M
My childhood experience verges on something of a Canadian cliché. I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, playing hockey with my brother and friends almost every day. We played street hockey or roller hockey in the summers and spent our winters playing organized hockey and shinny at the outdoor rinks or someone’s backyard rink.
I was a good enough player that I got to play with and against some future NHL players like Jason Spezza, Patrick Sharp, and the famous Staal brothers. I even left home when I was seventeen to play a season of junior A in the Greater Toronto Area, finishing up in junior B back in Thunder Bay. It gradually became clear, however, that manning the blueline for the Toronto Maple Leafs was not my calling. I’d discourage readers from checking my statistics at hockeydb.com—they’re not impressive.
But I remain a big hockey fan, even as I had to move on to focus on school, then work, and eventually building my own family. I’m known now for thinking and writing about public policy. But what people don’t know is how hockey-obsessed I was as a youth and, perhaps more surprising, that I used to fight quite a bit. I was probably involved in about fifteen or twenty fights over my playing days.
It seems out of character, right? It’s not like I’m in a professional vocation associated with pugilism. It’s funny for me to reflect back more than twenty years later. I’m averse to confrontation and disagreement. I’m sentimental about movies and music. What was I doing throwing punches at people on the ice?
The answers may speak to some of the broader themes at the heart of this issue of Comment. We’ll return to them in a bit.
Rugby on Skates
Hockey has been violent since its origins. Most hockey historians agree that hockey was created when Europeans brought over their traditional stick-and-ball games to North America in the eighteenth century, which gradually evolved into organized hockey in the nineteenth century. Hockey most likely developed its physicality and violence from European exposure to lacrosse, which was played by Indigenous peoples.
There were apparently fights between players and spectators in the first indoor hockey game in Montreal in March 1875. The first documented fight during a game occurred in 1890 between the Rideau Hall Rebels and the Granite Hockey Club of Toronto. Fighting soon became a common feature of amateur hockey throughout the era and was imported into the professional ranks when the National Hockey League was established in 1917.
In these early days, fighting wasn’t subjected to rules or sanctions, and the physical altercations were often quite dangerous. In 1905, for instance, a twenty-four-year-old French Canadian named Alcide Laurin died after being punched and hit in the head with a stick during a game. Owen “Bud” McCourt, a member of the Federal Hockey League’s Cornwall Royals, was killed two years later when he was attacked by a number of Ottawa Victorias players. Author Ross Bernstein refers to this era as “more like rugby on skates than it was modern hockey.”
The NHL instituted a five-minute penalty for fighting (or “fisticuffs”) in 1922, but the norms and patterns were already set. Fighting would be an ongoing element of the sport for the next several decades. Even star players like Maurice Richard or Gordie Howe were more than capable of taking care of themselves.
Fighting reached its apogee in the 1970s with a Philadelphia Flyers team that became known as the “Broad Street Bullies” for its physical style of play and extraordinary cast of characters including David “the Hammer” Schultz, Bob “Hound” Kelly, and their captain Bobby Clarke (who couldn’t quite “spit Chiclets” because he was missing most of them). The Flyers deliberately used fighting and violence as a form of intimidation. It helped them win two consecutive Stanley Cups, in 1974 and 1975.
The team’s ethos was theatrically captured in the cult classic film Slap Shot, starring Paul Newman, which was released in 1977 and remains popular in certain hockey circles. The famous Hanson brothers (who themselves were minor pro players) famously depicted the gratuitousness of fighting during the era.
Since then, the frequency of fighting has slowly yet steadily fallen. During the first decade of the 2000s, the NHL averaged 669 fights per season. Over the past several years, it’s been in and around 200 fights per year and still declining. The Quebec Major Junior Hockey League has banned fighting this season with new strict penalties such as an automatic game ejection and possible suspension. Few NHL teams carry a so-called enforcer—a one-dimensional fighter—anymore.
The push to ban or curtail fighting is attributable to various factors, including efforts to expand the game in non-traditional markets and new evidence about concussions and brain trauma. These developments are generally positive. Today the game is safer and more skilled than when I was a kid.
Canadian author and essayist Mordecai Richler (who passed away in 2001) would have lauded such trends. In a 1981 satirical essay titled “What Hockey Needs Is More Violence,” he argued that fighting in hockey was a social good because, among other reasons, it redirected violent crime from the streets to the hockey rink, where we have “cunningly put our potential muggers into team sweaters, shoving them out on the ice, paying them handsomely to spear, slash and high stick or whatever.”
