OK, is this really an issue?

[Occhidiangela]

It's like boxing or any other consentual full-contact sport.
[right][snapback]72232[/snapback][/right]

Horsecrap, pure and simple friend Dee. Fistfights in football are BS also, and get people suspended. Boxing is fighting with no pretense to other types of scoring, as is judo and "Ultimate Fighting." Your comparison is absolute nonsense.

I like a fast paced, well played hockey games. The "obligatory" fist fights piss me off immensely as a sports fan. I stopped watching Hockey at all about six years ago. The NHL are supposed to be professionals. They hardly show that they know what that word means.

Fighting, as opposed to checking, in Hockey is a crock of crap, and one of the banes of the sport, just as the bench clearing brawl is a bane to baseball, and Shaq is an embarassment to the NBA with his "in the key" thuggery.

Hockey got a huge boost in the US in about 1980, when Olympic Hockey, which tends to not have the idiotic thuggery of the NHL and other leagues, stormed our TV screens with superb play and a completely improbable US Gold Medal. Right on top of that, Wayne Gretzky and a handful of classy hockey players (a number of them Finns) emerged as stars in the NHL, and moved the game away from the thuggery of the 1970's that damned near killed the league. Mario Lemieux likewise. (Yes, I know, Paul Coffey and Marty McSorely were The Great One's enforcers . . . and Mark Messier takes crap from no one.) With the greater density of skilled Europeans entering the NHL, there need not be room made on rosters for thugs.

A good hard check, and the crowd pleasing check into the boards, is great stuff within the rules, just as a good hard tackle in football is a crowd pleaser. That is the good contact in the contact sport element of Hockey. Idiots engaging in fisticuffs on the ice is not only not entertaining, it disrupts the SPORT wherein SPORTSMANSHIP is part of the package.

If hockey ever cleaned up its act, the artistry of a well played hockey would once again be the dominant theme of the game.

"I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out." That kind of thinking almost killed the NHL in the 1970's. If the NHL dies the death it deserves in its current post-Gretzky self immolation, it will be a damned shame, but the sport will have brought it on itself due to a lack of vision.

Hockey is a great sport. We have the Ice Rays "AA" rated team here in Corpus Christi, of all bloody places. But as long as hockey above juniors forget that the play is the thing, it will never reach the artform that it has the potential to reach.

A contact sport is NOT by definition a blood sport.

Occhi