cartoon: Aislin, Montreal Gazette, March 9, 2011
Seven years ago this month, then-Vancouver Canuck Todd Bertuzzi mugged Colorado Avalanche forward Steve Moore from behind, broke his neck and ended his career. Another day at the office. Moore had delivered a head shot to Bertuzzi's teammate Markus Naslund several games before, giving Naslund a nasty concussion. For this, Moore was assessed a grand total of zero minutes in the penalty box, and was suspended a grand total of zero games.
From that day forward, the Canucks, from coach Marc Crawford to team enforcer Brad May, issued dire warnings about what might have to be done about Moore. Hockey, you see, is this sport that preaches that referees ruin the game by calling penalties, and that players should be left to settle their differences among themselves. This pattern played itself out all too predictably in the case of Moore and the Canucks. In the moments after the Bertuzzi mugging, Canuck coach Marc Crawford was seen (on this video still) registering this greasy shit-eating grin of approval.
Mission accomplished, Marc.
Bertuzzi, sued by Moore for well over $30 million, has since gone on to spread the love, claiming that Crawford had been calling for Moore’s head in the dressing room. That night, it seemed like the only thing the Canucks could do right. Colorado was drubbing them, and so the Canucks, with no prospect of winning the game, went to the next order of business on the hockey agenda: settling scores. Bertuzzi would not have attempted his cowardly attack if there were a chance he might cost his team a win, but with the game out of reach, hey, why not break the guy’s neck?
It is a measure of the NHL’s debased culture that most of what issued forth from the mouths of hockey wise people was concern about how poor Todd Bertuzzi was taking it all. Todd dutifully wandered up to a microphone with a prepared statement, and bit his quivering lower lip while blubbing how sorry he was.
In this 2004 file photo, Vancouver Canucks hockey player Todd Bertuzzi cries as he apologizes for sucker-punching Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalance during an NHL game.
CHUCK STOODY/CANADIAN PRESSIt was a most unconvincing performance, but Bertuzzi needn’t have worried. For going to work one day and breaking the neck and ending the career of another person in the workplace, poor widdle Todd was suspended for fewer than 30 games. (The NHL and its apologists will try to convince you that he sat out for well over a year, while omitting to mention that everyone in hockey sat out for the entire subsequent year because of the owners’ lockout. Bertuzzi’s suspension—if by that we mean not being allowed to play hockey while everyone else plays—amounted to the rest of that season and the playoffs.)
Not bad for nearly killing someone, eh?
As for Steve Moore, he immediately became persona non grata in hockey. While the troglodytes pulled out their hankies and dabbed their eyes thinking about how all of this was affecting poor snivelling Todd, Steve Moore quickly found himself flushed down the memory hole, shunned even by his own teammates. That’s hockey for you, instilling those good values, as Sarah Palin might be tempted to say.
Since then, the Bertuzzi-Moore saga has been winding its way through the courts, and even though Bertuzzi might be retired by the time the issue comes to trial, his day of reckoning (and that of Marc Crawford) will come. In the meantime, the league seems to be in a rush to make sure someone dies on the ice.
Last night they nearly got lucky. Boston Bruin Zdeno Chara ran Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty’s head into the stanchion for the rinkside glass near the Canadiens bench. As he rode him along the boards at the bench where there is no glass, Chara, who had no business even touching Pacioretty since the latter did not have the puck, pushed Pacioretty at the last second, ensuring that Pacioretty’s head would hit the stanchion even harder. Pacioretty ended up, like Moore, with a broken neck. He is surely finished for this season, and possibly for the rest of his career. He is 22 years old.
Just as the hockey trogs circled the wagons after Bertuzzi’s cowardly assault, much of the noise emanating from the usual places today are clucks about how Chara didn’t mean to do what he did, Chara’s not a dirty player, Chara’s a good guy. In typical hockey cult rationalization, they say, as Damien Cox alluded to today in the Toronto Star, that had the play taken place along the boards where there is glass, nothing would have happened. True. And if the play had taken place in the parking lot, obviously there would be no evil stanchion for Pacioretty to break his neck on. Stupid stanchion.
So now seven years later, we have another player mugged by an opponent, and left with a broken neck, and possibly a finished career. It has been reported that Pacioretty came within a millimetre of having his spinal cord severed by the hit. Sidney Crosby, the best player on the planet, is not playing because the league doesn’t give a shit if someone wants to use his head as a piñata. Marc Savard, a teammate of Chara’s, is finished playing for this season after yet another concussion, and likely for good. Brett Lindros, Eric Lindros, Pat Lafontaine, Paul Kariya, Adam Deadmarsh, Matthew Barnaby, Keith Primeau, Jason Botterill, Jesse Wallin, Steve Dubinsky, Mark Moore (brother of Steve Moore), Stu Grimson, Cam Stewart, Brian Bradley, Marc Savard, Nick Kypreos, Chris Therien (for a fuller list, see http://www.thestar.com/Sports/article/287833): the roster of players whose careers were ended or shortened by headhunting grows longer every day, and it is likely also to include Sidney Crosby, who until he was blindsided in January (and criminally allowed to play again, only to sustain a second concussion within days), was on his way to a record season in scoring. Don't expect him back this season.
The NHL is committing suicide.
Evidence mounts every day about what blows to the head are doing to athletes, and the NHL, for its part, responds by quivering in fear that if it did anything about this epidemic of deliberate infliction of traumatic brain injury, it would turn its players into pansies and then Mike Milbury would hurt their feelings on TV. Do we not appreciate what the trauma of being called a pansy does to players, people? Will no one think of those poor thugs?
Don’t believe me? Today the league announced that Chara will not have to serve one nanosecond of suspension. Exactly zero games. Something about Chara not meaning to, it was a clean play, a hockey play, and so what about Pacioretty's neck? It's not as if he was killed or anything. Move along now, nothing to see here.
A proud day for the Boston Guins. A proud day for the NHL, its thug culture and its gecko commissioner Gary Bettman (whose response to criticism from Air Canada was a surly invitation to auto-copulate). A good reason for Sidney Crosby to think twice before returning to offer his head up to yet another goon the NHL is scared of alienating.
The league and all its fartcatchers, enablers and exculpators don’t have to worry about chronic traumatic brain injury. They exhibit all the signs already.
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"C'mon, get up, you pussy. It was a good, heads-up hockey play."
Aislin, Montreal Gazette, January 26, 2011 |
