by Ken Dryden
Consider this exchange on Sportsnet between John Shannon, Scott Morrison, and program host Jeff Marek. It happened the day after Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman Kris Letang hit Marcus Johansson of the Washington Capitals during the second round of the 2016 playoffs. Johansson had carried the puck through the neutral zone over the Penguins’ blue line, and was bent slightly forward trying to fend off a check by Evgeni Malkin. Johansson’s head was up, his eyes were on his teammate Justin Williams to his left. Letang, unseen, was to his right. Johansson made a one-handed pass to Williams; Letang moved towards Johansson, braced himself, raised up his body to make contact with him, his upward momentum taking his skates off the ice, his left shoulder striking Johansson in the head. Letang had been averaging nearly thirty minutes of ice time a game for the Penguins, almost seven minutes more than any other Pittsburgh player. Later in the day of this interview exchange, the league would decide if Letang was to be suspended.
Marek begins, commenting about Letang’s hit: “A little bit late. A little bit to the head. What are we looking at here?” he asks his panel.
“Certainly late,” Shannon concurs, “I think it’s a single-game suspension.”
In the previous game of the series, the situation had been reversed: Brooks Orpik of the Caps had hit Olli Määttä of the Pens in the head with his shoulder after Määttä had made a pass, for which Orpik received a three-game suspension.
“Everyone in Washington will say why not three?” Marek says.
“Because it wasn’t as late,” Shannon replies. The panellists comment back and forth.
“And the injury factor, too,” adds Morrison. Johansson later returned to the game; Määttä did not.
But Shannon adds a caution: “Apparently Johansson is not skating this morning,” he says. He and Morrison agree that sometimes concussion symptoms are delayed.
Marek pushes back at them. “Would that be gamesmanship, though?” he asks. With Johansson not being at practice, he might be injured, and the NHL, not yet having made public its decision on Letang, might impose a longer suspension if it thought Johansson might not be back in the lineup for the next game. “Not to sound crass,” Marek continues, “but let’s be honest about it. It’s the playoffs.”
Shannon still believes the league will decide on the basis of the lateness and the nature of the hit. “I don’t think they view it as a blatant headshot,” he says.
Marek talks again about “lateness”: “As we’ve seen with the Department of Player Safety, they will allow a player to ‘finish the check,’” he says. “And listen, Kris Letang, you see a guy who has his head down coming over the middle, a chance to get a lick in on him. I get it.”
Shannon picks up on Marek’s point: “And the question becomes, did he have enough time to swerve away and miss Johansson? And at the same time, where was Johansson’s head position…was he reaching? Was he down?”
Morrison has a question: “Do you think [Letang] thought, ‘I’m going to rock his head,’ or, ‘I’m just going to rock him?’”
“I think he was just going to rock him,” Marek says. “He said, ‘Oh, oh, here comes a freebie. Tomato over the blue line and I’m going to get a shot in.’”
Morrison and Shannon agree again that Letang will get a one-game suspension, then suddenly realize the implications of their own judgment. “It’s devastating,” Marek says. “Letang has been Outstanding….” They make no mention of the impact on Johansson.
Listen to this other exchange from a Monty Python skit between a customer, Mr. Praline, and the owner of a pet shop. Half an hour earlier, Mr. Praline (John Cleese) bought a parrot from the shop. He’s back to register a complaint. “It’s dead,” Mr. Praline says. The shop owner (Michael Palin) says it’s not dead, “It’s resting,” and goes on to say, “Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage.” Mr. Praline takes the bird from its cage, whacks its head on the counter, throws it up in the air, and watches it hit the floor. “Now that’s what I call a dead parrot,” he says. “No, no, it’s stunned,” the shop owner replies, then goes on to claim, “Norwegian Blues stun easily.” Furthermore, it’s not dead, “It’s probably pining for the fjords.” Mr. Praline is getting more and more exasperated: “It’s not pining, it’s passed on! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker!” To Mr. Praline, this isn’t about a parrot that is resting, stunned, or pining. It’s not about it being a Norwegian Blue with beautiful plumage. This is about a dead parrot.