Why Do We Fight and Why Do Fans (and Players) Like It?
It’s not obvious, however, that Richler’s point of view is the prevailing one. There are various polls with different questions and results, but the preponderance of evidence seems to show that support for fighting is generally high among hockey fans. It’s even higher among NHL players, 98 percent of whom, when asked in 2011 if fighting should be banned, responded negatively.
There are various explanations for the players’ ongoing support for fighting. A common argument is that it creates a system of accountability that acts as a deterrence against so-called cheap shots or the targeting of skilled players (think Dave Semenko or Marty McSorley for Wayne Gretzky). Although a 2022 academic study challenges this perspective, player interviews demonstrate that fighting is still perceived as an “informal mode of social regulation.”
Research also finds to varying degrees that fighting contributes to team camaraderie and can shift momentum in the game, and some evidence even shows that fighting is positively associated with teams advancing further into the playoffs. There is also of course the entertainment factor. As former NHL enforcer Stu “the Grim Reaper” Grimson explained in a 2019 interview:
I continue to believe that fighting in the following context is still one of the more exciting moments you’ll witness in a game. . . . From the players on the bench to the coach to the thousands in the stands . . . that moment can be electrifying because the game will often turn.
It reminds me of one of my favourite opening montages to Hockey Night in Canada for the Centennial Classic game in 2017. It includes a clip from the legendary hockey broadcaster Foster Hewitt in which he says, “I think hockey is the greatest game there is. It has everything to create a thrill. There’s bodily contact. There’s danger. It’s basically excitement.”
A lot of players and fans clearly like fighting.
Perhaps it’s not a surprise, then, that although research may not find a correlation between fighting and NHL attendance, the website hockeyfights.com has millions and millions of views. A lot of players and fans clearly like fighting.
The Primal and Cathartic
But in my own experience, these explanations are necessary yet insufficient means for understanding the true essence of hockey fights. That essence can instead be found in two words: “primal” and “cathartic.”
As part of my research for this essay, I read accounts from former hockey fighters about their experiences and motivations. Sometimes they were motivated by anger. Other times it was about one-upmanship, or responding to the expectations of coaches, teammates, or opposing players.
But many characterized fighting as fundamentally primal. In the context of a fast-moving and physical contest, there’s something almost intrinsic to the relationship between hockey and fighting—as if it is inscribed in our human nature.
This isn’t true all the time of course. There are plenty of premeditated or “staged” fights. But my own experience as a hockey player was that fights were typically an instinctive exercise fuelled by adrenaline rather than reflection. You tend to get lost in the moment and discover a survival reflex that you didn’t know you had.
I once fought a tough guy with the Parry Sound Shamrocks who was bigger, stronger, and more experienced than I was. I somehow instinctively got into a rhythm in which I punched and ducked at a pace that precisely matched his forceful blows. The fortunate result was that I managed to get out of a challenging situation mostly unscathed. I can still picture where we stood on the ice and the sound of the crowd. But I don’t remember thinking in the moment at all. My hands, head, and brain were speaking to one another without my even knowing it. That’s what I mean by primal.
Which brings me to fighting’s cathartic dimension. Readers will be (mostly) forgiven if they don’t remember the famous game between the Colorado Avalanche and Detroit Red Wings on March 26, 1997, in which the Red Wings sought retribution for a cheap hit in the previous year’s playoffs by Avalanche player Claude Lemieux on their teammate Kris Draper that had left him with a broken orbital bone, cheekbone, nose, and jaw.
The buildup to that next game was virtually unprecedented. Everyone—including league officials—knew that there would be some kind of pushback. The game and the surrounding controversy are the subject of the must-watch ESPN documentary Unrivaled.
Draper wrote about the whole experience in a personal essay in 2017, in which he characterized the infamous 1997 brawl as a necessary moment of catharsis. It enabled him and his teammates to move on from the dishonour of Lemieux’s devastating hit and envision a world in which they could ultimately beat the dominant Avalanche team. As he writes:
Exactly 301 days after I had my face caved in, my teammates stood up for me. We settled it. But this is what a lot of people don’t remember: For the players on the ice, that night wasn’t just about the fight. That night was about proving that we could beat Colorado on the scoreboard. . . . The brawl was one thing. But us winning that night changed everything. It gave us the belief that we could beat them in the playoffs.
