“The NHL (national hockey league) is not in the business of comforting people, they’re in the business of entertainment, and if fighting represents a way to differentiate themselves from an entertainment stand point, then fighting isn’t going anywhere” In the 2014-15 season 1,230 games were played, and out of those games 391 fights were in action. 29.91% of games had fights, 45 games had more than one fight. Taking fighting out of the game of hockey is too big of a risk. I think the fans will be disappointed and the entertainment level will go way down. In my paper I’m going to write about why fighting in hockey should stay and why people think it should also.
The NHL needs fighting to keep the game safe. It is like an oxymoron and here’s
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what it means. It means that if a really valuable player on the team gets hit really hard, you will want to do something. Sitting there and thinking that if you don’t do anything, you would regret it. If your best player get hurt, you can’t just not do anything about it, you have to get revenge. Without fighting there will be no real consequence for guys taking runs at each other. There needs to be consequences. If people are taking runs at your team, you can’t just let it go, you have to do something. Hard runs at other players are going to cause problems and with fighting, there’s how you can solve them. You have to stick up for your team. Players defend their teammates. That’s why you’re a team. Fighting allows it to happen. Sticking up for each other can build confidence, with that confidence a team becomes better and can begin to play as one. Fighting is some people’s job. If you aren’t the most skilled player on your team, you can be an enforcer. Basically they’re on the team to fight. They stand up for their team, if you take fighting out people will lose their jobs. Fighting is a tradition. Fighting has been in hockey from the beginning. Fighting has built the game. Taking fighting out is like not getting the option to put your favorite topping on your pizza. What I mean is that not everyone likes pepperonis, but with the option, the pizza is pretty boring. Fighting builds rivalries. People love games between teams with heated rivalries. The intensity is high, fans and players love the atmosphere with those games plus the energy. Those types of rivalries won’t take on the same kind of feeling that they have now if fighting were gone. Fighting is better than ‘maiming’.
Would you rather have a couple of guys who have beef with each other dropping the gloves to settle their differences or a couple of guys trying to get the best cheap shot on their opponent? Fighting is a much less dangerous and bloody way to settle things. People still take cheap shots, hitting each other in the face with their hockey stick, but that type play would be seen way more often if fighting were taken out of the game. Emotional guys with short fuses would lead to more cheap shots. Fighting is a way for players to police each other. If somebody takes a shot at one of your teammates and it looks to be even the littlest bit of dirty, you’ll see that offending player on that team to get some revenge. Players can handle suspensions and fines but if they know that a player is going to knock their teeth out, then they might think twice about taking those cheap shots. Hockey will never become mainstream. It’s unique to a sport to allow this kind of fighting to happen. Sports don’t allow fighting. Without fighting in hockey would be a mainstream sport, it wouldn’t be hockey.
Should fighting stay in hockey? Should we allow players hit other player in the face with a hockey sticks or take other cheap shots and not do anything about it? If your star player got taken off the ice because of a stick to the face, you would want to do something about it wouldn’t you? Fighting should stay in hockey. For the fan appeal, players getting revenge, having
their teams back, and people love the intensity, its people’s job, it’s unique. People might say to take hockey out because it’s dangerous but it would be even more dangerous to get a stick to the face. In conclusion, I talked about the reasons why fighting should stay and why people think it should also. It needs to stay, for obvious reasons. The NHL is not in the business of comforting people, they’re in the business of the entertainment and if fighting represents a way to differentiate themselves from an entertainment stand point, then fighting isn’t going anywhere
To understand this phenomenon we must go back to March 13, 1955. On this date, the Montreal Canadians were playing a game in Boston against the Bruins. One of the opposing players, Hal Laycoe, high-sticked Maurice Richard, injuring him to the point of requiring eight stitches on his scalp. Richard retaliated by smashing his own stick over Laycoe's head and shoulders and slashed him with another player's stick until it splintered. Becoming annoyed with the official's interference in the fight, Richard then turned and punched him. Since hitting an official was the least honorable thing to do, Richard was expelled from the game (2000).
As stated in my thesis statement, the sport of hockey has been forced to compete with the growing mass popularity with other sports such as basketball and football. There once was a point in time where hockey had just as much popularity as those sports but because people are finding more interest in those sports, the National Hockey League found itself in a “drought” of unimportance with other sports. With not televising the sport as “commonly” as other sports.
As long as there have been sports, there has been violence in them. Ice hockey, particularly due to its increasing popularity as a professional sport, has brought up several ethical issues regarding the act of fighting in hockey. There are strong arguments for both sides of this present problem in the world of hockey. Numerous male athletes, including children as young as nine years of age, have suffered injuries as an outcome of fighting and it should be considered if it should be part of a sport that very young people grow up with (Brust, Leonard, Pheley & Roberts, 1992).On the other hand, fights create excitement and the sport of hockey might grow in terms of popularity, making the problem of fighting in hockey complex and difficult to resolve (“Towards An Explanation Of Hockey Violence: A Reference Other Approach”). Even though hockey is known to be a very aggressive and fast-paced sport, the unsportsman-like action of fighting in hockey cannot longer be tolerated.
