by Ken Dryden
But ask them, ask any player, if they would do it all again if they knew. Their answer is: “Of course. I loved to play. I’m a player. I loved playing even before I got all that money and attention. I loved being with the guys. I loved what we all went through together. I love the memories and feelings I still have. Any other life wouldn’t be me. Even if I do have some regrets and wishes—and who doesn’t—it’s who I am. Why would I reject my own life? How could I? If I did, what would I have left?”
But is this the only choice a player has? Was it for Steve? Is it the only choice for all those who now play and who will play in the future? Why is the only choice this game—the game as it is now—or not playing hockey at all? Why can’t the choice be between a tough, collision game—of cuts and bruises, tears, separations, and breaks, knee replacements and hip replacements-to-be; of rare, random, accidental concussions—and a game that is just as exciting to play and watch, but where a player is less vulnerable to the big injuries, to the injuries that change a life? Why isn’t that the choice?
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What would it take?
Not that much.
Speed is hockey’s most defining element. It is also hockey’s greatest vulnerability. When a game starts in motion, when the puck moves from stick to stick and end to end, when the baton gets passed from player to player to player to player every forty seconds, when minutes pass—it’s as if, as fans, we forget to breathe. Then a whistle, then a breath, then all the oohs and ahhs that have been stored up. Then the game starts up again. Baseball is a game to savour. Hockey is a game to feel.
Almost anybody can do almost anything if they are given enough time to do it. But then try to do the same thing at thirty-five kilometres an hour. Try doing it with a 225-pound (plus equipment) opponent or two coming at you, also at thirty-five kilometres an hour. Speed separates the gifted from the adept, the courageous from the big and strong. From its beginnings, hockey was called “the fastest game on Earth.” And it was—and over time it has learned to become faster. The ice got better, skates got better, coaches got smarter, shifts got shorter, players got fitter, rules changed. Now, more than 140 years after that first game in Montreal, there is almost nothing that stands in the way of speed, or the consequences of speed: the increased number of collisions; the force of these collisions; the increased severity of brain injuries.
Sports has always been a compromise between performance and safety. In skiing, we learn to control our speed so that when we go down a hill we don’t smash into a tree; and knowing that we won’t, we can learn to ski faster. In hockey, we learn to stop so we don’t crash into the end boards; so we can learn to skate faster. Safety doesn’t need to hold us back. It can make us better. Just as goalie masks made goalies better, safety can enhance performance.
Compromise doesn’t need to be a bad word. We say that to be good at anything today you have to go all out. You cannot hold back. You cannot leave anything in the tank, because if you do—in business, politics, sports—the other guy won’t, and the other guy will win, and you won’t. Steve Montador was an all-out guy; if he wasn’t, he would never have made the NHL. The league is filled with hundreds of Steves, and family rooms and bars are filled with thousands of guys who were like Steve but who weren’t all-out, who did hold back and didn’t make it. This is an all-out era. Compromisers lose.
But sport is a contest. It is something we create, and if we don’t find it interesting or fun, we don’t do it, or we change it, just as early pond hockey players did in Nova Scotia in the 1800s in the trial-and-error games they played, and just as it was at McGill in 1875. Just as it has been in all the decades since. Players play and coaches coach, and in all the other non-game hours of their day, they dream and scheme. What can I do different than I did yesterday? What can I do better? What is more challenging, more interesting, more satisfying, more fun? What can I do that the other guy can’t? What can I do to win? Hockey is always changing and has always changed, because players and coaches have always changed it. Imagine playing or watching a game with no substitutions, no changing on the fly, no forward passes, and five-minute or two-minute shifts played at a snail’s crawl.