I, too, understand searching for catharsis through victory both in the corners and on the scoreboard. I was unexpectedly cut from a local team when I was sixteen years old. It was devastating. In fact, in hindsight, it was undoubtedly up to that point the biggest disappointment of my life. I ended up playing for another team in the same league that season, which meant that I played against the team that cut me several times over the course of the year. I cannot recall if I fought in those games, but I certainly remember treating them like the Stanley Cup finals.
I played with a chip on my shoulder that wasn’t merely about revenge. It was about a personal search for affirmation and resolution. It was about finding closure for myself as much as it was about showing the coaches and the others watching that they were wrong. I needed to prove to myself that I belonged.
Real-life hockey fights are wrapped up in human nature and human psychology. They’re an expression of our innate selves. They tell us as much about the human condition as they do about hockey itself.
It may seem like a small anecdotal example without much universal application. But after years involved in the game, I think it reflects a psychology of hockey fighting that’s both simpler and more complex than is often understood. It’s neither about the heat of the moment nor the increasingly scripted bouts that one might find on YouTube.
Real-life hockey fights are wrapped up in human nature and human psychology. They’re an expression of our innate selves. They tell us as much about the human condition as they do about hockey itself.
The Drama Within the Drama
I said earlier that fighting in hockey creates a sense of ambivalence in me: I’m not prone to violence, and I generally loathe conflict. Yet I have a history of spending considerable time in the penalty box (in rugby it’s called the “sin bin”) for “fisticuffs.”
Can this ambivalence be reconciled? How do we, as a society, reconcile strong laws that require arrest, imprisonment, and social stigma for assault and battery outside the rink with what surveys of fans and players show to be a desire for violence on the ice?
One path forward would be to accelerate down the path set by the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League: just ban fighting. This path takes the legal and social norms around fighting that exist six inches from the ice and places them under the centre-ice faceoff circle. It totally changes the incentives for players such that it becomes too costly—to one’s team, to one’s career, and to one’s future—to drop the gloves. And that cost is imposed by an authority in a striped shirt with orange arm bands.
I’m skeptical about this solution, in part because it ignores the steadiness and universality of our chthonic impulses. If both fans and players want fights, if over one hundred years of history show clearly that fights and hockey go hand in glove, is that desire going to disappear because the ref forbids it? My observation of human nature suggests that this is unlikely. It’s notable that the decline of fighting in hockey occurred—is occurring—at the same time as the rise of nakedly violent professional sports such as MMA.
Fighting in hockey exists within a complex social web of team dynamics, power balances, and inspiration, which itself exists within a broader game that is won not by beating the opponent to a pulp but by slipping a frozen rubber disc past the goal line more times than the other team. Fighting in hockey is governed by the rules and authorities (a player can always get sent to the penalty box), but it’s also remarkably self-governed. Players who lose their cool and throw a sucker punch harm their team, and the coaches and players take note when determining ice time and who makes the team next season.
The decline of fighting in recent years might simply be a product of the fact that, with greater skill on the ice, the internal costs of dropping the gloves in anything but critical situations is too high. In MMA, the violence is the point; in hockey, fighting is always a subplot to the bigger drama. Hockey, as Foster Hewitt’s quote hints, is high drama on ice.
This leads to a final thought.
It’s interesting to note that catharsis is a term that was first described in ancient drama: Aristotle describes catharsis as the purging of fear and shame. And these, as I noted, arise from doubts about the worth of oneself or one’s team, and from a desire to be affirmed—to be seen as worthy. It is likely that, given human imperfections, these impulses will remain, in hockey and in life, and therefore it is likely that, despite our best efforts, fighting will remain in hockey too.
Yet another age-old tradition might give us the best hint of whether fighting in hockey is eternal. There is an old, iconic picture of Maurice Richard and Boston Bruins goalie “Sugar” Jim Henry at the end of a hard-fought seven-game series in the 1952 playoffs. They’re both bloodied as hell and look like they’d been through ten rounds. But what’s fascinating is that neither was bloody from fighting. They had simply played to their utmost at the highest level of the game. One of them is the champion, the other is the loser. Yet there is zero shame, fear, or regret in either of their eyes. Instead, they were able to look each other in their bruised and battered eyes and say to one another, in near perfect magnanimity: “good game/bon match.”