NHL

Time for NHL to give up the fighting

BUFFALO — In this space on March 15, I recounted the late Derek Boogaard’s reaction 10 days previously upon learning renowned and troubled NHL heavyweight Bob Probert, at the time of his death at the age of 45, had been found to have been afflicted with the degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” is what Boogaard said on March 5 at the Rangers’ practice rink in a moment of tragic prescience.

For nine months later, following the work of medical researchers at Boston University that was reported in John Branch’s landmark series in The Times at the beginning of this week devoted to the life and death of Boogaard and the culture of hockey in which No. 94 was bred, we know that to have been the case.

We cannot know precisely the direct cause or effect between the punches Boogaard took to the head fighting his way into and across the NHL and his death at the age of 28 because of mitigating factors including genealogy and this gentle soul of a man’s addictions.

It is one thing not to know. It is yet another to not want to know. And it is this stance that apparently has been adopted by the commissioner of the NHL, Gary Bettman, and as policy by the Board of Governors, who somehow believe fighting must be preserved for entertainment’s skate regardless of the destruction and cost in the quality of human lives it leaves in its wake.

The NHL and the NHLPA already have taken steps in the wake of Boogaard’s death to amplify efforts to educate the players to the dangers of painkillers and to much better regulate the availability and dispersal of such. Additional changes in policy are under review.

Because Boogaard had been enrolled in the NHL/NHLPA Behavioral Health and Substance Abuse Program last season, every drug prescription he obtained through the Rangers was approved by physicians in the program.

In addition, the Rangers were never given more than a few hours’ notice before Boogaard was subject to random drug-testing as a member of the program.

Not everyone is savable. The program though, has saved numerous lives. I believe in the strength of anonymity, but I also believe entering a program such as this carries no stigma. And I also believe as the program itself has come under scrutiny, there would be great value if a player in the program were to come forward and explain its importance.

Fighting in hockey is from another era, just like the three-martini lunch, just like the winking-and-nodding at the individual who gets behind the wheel after indulging in that lunch.

Game 7 of the epochal 1994 Eastern Conference Finals between the Rangers and Devils stands as the greatest hockey game ever played at the Garden. There wasn’t a single fight in the masterpiece theatre of the Blueshirts’ 2-1 double overtime victory.

The argument that eliminating fighting from the game would deprive a cross-section of players like Boogaard from pursuing their dreams to play in the NHL is a specious one, because for every young man like Boogaard, there is at least another with more skill and just as much heart who leaves the sport because he doesn’t want to absorb punches to the head in order to get to the NHL.

The argument that fighting is entertainment represents nothing more than pandering. If people would pay to watch Russian Roulette, if people were desperate enough to participate in such an event in exchange for riches that would go to the survivors, would we stage such a spectacle; would we televise it?

See, these heavyweights in the NHL, these good men such as Colton Orr in Toronto, they are playing Russian Roulette. Boogaard, he was playing Russian Roulette.

Maybe once we didn’t know that. Maybe once we could pretend not to know that. There is no such pretense now. There is a difference between not knowing and not wanting to know.

And it’s a shameful one.

May Derek Boogaard rest in peace that he did not know when he was on the ice.