to take him out of the lineup, send him down. Brian Burke gave the press conference, a great soundbite. He said, the rats are taken over the game. I'm really afraid of where the game's going to go because the rats are going to take over. And that's what we'd always said. 80s and 90s and everything, you get rid of the fighting. The rats take over.

Well, we're sitting here in 2023. Does anyone feel like the rats have taken over the game? Does anyone feel like the game is cheap shots and dirty play? I mean, there's stuff that happens still, sure. There was stuff that happened back then, too. There was crazy cheap shots, crazy violence, and, you know, Dale Hunter hitting guys from behind and all that. Does anybody feel like that's increased with the lack of fighting? Or do we look at the game now and go, there's a lot of speed, a lot of skill,

and a lot of guys who just never get involved in that stuff. And you know what? Maybe that was yet another lie we were just telling ourselves to justify what we wanted to to cheer on. Fair point. Dan, do you want to take the next one? Yeah, I mean, I can definitely sympathize with, you know, growing up in the game. And I also grew up in the church of hockey and watching Rockham Sockham and, you know, some of my favorite highlights of seeing, you know, Felix Potvin and Ron Hexel go toe to toe and Patrick Waugh and Mike Vernon. I was a goalie growing up. So I always had this sort of perspective of, you know, like these tough goals that you jump out

and do a role that I can do. I also as a goaltender in the game, I also believe in the idea that you had to be protected by players, right? I understood the art of the cheap shot and that guys would come in and as a goal, you get hit in a certain way and someone would have to pay for that. And so, you know, there was this sort of, the rules of the game were sort of ingrained in me from a young age. And I never fought, but I definitely enjoyed watching fights.

I definitely was entertained by it in the same way. And I, but I do think now, you know, with hindsight and having written about it, having talked to many fighters in the past, people who, you know, have actually endured what was so entertaining, I look at hockey is, and this is the thing about hockey that I've thought for a long time. It loves to create mythologies about itself. Like, it loves to have this idea that, you know, this is the sport that, you know, this is the sport that doesn't really need the rules because the players can police it themselves. and we can sort of stand up and there's there's consequences for your actions. And, you know, there's this sort of like, this is sort of like, you know, that the game itself has this sort of natural way of eveninging itself out that we've enjoyed. And, you know, growing up, I living inside the game, I didn't really see how bizarre that looked.

You know, and, you know, Stu Grimson, when I was talking to him for this piece, mentioned, you know, talking to European hockey fans who described him, one of them described to him as a, I'm a bare, a bare knuckle fighter on ice. Like, and he was sort of like, this is bizarre, but like, that was the role. And he kind of chuckled at it, but I thought like, no, like that really was the position.

If you really break it down, what's happening is bare knuckle fighting on a surface that isn't safe. I mean, you can ask, let's see what happened to Nick Kiprio. So, no, this isn't like a thing where, you know, this is a ring where it's contained in a safe way. Like, this is an ice, ice surface is a dangerous place to be fighting. Like, just, if you just take out the, the sort of being ingrained in the game and growing up watching the entertained by it.

If you just sort of step outside of it and think about what's actually happening, you realize like this is, it's bizarre. I mean, it's bizarre that other sports don't have fighting in it, but hockey for some reason, the culture of it. And in a variety of, I think, fascinating reasons it became part of it, which I think is really interesting to dissect and look at. But is it necessary? Was it ever really necessary?

Or was it something that, you know, as Sean said very well, like we told ourselves because it was entertaining and it is entertaining. I mean, there is, it's adrenaline-packed. It's, you know, it's, this is, there's a, there's a bloodlust to it. It's, it's enjoyable. It's something that people, I think, if in the past, we wanted to watch, but, you know, is the game worse now without it? Yeah, I don't, I don't think so. I think hockey is entertaining because the sport itself is fast and it's, it's full of imagination and it's full of imagination and it's full of excitement.

and we watch for goals, we watch for saves, and we watch for wins. On the periphery fighting was always sort of that added thing. But I think now when we look at what it costs and what it does, it's hard to argue that, you know, the game is worse for having less of it. Okay. What about you, D&B? I can't lie. I mean, I grew up in, again, Mississauga, and I was a big leaf sand. And I was a six-year-old runner-round the house with the window Clark jersey.

He was my favorite player because he was a good player, very good player, but he could throw him. And I've then kind of progressed to Eric Lindross, who, again, like, he's in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but he was, you know, an amazing power forward that feared no one. And those ice dogs games I was talking about earlier, you know, I remember my dad dragging me out of one of the games because it was, you know, probably about three or four consecutive. effective fights, you know, in the last five minutes of a game where they didn't have, you know, rules like they do today where, you know, fights in the last five minutes, you know, are warrant stricter punishment. You know, by the fourth one, I said, okay, maybe. But I was disappointed to leave. I didn't know. You know, this is good stuff.

A real turning point for me, though, I think, came when I took the job at the Saskatoon Star, Phoenix. And it was a summer of 2011. And we experienced, you know, in the hockey world. the deaths of so many players that, you know, fighting was such a big part of their repertoire. I'm talking about Derek Bogart. I'm talking about Rick Rippen, Wade B. Lack. And that hit the hockey world very heavily, but those guys are all prairie guys. And that really impacted people, you know, in the prairies in Saskatchewan.

And I, you know, I think there's been a real turning point for me personally, since that time. You know, I always thought fighting was a big part of the game that it had a rule. And, you know, since that point, I've devolved from there and to the point where, you know, I don't think it has much of a role. You know, I respect, you know, the players, they're the ones on the ice that say that it keeps the game honest and those types of things. I get where they're coming from.