For hockey, this isn’t about a player having his head down, an opponent with an intention to “rock him” or “rock his head,” or getting a “freebie,” or the importance of Kris Letang. This is about hits to the head. It’s not about the perpetrator, it’s about the victim. It’s not about the perpetrator’s inconvenience/pocketbook, it’s about the victim’s brain/life/future.
For hockey and its future, this isn’t about winning or losing old arguments. It is about tomorrow. Focus here. Start here. And when the debate gets quickly ensnarled—“but what if one player is shorter, what if one is leaning forward, what if . . .”—don’t be distracted from the point. This is about hits to the head. Look at the NHL’s own rule book for guidance and precedents. Rule 60.2 imposes a minor penalty for “Any contact made by a stick on an opponent above the shoulders,”…Rule 60.3, a double minor or more is imposed if an injury results from the contact, whether accidental or careless” [italics added]. It doesn’t say anything about whether the head was the main point of contact, or whether the player should have seen the stick coming, had his head down, or tried to draw the penalty. The league decided that a stick to the face is a bad thing. It is a penalty. Automatic. Period. As Sidney Crosby put it, concerning hits to the head and the league’s rules after he received his concussions, “If a guy’s got to be responsible for his stick, why shouldn’t he be responsible for the rest of his body?”
If some players try to abuse the rule, if they duck into a hit to draw a penalty, then penalize them. Use another of the league’s rules as a model: if a player attempts to draw a penalty by diving or “embellishing,” he gets a penalty, and perhaps a fine or a suspension as well. Do the same for a player “embellishing” head hits, except make the penalties more severe because his embellishment isn’t just about normal gamesmanship, about getting away with something in order to gain an advantage before the other guy does the same. Diving is merely an embarrassment to the game; head injuries are dangerous—to the player, but also for the game. Drugs, gambling, and performance-enhancing substances all bring a sport into disrepute, and all are treated harshly by the league. But players who end up damaged also bring a sport into disrepute. The NHL can say with complete justification that any attempt to undermine the league’s efforts to make the game safer for its players, and for youth players everywhere, for now and for the future, will not be tolerated and will be dealt with severely. A serious problem requires an equally serious response.
If there are other abuses, you find other answers. Players and coaches adapt. They adapt to every next game and to every next moment and to every situation and opponent in a game. That’s what they do. And they do the same with rule changes. When a player hits an opponent in the face with his stick, he now skates directly to the penalty box; no argument. If his opponent is cut, he gets a four-minute penalty; no argument. If he shoots the puck over the glass in his own zone, it’s a two-minute penalty; no argument. There should be no such thing as a “legal” check to the head. A hit to the head is a penalty. No argument. If a player applies physical force to an official, depending on intent and severity, the player is suspended for either three, or ten, or twenty games. No argument. In that rule, “intent to injure” is defined as “any physical force which a player knew or should have known could reasonably be expected to cause injury.” Do head injuries not similarly undermine the integrity and reputation of the game? A hit to the head with the intent to injure is a suspension. No argument.
And if this isn’t enough to dramatically reduce brain injur
ies in hockey, then you do what any serious person does when you face a serious problem. You do more.
This is where Gary Bettman comes in.
We all want the problem of brain injuries in hockey not to be a problem at all. We want it to be about bad luck, or something that comes out of nowhere, is treated, and is gone. We want for it to be about media hype, not reality; about public awareness of something old, not something new. We got through it before, we’ll get through it again.
We also want brain injuries to be about fighters and fighting, so that if we create the conditions for a style of game where the specialty fighter is too great a risk to have on the ice, then the problem goes away.