There is speed that makes sense, and speed that doesn’t. We could bring back hooking and holding to slow down the game, but that would reward what we want to reject. We could bring back the red line for offside passes, but that would clog up the open-ice play we want to encourage. We could limit shift length, or changing on the fly, but that would be too restrictive and complicated. We could play four-on-four during regulation time as we once did in overtime, to encourage puck possession, to give extra space to players who have the talent to use it, who know how to slow play down and to speed it up. Modern players have the open-ice skills to play four-on-four without embarrassing themselves. Perhaps someday that might be the answer, but not now.
Two small changes might make a big difference.
First, we need to see “finishing your check” as what it is: interference. Finishing your check once didn’t exist even as a phrase in hockey, because the circumstances needed for it to occur in a game didn’t exist. The game was too slow; finishing your check requires speed. And when it did come about, it happened by accident. In the 1950s and 1960s, passing increased, but not all passes—especially by those more used to advancing the puck by stickhandling—hit their intended target. As a bad pass slid uncontrolled into an opponent’s zone, the attacking team did what was left for it to do: it chased after the puck, trying to regain possession. It forechecked. Forechecking was an attempt by a team to neutralize the disadvantage it had created for itself. It was a default strategy, and finishing your check was its unintended consequence.
Forechecking grew in use, especially after the NHL doubled the number of its teams in 1967 and minor league players with minor-league skills became instant major-leaguers. For these players and their coaches, forechecking needed to become not just a strategy, but the strategy. But for it to work, lesser-skilled players had to get themselves on top of their quicker, more skilled opponents before they could pass the puck to their teammates. If they didn’t get there in time, but almost did, and if they were moving too fast to peel off to try and catch up to the play, what could they do? Many just continued forward, crashed into their opponent, and waited for the referee to deliver his justice. But most often—happily, surprisingly for them—that justice never came. The referee let play go on. It was the referees, not the players, who adapted. Their reasoning seemed to be that the player almost got there in time; he was going fast and, like a driver putting on his brakes momentarily before powering through an amber light, looked like he was trying to stop. Besides, in an expanded league where disadvantage was the norm, forechecking and finishing your check offered an opportunity for lesser teams and lesser players to balance the larger injustice of an uncompetitive league. Finishing your check seemed a small price to pay.
But what about the injustice to the player who races back to get the puck; who, under the threat of a speeding body coming at him far more prepared for impact than he is, endangers his health or, risking a turnover, makes a pass before he is ready; who, if he does make a successful play, finds that it is to no advantage to himself or to his team because he has been taken out of the play by his opponent anyway—an opponent who, arriving late, made an unsuccessful play yet was not penalized for doing so because finishing your check is part of forechecking, and forechecking is part of the game?
By the mid-1980s, things had gotten even worse. With Gretzky and the Oilers and the growing European influence, with passes and not just a dump-and-chase, the game speeded up more. The most dangerous position on the ice became that of a defenceman, not a goaltender. By far. Goalies wore new cage-style masks that offered nearly perfect protection; defencemen, like Steve, with forecheckers able to finish their checks, played as if they had a target on their backs. Hooking, holding, “obstruction”—almost anything short of tackling was allowed for a time, because referees knew it had
to be allowed for defencemen to survive. It was the compromise between performance and safety. But in 2005, after the lockout year, obstruction was no longer allowed. The game got faster, the shifts got shorter, the collisions more frequent and more damaging. And here we are. The forever compromise has been compromised. Safety has lost the day.
But what if “checking” were to become again what it had always been? One player has the puck, another wants it and uses his stick or his body to get it. He checks him. If a player, any player, doesn’t have the puck, he can’t be checked—whether the puck is two feet away from him or sixty—because that is interference. No big deal.