But, you know, I don't necessarily agree. And part of it maybe is, you know, if the league maybe called the rulebook properly or more consistently. There might be, and I think they've done a better job of that in the last couple of years, but we could see fighting even go further away still. But there is still that intimidation part of the game and trying to throw top players off their game. So, you know, I get it.

It's a complex issue. But, you know, what I always come back to, and David Branch, the Ontario Hockey League Commissioner mentioned this to me, is, you know, what are the biggest games that we see in the sport? You know, at the junior level, it's the Memorial Cup. world juniors. In the NHL, it's, you know, deep into the playoffs is certainly the Stanley Cup final, you know, the Olympics, if we ever get NHL players there again. But how often you see fights in any of those games? Never, almost never. Occasionally one might happen, but it's,

it's so rare. Part of that, of course, is it's best on best or the stakes are so high. where you know the the room or the role of somebody who can fight or is there strictly to fight there is there is no role or very limited role for that type of player

but you know a lot of it is the games are so important players don't want to take penalties you know it's certainly in international cases like the rules dissuade or don't allow fighting so

I mean Those are the games that we remember. We don't, even, even, you know, for the, for the blood list and the kind of the entertainment factor of a fight, nobody remembers the, you know, very few people, I should say, remember the Toronto Columbus game in February of 20, whatever, where there was a big fight. It's just, we remember the biggest games where, you know, Cindy Crosby scoring the overtime winning goal to win the Olympics or, you know, you know, Honor McDavid scores to be Calgary out of the playoffs or things of that nature. So that's where the game is at its highest. And fighting is, again, not really part of this game. It's kind of funny you mentioned the fact that, you know, we don't think about fighting

all that much and really big games that matter. The only one that comes to mind, and I'm sure Sean, the historian that he is, could think of another example. The only fight I can think of in a game where the stakes were everything was there to play for was when Jerome McGinland and Van Sauna Cavalier battled in the 2004 Stanley Cup finals. I don't remember in which game, but like that is like the one fight that stands out to me. I just want that mention, but also I want to say like, I think I'm on the same page as all of you guys. Like I remember like growing up liking, uh, fighting and growing up as a, as a

millennial in the YouTube era where people were putting together highlight packs and you're seeing people scrap and you're seeing people get hit really hard. If you, if you just, even just, I think we've all gone through this where we play, uh, we turn. Turn on EA Sports NHL and the intro has like, obviously they got their goals and some sick plays. They've got a lot of hitting. They've got a lot of fighting. And they have some really aggressive rock music in the background that gets you hyped up because that's what the game is supposed to be. And that's what so many people associate a lot of their early childhood memories to.

I remember growing up and watching the highlights of a Sabre Senators game where all hell breaks loose. And then we see Ray Emery and Martin Biron fighting each other before Andrew P. Peters gets in. There's a time where, especially when we're young and maybe we don't really know all that much better, like, fighting is like this really cool, really awesome thing. You're not thinking about the consequences. You're not thinking about the trauma. You're not thinking about the anxiety, as Dan was mentioning. Like, you're seeing people beat each other up and that's a cool thing. But Dan mentioned something really interesting with regards to, you know, if we take a step back and we look at how these fighters are, these are guys not just fighting on a surface of ice. They're

wearing knives on their feet, right? Like, God knows what could happen if things were to go wrong. One other fight I can think of as well is when George Perros was a Montchrock Canadian very briefly gets into a fight with Colton Orr gets knocked out. And everyone's just like, oh my God, like what's happening? Like, it's really interesting to see how fighting can be seen as this thing that brings so much entertainment value. But if you're not thinking about it too much, you're not thinking about all those consequences.

is you just kind of go with it. And I think especially over the last few years, there's definitely a generation of hockey fans who, like, you know, they're now coming into realizing the dangerous consequences that come with it. But they did not consider any of those in the first few years of their fandom. Yeah. And, you know, there's been, there's been ebbs and flows. There's been ups and downs.

But as you were talking, what really came to mind for me is one week. In fact, it's three days in 2004, March of 2004. One night, I want to say it's March 4th or the 5th, 2004. And just by saying that date, there's two fan bases who know exactly what I'm talking about, because it's the senators and the flyers. And they're playing a game. And it's, you know, it's rough. And, you know, there's some stuff going on.

But late in the game, a linebar all breaks out. Goalie fight, all of that stuff. But one team feels like the other team's taken back. I think it was the flyers that sent the tough guys out and the senators weren't really ready for it. So now the senators are mad. So now they send their tough guys out. And there's another line brawl right away. And then another.

And then another. Then Jason Spetz and Patrick Sharper getting in a fight. Meanwhile, the fans are losing their minds. That game holds the all-time record for the most penalty minutes ever handed out in a game. Partly because there's so many misconducts and gay misconducts at the end. But by the end of the game, there's nobody left on the bench. Like there's literally like Daniel Alpherson is sitting by himself on the senator's bench because everybody's been thrown out of the game. And oh boy, people are just loving it.

It was great. I mean, there was, you know, I think, you know, Rob Ray might have got, you know, cut up. But nobody got hurt. Everything was great. Oh, my goodness. All-time hockey. This was the greatest thing ever. Three nights later.