We want the answer to be equipment. The most advanced helmet manufacturers will tell you there is no evidence that better helmets reduce concussions. Then they go on and talk excitedly about the new helmets they are creating, and leave the impression that a better helmet is the answer. It isn’t. Neither is a better mouthguard. Or some new whole-body, rotationally stimulating gyroscope. None of these things are the answer. But where there is fear, there is hope. And hope-mongers. And we waste time, we waste careers and lives looking in the wrong direction.
We want for the answer to be science. We want for science to know, and to know now, and to tell us what to do. But science doesn’t work that way. Science is about learning. Whatever we think we know at any moment is only a placeholder for what we will know better in the future. The sun revolved around the earth until we learned differently. Science isn’t about certainties; it is about likelihoods, probabilities, the best we know at any particular moment. But decision-makers want certainties, and decision-makers who don’t want to make certain decisions hide behind science. They may acknowledge what we know, but they focus on what we don’t. They create doubt. After ignorance, after denial, after counterargument and strategic inaction, after being put into their final corner, that’s what tobacco companies did. That’s what lead and asbestos companies did. That’s what climate change–deniers do. They will wait for science to know, they say, because after all, we are all serious, modern, evidence-based people, aren’t we? Except science takes time, and games are played tomorrow. And people, and players, have to live with the consequences of tomorrow.
We want for awareness to be the answer. We want more scientific studies, more articles and books, more movies and investigative reports, more tragic stories of players we have watched and loved. We want to build a mountain of awareness so tall, so sad, so unmistakable, so unmissable that something will be done because it has to be done, because how can it not be done?
But the answer for brain injuries is not awareness. It is not in our scientists, researchers, equipment manufacturers, writers, or film-makers. It is in our decision-makers. Decision-makers decide.
Decision-makers will sometimes make the wrong decisions. When we think back a hundred years or more—to slavery, or to the absence of women’s rights—we now wonder, “How could they have been so stupid?” When we think back fifty years to the dangers of tobacco, or lead, or asbestos, we wonder the same. Fifty years from now, people will look back at us with the same incredulous eye about something. What are we getting wrong? Climate change? Global pandemics?
In sports, it will be brain injuries. How could they—how could we—be so stupid?
Gary Bettman has been the commissioner of the NHL since 1993. His contract, extended last year, expires in 2022. It seemed to some that Bettman might choose 2017 as a natural moment to retire. He would be sixty-five. It would be his twenty-fifth year as head of the league. It is the hundredth anniversary of the NHL, a season that will be filled with celebrations. Many of the league’s loose ends have been tied up—the CBA has been signed, TV contracts are done, the league’s franchises are more valuable and more secure than they have ever been. The expansion process is in order. One new city has now been added, Las Vegas; the other, Quebec, is usefully in place as a credible threat in case the fans or local politicians of an existing franchise’s city get too difficult. But if 2017 seemed a logical time to others for Bettman to leave, it didn’t seem logical to Bettman. His first ten years as commissioner were not easy. He is just getting good at this. Why would he want to leave?
Gary Bettman is in control of the hockey world. The league’s Board of Governors are his bosses, but since he won his salary cap in 2005, crushing the NHLPA, no one stands in his way. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), led by René Fasel, has members from seventy-four countries, but it is no rival. Nor is the KHL. Nor is Hockey Canada, or USA Hockey, or any other organization or federation in any other country at any level. They set local priorities. They administer. But it is the NHL that sets the direction for the sport, and Bettman sets the direction for the NHL. Moreover, all these other leagues and organizations need the NHL. They need it for hockey to be a showcase Olympic event. They need it for the World Cup, World Championships, and World Junior Championships to generate the money they require that drives their programs and pays their salaries. Those who have power understand power. The rest of the hockey world understands that on any issue, if they disagree with the NHL, it is at their peril. They are all beholden to Bettman. They know it, and Bettman knows it.