That’s how hockey was always played. And the forechecker can go as fast as he wants towards the puck carrier, he can fly, but he has to get to him before his opponent makes his pass. If he does, he delivers his hit and gives himself and his team a better chance of gaining possession of the puck. He has earned the advantage he created. If his opponent makes the pass first, his opponent has earned the advantage. That’s fair. And if the forechecker arrives after the pass is made and makes the hit, he gets a penalty. This is considered justice even in football: a pass rusher hitting a quarterback after he releases the ball is penalized. And so the forechecker must use his own judgment: Can I get there in time, or not? If he thinks yes, he keeps going. If no, he makes a different play. If maybe, he takes the chance or he doesn’t. He can go faster or he can go slower, the decision is in his hands. It’s up to him to control his own speed—it’s not up to his opponent’s defence partner, by hooking and holding, to do that for him. The consequences, good or bad, are his to face, just as they should be. The result: controlled speed, not uncontrolled speed. Speed that makes sense, not speed that doesn’t. Advantages that are earned, not advantages that aren’t.
No big deal. But a big impact.
The second change is no less rooted in the game: no hits to the head. Players and officials since the first game at McGill have recognized the vulnerability of a player’s head. A “high stick” isn’t something that is delivered to a shoulder, or an “elbow” to a hip. Rule-makers created high-sticking and elbowing penalties specifically to protect a player’s head. Yet there was an exception to this. For the head to get this special treatment, it had to be up at the moment it was struck. If it were down, the hit was considered to be the player’s own fault; the player was “fair game.”
This thinking arose out of the pre–forward pass era. If a player has to advance the puck up the ice without passing, he has to stickhandle, which is easier to do if he looks down at the puck. If stickhandling is to his advantage, the checker should have some advantage of his own. So a hit to the head by a stick or an elbow wasn’t allowed, but a hit to the head by a shoulder or a hip delivered with far greater force was not only okay, it was glorified, as long as the player’s head was down. It was a “freebie.”
There is another category of hit to the head that is also penalized but accepted: a fist to the head. It’s because it has never been seen as a hit to the head, but rather as fighting, which isn’t possible without some fists to the head, and is acceptable, in fact essential, because hockey is a passionate game different from other passionate games, and an emotional release is necessary.
This is all very admirably consistent, but even if it wasn’t, even if you wanted to make these changes, you can’t. The game is the game and you can’t change the game. It has been played this way for a hundred years. The traditionalist “knows” this.
But it hasn’t. The game has changed constantly. It is always changing. The traditionalist is blind. The game is much faster. A hit to the head from a shoulder moving at thirty-five kilometres an hour is a hit from a much different shoulder than fifty years ago. A hit to the head from the fist of a bigger, better-trained fighter is a hit from a much different fist. A hit to the head today is a much different hit.
The NHL created a Department of Player Safety in 2011 to review dangerous hits and to impose additional penalties if the department believes they are warranted. The length of suspension for these infractions has been increased over time. Rules have been changed. When it was implemented in 2010–11, Rule 48.1—“Illegal Check to the Head,” as the league terms it—stated that a “lateral or blindside hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principle [sic] point of contact is not permitted.” Which, put a different way, meant that a check was “legal” if the player who was hit ought to have been able to see the other player coming, if his head wasn’t targeted and/or made the principal point of contact by that player, even if the result were a serious and injurious blow to the head. Rule 48.1, as amended, now penalizes “a hit resulting in contact with an opponent’s head where the head was the main point of contact and such contact to the head was avoidable.” It also adds this as clarification:
In determining whether contact with an opponent’s head was avoidable, the circumstances of the hit including the following shall be considered:
(i) Whether the player attempted to hit squarely through the opponent’s body and the head was not “picked” as a result of poor timing, poor angle of approach, or unnecessary extension of the body upward or outward.
(ii) Whether the opponent put himself in a vulnerable position by assuming a posture that made head contact on an otherwise full body check unavoidable.
(iii) Whether the opponent materially changed the position of his body or head immediately prior to or simultaneously with the hit in a way that significantly contributed to the head contact.