Vancouver, Colorado, Todd Bertusie, Steve Moore, incident. And there you have. something where, look, whatever you think of the code, that game heading into it, that was the code, right? Steve Moore, this guy, this nobody, this fourth liner had throwing a hit on Marcus Nazlin, injured Marcus Naslin, maybe clean, maybe not, but the Canucks didn't like it. Now the Canucks are going to get their payback. The code says, he's got to answer the bell. The code says they got to go out and get them. Well, what does it mean to get them? What does it mean to intimidate? What does all this stuff mean? We've all known what it means. It means you're

going to go out there and you're going to hurt the guy or you're at least going to make him think he's getting hurt and Todd Bertuzzi tracks him down he sucker punches him and course we all know the result of that Steve Moore never plays again but you go back and watch that clip when that when Bertuzzi's following him around the ice and it's clear what's going to happen and then he throws the punch and everyone piles on that crowd goes just as crazy as they had a few nights earlier in Philadelphia it was exactly the same thing all time hockey there you go that's what you get it's not until they start pulling guys off the pile and you realize Steve Moore isn't getting them.

And I really feel like that was a turning point for a lot of us because you're sitting there going, this wasn't some fluke thing. This wasn't some crazy thing that had happened. This was a guy saying, if you're not going to fight me, I'm going to punch you in the head. Which Bob Probert had done that a dozen times in his career. One of Clark had done that to guys. Lots of guys have done it.

But now you're sitting there looking at this kid getting stretched out of the ice going he's never going to play hockey again. Well, what did we think was going to happen? what were we really talking about all those years saying about, you know, go out and get your payback, get your, you know, intimidation, all this stuff. That's what we were talking about. And not that we wanted to see that happen, but it was inevitable. That was going to happen at some point if this is how you played the game. And it's just, it's amazing.

You go back even to this day, that flyer senators, big brawl, record penalty minutes. Nobody got hurt. People love it. People still say that was the greatest game I ever saw. That was so amazing. Steve Moore, tragedy, horrible thing. Todd Bertusie, awful guy. really what was the difference between those two other than you know what the the

roll of the dice came out differently for one guy and he never played again and and you know it just that was for me a turning point because again it was very hard for me to sit there and go how can we have these guys out there these enforcers trying to lay down the law uphold the code all of this stuff knowing that this could happen again and if and if it's not going to have how do you prevent it and I don't have an answer other than you got to you got to knock it off with the code and all this stuff. Very fair. Dan, I know D&B mentioned a turning point.

I know Sean's mentioned turning point. Do you have a turning point with regards to fighting that you'd like to share? I mean, I don't think I have a specific turning point, really, like in terms of a horrific moment. I mean, obviously, you know, Sean laid out. I mean, like, there's sort of, as I'm thinking now, I'm like, oh, yeah, there was that horrible incident. There was an incident. There's these moments that have sort of built along the way. But I think it's really just been sort of a change in the conversation.

I mean, D&B mentioned, obviously, you know, as these stories came out about these players dealing with opioid addiction and things that they're dealing with post their careers, the pain that are dealing with and the turmoil. For me, it's just sort of been a change in sort of almost like as you sort of grew as a fan and as someone, you know, reporting on the game, you really start to realize the toll, you know. And I think that for some it was a lot of like, oh, that's a one-off thing. Like what, you know, what Bertuzzi did with that was horrible. I mean, that was, that was something that, you know, we, oh, yeah, but then, you know,

every other fight is somehow different. But really, it's, you know, it's one slip. It's one fall one way. I mean, Ryan Banderbush, my spokesman, talked about how he injured, you know, Nickyprios that day. And that was the first time he thought about being injured himself when he was sitting in the bench and seeing this pool of blood on this, in this, you know, person that he, you know, was, smaller than on the ice in danger.

and obviously worried about his well-being, but then thinking like that could easily have been me. I mean, many times that that could have happened to me. And so I think that it's like for me, I think it's been the sort of progression of just this conversation constantly happening to a point where you start to think, okay, is this, like are we kind of beyond this now? And I think we have moved beyond it, but it seemed like this inevitable thing as we saw these things building. You know, if you go back, I mean, you know, as, um, do you.

can be mentioned before that, you know, like no one watches, no one wins off of fighting. I mean, in the first piece of this series, it's quite interesting I mentioned, like the Broad Street Bullies did win because of their intimidation. I mean, they did win in the two straight Stanley Cups by being, as argued, one of the, you know, toughest, most intimidating teams. And that, I think, was the beginning of a mythology about if you want to win the Stanley Cup, if you want to be a champion, you have to, you have to be able to defend yourself and intimidate other teams.

And we talk about, you know, it's one thing for fans and media to be like, oh, get fighting out of the game. But really, it's the players that are, I think, going to, you know, they're the ones saying we, you know, the Sean was saying earlier, a lot of them still, you know, has a role to play in the game. I mean, that's building up over time. That's sort of a culture within the game. And I think that that's something that is interesting because we're seeing now that you don't need to have fighters in your team to win. You don't need, you don't need to be, like, you need to maybe maybe to be physical, but you don't need to have some. someone that can go out and just like destroy and on that team to win.

And so I think that there's been a change. And it's going to continue to change. As kids playing right now and inevitably playing junior don't see fighting in the game the same way and don't fight the way they used to, whether or not we think it should exist, hockey is, I think going, or fighting is going to be eradicated from hockey. Just because at the grassroots level on up, it's not what it was for people our age that grew up watching hockey and saw fighting as an entertaining, necessary component within it. It's just changed. And so with that culture shift, I think inevitably we'll see it become extinct. D&B, I'll let you get last word in here. Just any final thoughts with regards to fighting, how you may be wrestling with it.

