Twenty one year old Don Sanderson of Ontario’s Whitby Dunlops died this January. He got into a brawl on December 12th and after spending a month in hospital, succumbed to his head injuries this past January, becoming a parents’ past, becoming a memory because violence on the rink is condoned and encouraged.

Since hockey started in 1875, fighting has always been a part of the package. Before the turn of the century nearly a dozen people died on the rink, most of those responsible being acquitted. As the 1900′s began, regulations slowly began to form and while several more deaths occurred, most notably in the thirties, a ban was never issued, a suggestion to withhold (cough*grow up*cough) was never handed down to the players. New rules did come to fruition however and today the fighting that occurs, while real, is almost always the result of forethought and planning, an illusory pageantry that, in junior leagues and the NHL alike, is considered a worthwhile way of keeping fans coming back for more. Evidently the game isn’t good enough to draw fans on its own.

There is a code in today’s modern hockey. A code of silence. What happens on the rink stays on the rink. Those who push the boundaries too far (Bertuzzi, Moore, etc.) get handled with enough disciplinary action to make the so-called ‘liberal urban sissies’ happy but not enough to actually make a point.

The preferred policy is to allow the status to stay quo; Let the boys play their game, on-rink fighting diminishes instances of slashing and high-sticking, and so on, etc..

And so when a 21 year-old fell to the ice and slipped into a coma, the silence continued. It happens. Nobody ever gets REALLY hurt. He’ll wake up. But he didn’t. He never would. Sanderson’s death marks the first death deemed directly related to a hockey fight by a coroner since the current set of on-ice violence regulations have been in play. His passing should have stood as an example but hockey is an establishment of tradition.

“Unless you’ve played the game, you can’t understand.”

Perhaps. But perhaps there’s also a reason for why Tiger Woods never takes his three iron to Mike Weir, for why Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham don’t throw their cleats around to settle things… to say nothing of true football fans…. Kobe Bryant keeps cool on the courts and Peyton Manning holds his composure across the yard lines. Baseball players don’t take the bat to one another. Nobody’s ever tried to strangle an opposing team member with a volleyball net, curlers don’t make use of what their stones could really dish out, and England’s boy princes have never jousted with their mallets in quarrel on the polo pitch.

Violence in hockey is nothing more than an ignorant attempt to amp up a sport that is already exciting enough as it is. One need look no further for proof than across the pond where nearly all European hockey leagues have banned fighting or to the Olympics where fighting is strictly banned as it is in all olympic wages of sport. The sport is the draw. The sport itself is the hook. All other sports line and sink their fans simply by existing in their raw form, without the draw of what has become pre-meditated yet spontaneous chicanery on ice by players who are picked specifically to get into said scuffs in the first place. The bottom line is that hockey is a game. A game. At its heart it was designed for recreation, and while money, glory, competition, and a trophy are at stake, in the end it’s still JUST a game.

Look at the picture at the top before you click away (see it larger HERE). It was taken during a Vancouver Giants game recently. Look in the audience. There are actually people smiling, exuding content over grown men, the professionals among them being paid millions of dollars, engaging in violence for entertainment. But at what point does entertainment become reality?

I’m sure a mother and a father in Whitby would be more than happy to provide an answer.