The NHLPA, led by Don Fehr, has become more formidable again. Fehr’s background is in baseball; he was a protégé of Marvin Miller. Miller had worked for the United Steelworkers union. The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) had played rag doll to the teams’ owners for decades; Miller was hired to head the MLBPA in 1966. With his silver-white hair and carefully ordered moustache, Miller was an elegant street-fighter. By the time he retired in 1983, replaced by Fehr, the players were no longer tied forever to their teams by a reserve clause, they could become free agents—and salaries increased, on average, from less than $20,000 a year to over $300,000. Fehr learned from Miller some basic lessons: Owners are owners; and players, no matter how highly paid, are labour. Owners need to run things, owners insist on that; the best a player can do is to be paid his proper piece of the revenue pie. Owners will never stop trying to control players or to destroy their unions. Players have to be good teammates, whether in a steel plant, or on a playing field or rink, and be ready to fight back. The average salary in baseball increased tenfold during Fehr’s tenure. He stepped down in 2009, and a year later was hired to head the NHLPA.
Fehr is an old-style players’ union leader. Like Miller, he isn’t looking to run the game; he leaves that to Bettman. He wants, instead, like Miller, to maximize the benefits to the players, by increasing the size of their piece and/or the size of the pie. Historically, that has meant mostly economic benefits, and in negotiations Fehr doesn’t like to push non-economic, quality-of-life issues too far, knowing that Bettman will ask for economic concessions in return. But for Fehr to do his job now, he needs to know that it is one thing for players to earn as much money as possible, and another for them to be able to enjoy that money for as long as possible. For them at age forty-five and seventy-five to have a brain that works. That is the job of a new-style players’ union leader. Safety and quality of life were Miller’s job when he acted for the steelworkers; less so when he worked for the baseball players. The game is changing for Fehr.
For Bettman, Don Fehr is an exacting adversary, but he is no threat. Bettman today finds himself in a place he must surely have never expected. Almost twenty-five years after being named NHL Commissioner, this American who never played the game is on top of the hockey mountain. He has no peers; he has no rivals. But with this reality has come another, that Bettman must also have never expected and may not want, for ultimate authority brings ultimate responsibility.
Brain injuries in hockey are a problem. Indisputably. But in hockey, unlike in football, there are answers—good, doable, real hockey answers. That is the exciting part. The other exciting part is that Gary Bettman is the right person to implement these answers.
He can play “clever lawyer” at times, and he is good at that. Wit
h wordplay and an incisive mind, he can get himself out of almost any corner in which he finds himself, an essential skill for a sports commissioner. He can also play pit bull with lawyers representing players on the other side of the class-action concussion case, tell them that their lawsuit is going nowhere—as he has done—because they can’t prove causation, because they can’t prove that the players’ injuries happened in the NHL, and not in junior, or playing minor atom with Lorne Park, or from jumping down the front stairs as a two-year-old, or from abusing alcohol or drugs, or from hitting their head on a doorframe. And he can employ the same adept belligerence when governments attempt to intervene.
On June 23, 2016, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Bettman, introducing himself as the “Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security,” the committee that has jurisdiction over professional sports. Blumenthal noted in his letter the NFL’s admission earlier in the year about the connection between playing football and CTE, and described the subsequent NHL response to the question as it relates to hockey as “dismissive and disappointing.” He pointed out to Bettman the NHL’s obligation to ensure the safety of its players and to “engage in a productive dialogue about the safety of your sport at all levels” because of the NHL’s position as “the premier professional hockey league in the world.” He also reminded Bettman that because many NHL teams “play in arenas financed in part or in whole by taxpayer funds and [because of] the hundreds of thousands of American children playing hockey, government oversight into the safety of your sport is appropriate, and a matter of public health.” At the end of his two-page letter, Blumenthal then set out nine questions for Bettman to answer, most of which related to CTE and its link to hockey; others to fighting, concussion protocols, and the education of players as to the risks of playing hockey. He asked for Bettman’s response by July 23.