I don't know if it's fair to say you've grown out of it, but just covering the sport and also seeing the entertainment value, but also recognizing the troubles that do come with it or anything else you want to add. I think I just wanted to kind of touch on a few things. my colleagues just mentioned there. I thought Dan made a pretty good point about the, you know, the 70s flyers. And, you know, being in Edmonton and covering the Oilers, we look at the 80s, where there's this team of, and certainly they are, of superstars, like some of the greatest players to ever play the game, you know, Gretzky and Messier and coffee, you know, I'd say

Grant Fear, depending on where you rely on his goaltending or whatnot. But those teams also had a lot of tough guys. Those battles, you know, with the Calgary Flames were some of the most epic, not just because of the skill, but because we had Kevin McClellan for the Oilers fighting, you know, Tim Hunter of the Flames or you can go down the list of guys, you know, Jim Polblinsky was certainly a tough guy for Calgary or, you know, there were no shrinking pilots, Dave Semenko on the Oilers. But the Oilers obviously won their cups on their skills. And to Dan's point, I mean, you look at the Colorado Avalanche last year, Josh Manson is certainly a tough guy. His dad, assistant coach is the Oilers, Dave Manson, one of the toughest players to ever play the game.

And Josh is, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree in terms of father and son there. But Josh can play. Not that Dave couldn't, but Josh doesn't, you know, is fighting is not the only thing he can do. I'll go to what Sean said about, you know, we obviously been talking about the Steve Moore-Todhbertusi incident. And I guess the one thing about that was Steve Moore did fight in that game.

He fought Matt Cook. He quote-unquote answered the bell for this nebulous code that nobody has, you know, written down and continues to change based on what serves the purpose of the players involved. So, you know, by the letter of the law in the supposed code, you know, that should have been it. He answered the bell. He fought Matt Cook. But, you know, that's obviously not the way things played out as everyone knows. So, you know, that's where I, as I touched on earlier, if the game was called a bit more promptly to the letter of the law.

And I know there's a bit of an issue with that because people don't want to see a million power plays in the game. people want to see five by five. And you're kind of coming out of that, you know, 2005 lockout where, you know, there were a lot of penalties and that, you know, wasn't necessarily the type of game people wanted to see. But there's kind of that push-pull scenario there. And then to go back, I guess, to something Dan said about, you know,

fighting isn't really, you know, part of the game. People, you know, the younger players don't grow up with it. You know, I liken that to, again, that rules package. I mean, Connor McDavid has played his entire career. I'm not just talking about the NHL. I'm talking about his entire hockey career from the time he was a little kid with the, you know, with the game called, you know, with the intention of the game being called where, you know, you can't water ski behind somebody. You can't, you can't hook and hold and play the game that, you know, really hurt hockey in the late 90s and early 2000s. You know, obviously there was a couple playoffs ago where he didn't get a penalty called against him. in the Winnipeg series, and that kind of opened the alarm bells a little bit, but I think he certainly saw the way he could play in the playoffs last year when the game is called properly.

So, you know, I think a lot of it does go back to having, again, the rules being called properly. But players are going to kind of adapt, as Dan said, to the way that the game is today. And as I touched on earlier, I mean, you know, darn on ours going back to Susibri to train with, some players, I mean, the construction of the lineups and the skill and the type of players that are being put into these lineups is vastly different than it was even, you know, 10 years ago.

And I think that's only going to change because of the way that the game has evolved. Thank you, Dan, Sean, and D&B. We're going to take a quick break before we bring in Robert Rossi and Kevin Kurz to talk more about fighting. This is the Athletic Hockey Show. And we're back with Robert Rossi and Kevin Kurz. who are going to discuss their pieces, and they're working for those pieces of the series of fight content we've put up for the last few days here at the athletic. Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me.

I know you guys have busy schedules. Happy to be here, Julian. Anything I can hang out with Rob is a good time, too. Yeah. Yeah, I got to say, man, like getting the opportunity to, you know, obviously doing it with Kev, like, you're cool. But Robert, like, come on, double R. Like that's that's OG.

OG, yeah, that makes me feel old, but thank you. Emphasize on the O. Yeah. Let's get it to some of these pieces you guys were working on. Kevin, I know you were working on a story about former enforcers who are working in the league as coaches and analysts and scouts. What can you tell us about putting that story together and the people you talked to for that piece? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was interesting just because obviously, you know, know, if people are reading this series, one of the primary themes is fighting is sort of being

phased out of the game. But you have so many guys that were in their heyday as players, they were in the league because they were fighters, whether that's Craig Barubi, who won a Stanley Cup with the St. Louis Blues. You have two very good analysts, in my opinion, Jody Shelley and Stu Grimson on the NHL network and Jody's working with the Blue Jackets. Dave Brown, who was one of the toughest guys in the 80s. One of the most feared fighters in the 80s has been a long-time scout, both for the Rangers and the Flyers. So, and then, you know, there's other guys, too, that are still working in coaching and maybe sort of working their way up. And Bob Boogner's one example. He's already reached the top, but he's now an assistant with the Detroit Red Wings. And Ian LaPereer,