When I think of what it means to be Canadian, one of the first things that come to mind is hockey. This is true for many Canadian’s as hockey was and is an integral piece of the formation of the national identity. However, when people think of playing hockey their attention usually turns to the men in the National Hockey League or other top men’s leagues and tournaments. Even so, Canada has come a long way from its beginnings, when women were not even considered persons under the law until 1929. While it has taken many decades for women to receive more recognition in the world of sport, today shows great improvements from the past. A key reason that women are not treated the same way as men in regards to hockey is due to how the game began;
When you think of hockey, you would think of people getting in fights or skating. To even play hockey you need to skate well enough to protect yourself from other people. Theses skates are 2.9 mm or 0.115 inches thick, skating is more tiring than running and they require different muscles. You have to be tough enough to take hits, block shots, or someone hitting you with a hockey stick. The puck you play with is 1 in thick and 3 inches in diameter. You have to hit the puck with a hockey stick, the blade is 12.5
face. Playing contact hockey can result in bruises, broken bones and concussions, which makes it
The future of hockey protective equipment is closer than originally thought. New helmets and equipment designs aid in the protection of all skill level...
This study showed that there was a significant difference in the amount of concussions between these two leagues. There were 69 teams consisting of 829 players from Calgary and Edmonton that participated in this research. Both of these areas allow body checking. The leagues that didn’t allow body checking were from Kelowna and Vancouver. There were 33 teams and 379 players from these two areas that participated in the study. This study classifies severe concussions as greater than ten days time loss from being eligible to participate in hockey. The research showed that there were 83 concussions and 53 severe concussions in the body checking league. However there were only 15 concussions and 10 severe concussions in the non-body checking leagues. The researchers suggest that there is a 60% lower risk of having a concussion or severe concussion in these non-elite Bantam teams when body checking is not allowed based on local
...know" (The Canadian Press, 2013). Hockey is one of the most difficult sports out there, and dropping the gloves and looking another fighter straight in the face is one of the most challenging parts of it. Getting rid of fighting will not necessarily make the game safer, and it could potentially cause a decrease in the number of fan viewership. The players and leagues understand what they are getting themselves into and they are aware of the culture of the sport, which is rich with fighting history. They respect that aspect of the game, and they respect their opponents as players and fighters. There will never be a time when everybody is happy about the state of fighting in hockey, but for now, the NHL is taking the right steps toward maintaining this historically important part of the game, while also making adjustments to keep the players as safe as possible.
Hockey is a very quick game. Probably the fastest game out there. The speed really helps with entertainment. Watching the players go back and forth, scoring chances everywhere. The watchers blood pumping quick and hardly any stoppages in the game. It is they only sport that actually allows fighting to occur. This entertains and gives pride to the fans when their teams player wins. As said before, any quality of other sports can be found in Hockey, In this case it was Boxing.
Some of these factors include high costs and time commitment of hockey participation, increasing violence issues in hockey and diversity. Although other factors, may be negatively impacting the view of hockey to some, the information from Forum 1 outline how hockey is crucial to the Canadian identity. NHL hockey teams and professional players influence youth hockey players and Canadians by uniting people, and allowing young hockey players the opportunity to see their individual potentials. If hockey in Canada wishes to continue it’s growth, these challenges will have to be addressed as hockey is becoming more expensive to participate in. As a result the sport is becoming less assessable to lower income families, which could be negatively influencing participation rates as other alternatives aside from hockey are being chosen for youth. The sport can be seen as violent, which also may be straying participation to other “perceived safer” sports. There is also racism that is demonstrated in hockey, which occurs in most sports. Canada will have to create plans to reduce the racism in hockey to ensure equal treatment to all
March 8th, 2004 was supposed to be nothing more than a competitive and action packed regular season hockey game between feuding rivals, the Colorado Avalanche and the Vancouver Canucks. The game slipped away from the Canucks, with the Avalanche up 6-2 heading into the third period. The heated contested already had its fair share of fighting majors, but an incident that happened late in the third period shocked the more than 18,000 fans in attendance at Rogers Arena, the hockey community, and North America. After failing to instigate a fight with Avalanche forward Steve Moore, Todd Bertuzzi of the Vancouver Canucks grabbed the back of Moore’s jersey, landed a vicious punch to the back of Moore’s head, before slamming him face first on the ice and falling on top of him. Moore had to be helped off the ice on a stretcher, and has never returned to the NHL. Bertuzzi, on the other hand, was suspended for 20 games by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, and is still playing in the NHL for the Detroit Red Wings. This is one of many examples of deviance in sports, and how a win-at-all costs mentality can drive athletes to act in extreme manners. As a result of the growing commercialization of sports, athletes are socialized at young ages to believe that winning is everything, and that stopping at nothing will help you succeed. Athletes will do almost anything to gain the upper hand in their respective sports, whether it is through engaging in excessive on-field violence or through the use of performance enhancing drugs, excessively committing themselves to their sport, or by violating league rules and policies. In sports, deviance is viewed in a different light than in the outside world. As professional athletes strive towards conforming to spor...
As population continually increases in the Southern states, the NHL is moving teams into large Southern cities. In an effort to increase profits and popularity, the NHL has increased the number of teams in the league and moved into Southern cities that have never had hockey teams before. The problem is that hockey is not as popular in the South as it is in the North. This expansion in the South has lead to huge monetary losses to Southern teams and very low attendance numbers. The NHL should not have expanded the league into Southern cities and should keep NHL teams farther North.
Sink M. (2002, January 31). HOCKEY; Youth Game Postponed After Fight by Parents. Retrieved November 1, 2010, from New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/01/sports/hockey-youth-game-postponed-after-fight-by-parents.html
When it comes to physical contact sports, there are two categories, collision sports and tackling sports. American football, ice hockey, lacrosse, boxing, and many more are considered collision sports. Tackling sports would consider rugby, Gaelic football, Australian rules football, and even soccer as some of the world’s tackling sports. A collision sport is way more dangerous than a tackling one. For example, in a football game, it is pretty typical to see players lose their helmet’s, ripped out of their jersey’s, and be taken off the field by ambulance. Reason being is because nowadays players feel like they are Iron Man...