In other words, for a hit to be illegal, the head no longer needs to be “targeted” but must not be “picked”, and no penalty will be given if the player has his head down, or if by changing his body position he attempts to draw a penalty on his opponent. Other hits to the head remain “legal.” Within and beneath this careful language, the message and its intent are clear: a thunderous hit from a shoulder that stops an opponent in his tracks should be legal even if it also makes contact with an opponent’s head, no matter the injury suffered, because that is hockey; and therefore it is legal. Simply, if it looks like a hockey hit, it is a hockey hit. The message is about the hit, not the head.
The rule is misguided in another way, too. It reflects a style of game and an understanding from another time. We don’t stickhandle up the ice anymore. We don’t give up the puck, to dump it eighty feet ahead, and fight to get it back. We don’t forecheck a lot. We want possession of the puck. So we pass. And when we pass, we look up and look around for teammates in open ice. When we see them, we drop our heads and bodies a little to see the puck on our stick, and make the pass. We might see an opponent coming right at us, but our vision is narrowed; we focus on the target of our pass. When we receive a pass, our heads and bodies also drop a little. We are looking at the puck. We might see an opponent coming at us, but again our vision is narrowed; we focus on receiving the puck. At the very moment we pass the puck or receive the puck, and for a few moments after, we are completely vulnerable. We are bent over slightly, but more significantly our attention is elsewhere. We are in no position to defend ourselves. This is not about a blindside hit, a blow from someone out of our possible range of sight. At this moment, we are blind to almost everyone. And because this is about a pass, the puck receiver, free of carrying the puck, breaking towards open ice, is moving fast. Think of Keith Primeau’s stories about how he got injured. Of Marc Savard’s. How many players received those injuries in open ice, cutting across the middle, getting hit by what they didn’t see? And because they didn’t see it coming, they weren’t ready for the hit they got.
Think of bighorn rams running at each other, their heads and horns colliding at thirty kilometres an hour. Think of gannets hovering in the air, spotting their target fish below, diving straight down, hitting the water at ninety kilometres an hour. They can do this because of bone and muscle and brain structures that have evolved over eons of time; and because they are ready. The bighorn rams can see each other, the gannets can see the wate
r; they know what’s coming, and they prepare. Football and hockey players build up their neck muscles to give their heads a stability that bone, muscle, and brain evolution didn’t provide. Players’ necks are no longer just narrow bridges that connect body and head, but they splay out wide towards the points of their shoulders. Before the moment of impact, they flex. But when they are not ready for a hit, when players like Matt Cooke appear from nowhere, they can’t flex. Imagine a bighorn ram that doesn’t see another bighorn ram coming at him, a gannet that doesn’t see the water. Why don’t helmets work against concussions? Why do most concussions seem to occur with whiplash-like hits that spin a head around, and not from direct, straight-ahead blows? One you see coming, the other you don’t. One you have prepared for, the other you haven’t. Big football linemen hit each other hard and often; whippet-like wide receivers and defensive backs much less so. Yet the receivers and backs seem much more vulnerable than the linemen. One plays a predictable game; the other doesn’t. In today’s hockey, in the passing game, speed, distraction, vulnerability, finishing your check, hits to the head—it is a mix made for disaster.
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Further within and beneath the language-dance of the NHL rule book is another message: you have to allow some hits to the head because you have to allow fighting—because fighting has always been part of hockey, hockey fans love fights, and fights symbolize the commitment of a hockey player that is different from the commitment of a player in all other sports. A hockey player, literally, is willing to fight for his team. Besides, if there were no fights, and no outbreak of stick-swinging resulted; if players were to find their emotional release in skating faster and checking harder, as almost every player now does and has always done; then real hockey fans, in their passionate defence of fighting, would have been living a lie all these years, and fighting’s critics, who aren’t real deep-in-the-bone fans, would win, and that would be too humiliating to take. So if some hits to the head are allowed—in fighting—to remain admirably consistent, then why not allow other hits to the head under some word-parsing, hair-splitting and re-splitting logic that is able to wrap itself up as part of the essence of the game?