who's the Flyers, H.L coach, right? All of those guys had to fight in order to keep their spots in the lineup. And, you know, the interesting part of that to me is that if you look at the league, I think, and you're not very familiar with that aspect of the game, you think these guys are just on their respective teams benches in order to fight. And with the, with the, you know, when you're thinking of just a fighter, you might think of someone who's not all that intelligent, someone who, you know, the stereotypes start to take over a little bit. But in fact, it's, the opposite. These guys are some of the smartest guys, I think, on their team, some of the guys that are most in tune with the little details of the game because they need to be. Because if they aren't,

the other fighter that's in the HL or in one of the minor leagues is going to come up and take their spot. So I think because of their unique experiences and the unique roles they had to play in the game, allowed them to be, you know, sort of hyper-aware to all the things around them. And, you know, Bob Boogner, I thought, had a great line. He said, you basically become part of the identity of the team. And that was, you know, Dave Brown was part of the identity of the 80s Flyers. Craig Barubi was part of the identity. Also, you know, the teams he was on, whether it was Philadelphia, Calgary or whatever. And when you're a part of the identity of the team, you maybe take a bigger stake in the team and you feel a little bit more compelled to, you know, push guys,

maybe push the star players or help out the coaching staff. So it was that aspect I thought I wanted to take a little bit of a closer look at. That's cool. And Robert, what could you tell us about the piece you worked on with Joe Smith and Ashon McIndoo? We got Sean to talk about in the first part of our show from his standpoint. He had a little bit more historical context, but we know you were doing some interviews as well. What can you tell us about your part? Yeah, Joe and I think talked to well over a dozen people.

and what we wanted to do was sort of capture the voices that could speak to the evolution of fighting from some touch-tone moments. One of the things that I found really interesting, I was talking with Scott Bowman, legendary NHL coach, he has won the Stanley Cup, what was it, like 700,000 times. Probably the greatest coach to ever play the game, if not the greatest coach. Only the greatest coach to ever play the game, right. And he talked to, he spoke to how he was never a fan of fighting. And that he doesn't think it's really the deterrent that so many people speak to when it comes to fighting.

But, you know, and he even said how he felt like if they would suspend people more or really punish, you know, severely with not just a five-minute major. but, you know, other ways to sort of deter fighting. But at the same time, it was his St. Louis Blues teams that were, that had players on them that could play but also fight. That sort of gave rise to the Broad Street bullies in the 70s. You know, Scott even said that one of the things that he heard Ed Snyder say after the Blues beat the flyers in successive playoffs in the late 60s was that nobody would ever beat up the flyers again. And that gave birth to the Broad Street bullies, which I think because of their success and their popularity in the 70s, they won the Stanley Cup twice, sort of gave rise to the heyday of the sort of late 70s into the 80s through the 90s, these sort of line brawls that we spoke to that don't really happen anymore. We also had a chance to have conversations with people that were involved in sort of the last really notorious. line brawl between the Rangers and Devils in 2012 and sort of what a what a facade that was how

you know John Portobella came into the dressing room after seeing the Devils line up and was like well I don't want to put you guys in this position but what are we what are we supposed to do this is you know I think his his phrase was this is junior hockey crap and so we tried to run the gamut Obviously, we focused a lot, too, on the Detroit-Colada rivalry in the 90s. But basically what we wanted to do, and I think what we successfully did was just sort of show how this has evolved in the NHL and also where it might be going. Because it's not a thing that if you talk to people, it's not a thing. I don't know, Kevin, your thoughts on this. It's not ever going to go away completely.

But it's certainly different. And in the last decade, it has certainly changed. compared to what we knew, some of us who've been around the game covering it a lot longer, you know, we kind of got anesthetized, I think, to just being used to sort of these big heavyweight champions. And they don't really exist anymore because there's not really a division for them to which to fight in. That's true. That's just, that's very well said. Let's talk a little bit more about fighting and just the fact that, you know, we've all grown up as fans, well, all enjoyed the game. Like, how do you guys both feel about fighting in, in general,

in the game? Like, we, we, we, we, we can't really eradicate it with the way the game was just played. But what about in the older days when it was more of a thing? And it was, we didn't think about the consequences so much. How did you guys feel about it? You know, I, I worked for the Flyers organization. Growing up in Philly, I mean, it was so ingrained in the culture there. And, and even, you know, when I was there in the mid-2000s, even then, it was still something. that they wanted to actively market. There was a guy there, Riley Cote was his name. And the only reason he was in the lineup was to fight.

And there he is on billboards and on, you know, septa buses. So, you know, the fact that even then it was still something that they were trying to, you know, promote to the fan base, you know, I know we've gotten away from that a little bit. But, you know, Rob, I'm sure you would agree. in games now where there are fights, and there was one I saw this season covering the Islanders and the Flyers. They had, I forget what sparked it, but the next game, the Islanders dressed Ross Johnston, who's only in the lineup to fight somebody. And there were two fights within the first 10 seconds, and the fans loved it. So, you know, the fact that maybe teams aren't going to market it the same way that they used to.

But like you said, Julian, you know, I don't think it's ever going to go. away just because of the fact that it is still something that is unique in this game. There haven't been any, fortunately, there haven't been any events yet where someone's gotten seriously killed, you know, seriously injured in the moment. Maybe over the course of time, some of these guys in the 80s, we've seen some of the after effects of that. But there hasn't been really that jarring moment yet, right, where, you know, at least that I can remember, that sort of maybe been, would have been, it would be a catalyst for them to phase it out. But I still think there's a place for it when it comes to, you know, if there's a guy that's

out there running around and taking liberties against a star player, my opinion, I do think that he should have to, you know, maybe drop the gloves in order to, you know, answer for the way that this guy might play the game. That's funny, you know, Kev, I mentioned this to somebody when I was working on the the story, I bought my parents' tickets to the Flyers Penguins' first game in Pittsburgh for Christmas. They just played it recently. And my mom was disappointed because when she grew up watching hockey in the 60s and 70s, she was just used to seeing fights. So if there's a Flyers Penguin game, that's the oldest rival for each team. There's not a fight. She's disappointed. And I covered a game

recently. I think it was between the Penguins and the Islanders when there were some fights. And the crowd in Pittsburgh went nuts. And that's a crowd that is used to sort of playing a sort of watching a skilled hockey. I mean, their players are sort of legendary for being scorers, not fighters. I guess my thoughts on it changed the night that, you know, and our colleague Arthur Staples was there too, and he wrote a great story about it years ago, about the Long Island brawl between the penguins and islanders,

where I remember being at the rinked almost two in the morning that night waiting for the NHL to send the official penalty minute. And at one point, there were just guys at each end of the ice fighting, and there were only like five players for each team on the actual benches. And I just remember thinking, this was a circus. I do see a place for it in the game. I do see, and I think that's because of this, it still remains the only sport where there's no out of bounds.

And I don't know how you get around having a physical sport that's played as fast as it is that involves a stick, which is a weapon, let's be honest. Um, things will happen in a game that are going to lead to over the course of an 82 game season. You're going to have these moments when guys are trying to get themselves motivated, get themselves juiced, or for whatever reason, somebody's going to do something that it's going to force in that moment a dropping of the gloves. Because of now the helmet rule, you can't take your own helmet off. Um, because of the visor rule that, you know, there are so few players not wearing visors that weren't grandfathered in. I think the league's done a very good job of limiting the opportunities for fights. But I also think there is a, there's an inevitability of it that you can't take out of the game.

What I'm against primarily are the staged fights where it's, you know, guys that are fighting just to fight to try to sort of change momentum. I don't mind if a guy is protecting his teammate. But if you're just, and he has a willing dance partner. But if it's just, you know, to change momentum, I'm not as big a fan of that. And I have no tolerance for a clean big hit leading to a necessary fight. I've never understood that. I like body checking in the game. I like clean body checking in the game.

I don't think you should have to answer for throwing a clean hit. And I know I've covered a lot of guys that were known for sort of towing that line, but they put a lot of effort into hitting, learning how to hit clean. that feel that way. I also covered Matt Cook, who was not a clean hitter. And I remember when he had to answer for a very famous hit, he delivered in Pittsburgh against the Boston Bruins. And when he went up to Boston,

you know, there were tabloids in Boston that had like wanted dead or alive pictures with Cook's or front pages with Cook's picture on it. And Cookie was not a fighter, but he knew he had to answer the bell that game. So, and I think, In those situations, you know, you have to do it. But I guess we don't have to make it a facade or would you use a hockey term, a gong show. And that's where I come down against it.

You covered Matt Cook. I covered Rafi Torres, so I think we covered the two guys that are pretty much at the top. That's true. The mega powers of antagonists, right? You know, the players to me, you know, from talking to players throughout the course of however long I've been doing this, the one type of player that other players in the dressing room can't stand is the guy that does go out there and takes runs and maybe does tow the line, but then doesn't drop the gloves. He doesn't answer for his actions. And that's the kind of guy that I think,

you know, when you talk to players and I think the majority of them are still fine with the state of fighting, and I think most of them are fine with the fact that fighting is still part of the game. I think that's the biggest reason why is because maybe there aren't as many of them now as they used to be, but the Matt Cooks and the Rafi Torres is they weren't fighters per se, but they would both drop the gloves right when they had to, or at least every once in a while. But it was the guys that would do that and would take runs and would maybe play a little bit dirty that wouldn't drop the gloves that I think, you know, those are the guys that I think that certainly their opponents just didn't. respect them as much in the long run. And maybe some of their teammates didn't either because

I still think that the prevailing thought with most of the players in the game today is if you're going to go out there and you're going to play physical and you're going to walk that line and the Islanders that I'm covering right now have several of those guys, the Cal Clutterbucks, the Matt Martins. You know, they will fight when, when, you know, they feel like they have to maybe justify a big hit or justify a hit that might have been

a borderline hit. And I'll say this, covering a team that's had a lot of stars during the Cindy Crosby area here in Pittsburgh, those stars feel more comfortable when they have somebody on the ice to protect them.

And I also think an element of this and why maybe it's been glorified over the years is that fans love it and also fighters, because of what they do, the guys that are willing to fight tend to be more accountable

they tend to be more media accessible. They don't really shy away from that. And it's sort of a feed the beast mentality, right? The fans love it. You talk to a guy who did it. He's usually willing to talk about it because he doesn't get a lot of accolades, you know, outside of his dressing room for a lot. And those guys do, as Kevin said,

they kind of become part of the fabric, the identity of their franchise. That's true. The closest I can come to relating with you guys with five, well, Milan Luch. which is a pretty good guy to cover. And to your point about accessibility, almost every time we ask for him,

he's made himself available. He's also, I think he's a little bit smarter than a lot of people might, or at least that he might let on. Like, I find him to be very eloquent and very well spoken whenever we need him to talk.

Also, when you had mentioned the penguins and the flyers, it's not that long ago. They had a playoff series where they essentially beat each other up the entire time. And that was arguably the most entertaining playoff series

of that spring and summer in 2012, if I remember correct. Yeah, there were no saves by the goalies, a bunch of fights by the stars. Sidney Crosby got into a fight with Claude, James Neal got suspended. I mean, and look, if we eventually go back to a league where you are going to play more divisional games, I mean, you know, Kevin can speak to this, having worked for the Flyers. That's when you see it a lot. When you see a time, when you see a team for the fourth time in a season, or a sixth time in the season.

At one point, believe it or not, I won't have to remember when you played a team eight times in a season. And when you do that, it becomes sort of, you just get sick of the other guys. And that's what I mean. There's no out of balance in hockey.

And I don't mean to sound like an, you know, an old guard type guy in that, but that is an element of this. In football, you can, you know, there's close combat, but there's an out of balance. There's a sideline area.

In baseball, there are dugouts. In basketball, there are benches. There's nowhere to go in hockey. So when something like that escalates very quickly, I think part of it is just this very natural reaction of competitive guys that, like, they go back to being boys. And what's the first thing we, and again, I'm not justifying it. I'm just trying to explain it.

What's the first thing you did when you got heated on the playground playing any sport? You kind of started throwing swings. Not necessarily the intention of hurting that person. It was just sort of part of that intensity. And usually afterwards, it was like, hey, man, I'm sorry. You know, but because of that, I think that's where you initially had this develop. And then it got, look, it became a thing. And Slapshot plays into this, too.

The popularity of that movie does play into a lot of non-hockey fans. know the game through other pop cultural references. And you can say Broad Street bullies to casual hockey fans in the United States, and they go right to Flyers, 70s. They know what you're talking about. You say Big Bad Bruins, and they go right to, you know, not Bobby Orr, but sort of the fisticuffs. And I remember when I covered the Penguins and Flyers in the early part of the Crosby era,

there was a marketing campaign. Kevin was it, vengeance now. I was there for that. And it was such a part of the Flyers identity. You knew it. And I also used to laugh

because the Flyers' best teams in the long as I've been covering the league weren't necessarily fighters. They were skilled teams. So, and you know, the other thing is, Julian, the salary cap has eradicated it because there's just,

there's not enough room under the cap to pay a guy that is just going to be a fighter now. He has to be able to do other things. That's very true. Kevin, I know Robert kind of mentioned a fight that kind of served as like a turning point with him in fighting. I'd like to know if you have one that stands out in your mind. Well, you know, I wrote that long oral history about the fight in 87 between the Flyers and the Canadians that sort of brought the end of bench clearing brawls to the league. And that was interesting just for me, not just because I was a little kid when that happened. It's really one of my first memories as a little kid watching sports is watching the Flyers and the Canadians brawl and pregame. But what was interesting to me was hearing some people talk after the fact about how that was sort of the moment where they realized if they're going to make the game more accessible to a broader audience, they had to get that sort of clown.

show stuff out of the game. And that was a complete, you used the phrase gong show, Rob. I mean, that was like the ultimate gong show of the 80s when you had one guy out there running around in his flip-flops. He had Dave Brown without a jersey. He had no refs in sight. Everyone just sort of running around and fights breaking out on one end and then it would calm down. And then another fight would break out on the other end of the rink. So that was that was certainly one, I think, major turning point when it came to fighting and it came to the sport becoming more popular and again, maybe more appealing to advertisers and television networks and that sort of thing, right? But still, there's a fine line. So it's like,

you don't want to return to that. Nobody wants to see 20 guys out there with no jerseys fighting for 15 minutes before the game even starts. But do you want to eradicate it completely because then maybe, you know, it turns some people off that that do still enjoy that aspect of the game. So, you know, I think where they're at right now, in my opinion, it's in a pretty good place where sometimes fights will happen. Some, you know, we don't really see the staged fights anymore. Every once in a while, you'll get a team that puts in, you know, like the other, was it two years ago when the Capitals and the Rangers started off that game with a line brawl because of Tom Wilson, right? I mean, that to me was fine.

I know a lot of people didn't like that. I was fine with that. That was something that, you know, there was clearly, there was a reason behind it. Even if you don't agree with the reason, it was the sort of thing that you had to get all that emotion out. You got it out with those lines, you know, with the three straight fights or whatever it was. And everybody moves on. So to me, they're in a good place now with all that stuff. It's not the 80s anymore.

And that it's also not, you know, ice capades. Julian, you're younger than us, but I mean, if I say the words Red Wings Avalanche, what comes to your mind? Both teams beating each other up and Dino Cicerelli being pissed off at Clodl-Lum. That's the first thing that comes to mind. And that's considered the greatest modern rivalry of the last 30 years. As much as I would like to say, hey, man, I saw a lot of playoff series between the Penguins and Capitals and Crosby and Ovechkin and three straight years. And there were some moments in that. when you talk about rivalries, you know, the most celebrated one is one that involved, you know,

guys beating the living tar out of each other, a guy not even fighting back in that situation. So unfortunately for this league, it is a double-edged sword. And I do think if you're ever going to get rid of it, it's probably going to have to be something that's stricken down like everything else at the junior level, at the youth hockey level. And one thing that I found interesting talking to the guys, and I know Joe Smith heard this too, talking to the guys that are fighters, most of them don't want people fighting not at the NHL level. They feel like the development of younger, you know, development of teenagers' brains and that should sort of preclude that. That when you get up to the NHL and you're making big money, it's a choice you can make. But it isn't a choice you should have to have.

and what we've seen with the Ontario Hockey League, or sorry, excuse me, the Quebec Hockey League. Well, both of them have rules with regards to that. And Daniel Nugent Bowman has a piece that's dropping tomorrow that'll go in on that. Right, but that's where you're going to see an end at the NHL level. Just because everything at the NHL level, it's ended gradually. I just don't know if you're ever going to take away the emotion that leads to the sort of sudden

you know, I call them the berserker moments. When guys just the gloves, you see it, right? Usually it's in the corner of an end zone and the gloves drop. Next thing you know, there's three or four guys pulling somebody off because they're just, they just want to go. And I mean, it looks more, it looks more like a Hollywood movie fight than it does a fight from yesterday year. That's true. That's true. I was just thinking the whole time when we're thinking of all these different things that,

obviously with fighting, with how people think about it, there's that running joke all the time. It's like you, you go to a fight and a hockey game breaks out or something like that. Like, I don't know what it's going to take for, for viewers to kind of get out of that mindset of just thinking,

okay, well, fighting is the big draw. But I think we still live in that world where, especially for casual people who don't watch hockey and know fighting and no hockey to be that as fighting. I think that also has to play a role in the changing of the sport if we ever want to be at a point where we're fighting is, and I'm not saying, I get there are people who wouldn't

necessarily want it, but if people want to eventually go to that route where we want, where they want to take fighting completely out of the game, I think something has to be done with how people consume the game who are not necessarily as in tune with the league as we, as us three and other people at the athletic might be. Yeah, I agree with that. But I also feel like the NHL becomes an easy target, too, because if you watch enough NFL games, you'll see fights break out. If you watch the NBA, there's routinely sort of, I mean, it's usually a shoving match, but you'll see punches traded. Baseball has, baseball has this. They have dugout clearing brawls that are, you know, that involve 70-year-old men. I remember one between the Red Sox and the Yankees that involved, I think it was, was it, Don Zimmer, right? John Zimmer, yeah. John Zimmer, getting thrown to the ground by Pedro Martinez.

I'm not suggesting hockey is unfairly categorized in this because there's been more of it in hockey. But it, you know, I think for those of us that cover the sport, we can point to other things. And we can also always point to this. Usually the best hockey that we get to cover or watch as a consumer is the Stanley Cup playoffs. And there's very little fighting in that because the games matter too much. I've always thought too with those other sports, you know, you watch a basketball fight or a baseball fight. I mean, they're not on skates. It feels like the potential for someone to get really hurt is much higher in, you know, two guys squaring off on a basketball court or on a baseball field. Then, you know, we've seen so many hockey fights that really they just turned into wrestling matches and no one, no one lands any punches and they either get split up by the linesmen or they, you know, they fall to the ice.

and they wrestle around a little bit. So I do wonder if that has a little bit something to do with it, too. Is it just, you know, when you watch a hockey fight, most times, you're not going to see someone get knocked out or even land a punch. And when you do, it's horrifying. I saw Aaron Ashum knockout Jay Beagle. True. And, I mean, it sent, we all cringed.

You could feel it through the entire arena. And, you know, Asham spoke about how he knew the next game. He was going to have to answer for that. He didn't try to knock him out. That's the problem with fighting, right? The fundamental problem is something always is there to go terribly wrong. Because once you lose your cool like that, you can't bring it back. And I think that's where a lot of us have evolved sort of thinking, like maybe the danger of it isn't worth the other sort of arguments we make in favor of it.

That's fair. Any final thoughts with regards to fighting or wrestling with the weird entertainment value that it does bring while also the dangers of it? I can let you guys speak one more time and then we'll wrap it up. Final thoughts. I don't have any final thoughts other than I think that if you're a casual fan now and you're watching hockey, I do think we're reaching a point now where more fans are being drawn to the sport, not because of. of fighting, but because there are these younger skilled players that are coming up. And obviously, that's a good thing. You know, I think I have two young nephews that I, they're playing hockey right now and they're not playing hockey because they weren't drawn into the sport because of the fighting. They were drawn into the sport because of, I mean, they're in Arizona, so I'm trying to think of any good coyotes from the last few years. But, you know, they go to coyotes. Clayton Keller is killing it this year? Yeah, all right, that's a good one. I mean, you know,

And obviously the Connor McDavid's and the Nathan McKinnons and the guys like that. So I think that's a good thing that more and more people are being drawn to the sport now. Again, not because of the fighting. Whereas if you go back even 10, 15 years ago, I think there were a lot more people that were fans of hockey because they were fans of fighting, frankly. And I think that's starting to decline a little bit, which again, I think is a good thing. Yeah, I guess my final thought is the game's becoming too fast and too. skilled to have fighters in the league, and that's probably to have pure fighters, you know, enforcers in the league. And that's probably good. But unless we see a day where Gordy Howe Hatrick

isn't something that is celebrated, I don't know that we're going to see a day without fighting. I think that's very well said. Thank you so much, Kevin and Robert, for giving me your time. Really appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Athletic Hockey Show. please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and leave a rating and review. We'd really appreciate it. Special thanks. Big thanks to Chris Flannery for editing the show and helping to plan this special edition in conjunction with our series.

It's really, really appreciated on his part that he was able to take time to help make this happen. So thank you, Chris. And we'll be back again for the Monday show with Ian Mendez. Follow us on YouTube. YouTube.com slash at the athletic hockey show. And right now, get a one-year subscription to The Athletic for just $1 a month when you visit theathletic.com slash hockey show.