Eddie Shore

leafs + bruins, 1935: talking pep, a north bay nugget

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When last we looked in on the Boston Bruins and the Toronto Maple Leafs in the playoffs of 1935, they were battling hard: that’s over here.

Today we’re gazing on a pair of key goals from that same game at Maple Leaf Gardens on Saturday, March 30, 89 years ago. Focus your eye first on the image below, which shows the moment in the third period that Toronto’s Baldy Cotton scored to tie the game at 1-1. That’s (balding) Cotton departing the scene in exultation. The Bruins’ #11 is Red Beattie and beyond him, I think that might be Charlie Sands. If they appear dejected, teammates Tiny Thompson (in the goal) and (behind the net) Eddie Shore seem to be directing their energy into outrage and remonstration. As it turned out, referee Ag Smith did call off the goal, ruling that Cotton was infringing on Thompson’s crease when he scored. (Cue the aforepictured chaos.)

As previously mentioned, Toronto winger Regis (a.k.a. Pep) Kelly scored on the ensuing powerplay to tie the game. Then in overtime, the 21-year-old product of North Bay, Ontario, scored again to seal the deal for the Leafs. The top image shows one of those goals, though I don’t know which one. That’s Kelly with stick raised nearest the camera; his helmeted teammate is, I think, Joe Primeau. Tiny Thompson is the dispirited goaltender, with Eddie Shore facing him. Boston’s #4 is defenceman Bert McInenly, with Babe Siebert (#12) and Red Beattie (#11) turning away in disappointment.

(Images: City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Items 36277, 36272)

just one joyful jamboree

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A team of NHL All Stars turned out on the Wednesday night of February 14, 1934, to play against the Maple Leafs at Toronto’s home rink in a benefit game for Leaf winger Ace Bailey. Badly injured two months earlier in Boston when Eddie Shore knocked him to the ice, Bailey had seen his career ended, though he said he bore Shore no ill will. Toronto won the game 7-3 in front of a crowd of 14,074; over $20,000 (something like $440,000 in 2024 terms) was raised on the night.

Pictured here during pre-game ceremonies in which participants received a windbreaker and a medal, that’s (from left) broadcaster Foster Hewitt, Chicago defenceman Lionel Conacher, NHL President Frank Calder, Bailey, New York Rangers’ coach Lester Patrick, Canadiens owner Leo Dandurand (partly obscured), and  Leaf managing director Conn Smythe.

Lou Marsh of the Toronto Daily Star reported that not a single boo greeted Shore. “Down in their hearts some of the red-hot partisans may never forgive Shore for what happened to Ace Bailey … but they certainly kept it buried last night.”

The game itself was “just one joyful jamboree,” with no bodychecking. “Everybody pulled their punches all night,” Marsh reported.

defence department

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You’ve Got Us, Babe: Born in 1904 on a Thursday of today’s date in Plattsville, Ontario, Hall-of-Famer Babe Siebert was a star winger with the Montreal Maroons through the latter 1920s, combining with Hooley Smith and Nels Stewart on the dangerous S Line and winning a Stanley Cup championship in 1926. He eventually dropped back to play defence, and took his talents to New York to play for the Rangers. In December of 1933, Siebert was traded to the Boston Bruins. That’s him in the middle here, in March of 1936, with a couple of Bruin teammates, goaltender Tiny Thompson on the right and an old nemesis going back to the Maroon years (they did make their peace), Eddie Shore on the left. Siebert ended up back in Montreal, with the Canadiens, in the late 1930s, and was named Habs coach before his life was cut tragically short in the summer of 1939. (Image: Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library)

hockey needs headgears

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“I have been thinking about hockey headgears for some time,” Jack Adams, coach and manager of the Detroit Red Wings, confided in December of 1933. “The accident to Bailey prompted me to do something definite about it immediately.”

The hockey world was still waiting that month to hear whether Toronto Maple Leafs winger Ace Bailey would survive a blindside hit by Eddie Shore of the Boston Bruins that had knocked him to the ice and grievously cracked his skull. Bailey had undergone two bouts of brain surgery that week; his doctors, and everybody else, were waiting to see whether he’d live.

A scant few NHLers had tried out helmets before that, most of them Bruins, it so happens, including Shore. They weren’t popular, deemed too heavy, too hot, as the bare-headed players went on hitting their heads and playing through concussions.

Ace Bailey changed that, briefly. As he lay in a Boston hospital, many in the NHL began to think about — and try on — helmets. In Detroit, Adams commissioned trainer Honey Walker to come up with a padding plan. “The game needs headgears,” Adams declared.

“It’s the back of the head where most injuries occur,” Walker said. “I’ve helped to carry many off the rink after the back part of their skulls smacked the ice. Their skates fly out from under them for any one of a hundred reasons. And with a stick in their hands they don’t have a chance to protect themselves. I’ve always advised use of headgears for hockey players.”

This is one of Walker’s prototypes, as modelled that winter by Red Wings’ right winger Larry Aurie. He was 28 that year, a former captain of the team, and a rising scoring star in the league. “Larry Aurie, pound for pound, is the toughest player in hockey today,” Adams proudly declaimed in 1934.

Like many of his NHL colleagues, Aurie had had a close call with his own head earlier in his NHL career, during a game against the Rangers in New York. Skating full speed, he’d hit a rut in the ice and, as the Detroit Free Press described it,

… sailed into the air and came down on his back. The back of his head cracked down on the ice and the impact, according to Adams, sounded like a pistol shot. Aurie was “out” for hours and for a time it was feared he had sustained permanent injury.

Aurie lived to skate another day. Ace Bailey survived, though he’d never play another game in the NHL. Still, the league saw no need to mandate headgears for its hockey players; it would be another 46 years before they got around to doing that, in the 1979-80 season.

In the ’30s, the helmet fad didn’t last: within a season or two, all but a few players were back to bare heads, Larry Aurie included. He led the NHL in goals in 1936-37 (with 23) and was named to the First All-Star Team that year, too. He helped the Red Wings win back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in 1936 and ’37. He died this week in 1952 at the age of 47.

boston’s most legendary, more or less

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Face of a Face-Breaker: Sprague Cleghorn becalmed, circa the mid-1920s.

The Boston Bruins are rounding into their centenary this fall, as you’ve maybe heard, celebrating their status as the NHL’s third-eldest (and senior American) franchise still on ice. Have they got plans? Why, yes, they have: commemorative sweaters and heritage weekends, a brand-new bear statue, a Milan Lucic revival tour, a long-past-due remembrance of captains past are all part of the fun. As is, too, the All-Centennial Team that will be revealed in early October, featuring the all-time all-timiest 20 Bruins of — well, okay, the past 100 years, 12 forwards, 6 defencemen, and two goaltenders to rule them all.

Should I say here that I’m someone who actually cares about fantasy confections of this sort or was that already abundantly clear from the fact that we’re already two paragraphs into this post? For the record, I salute the panel that the Bruins convened this past summer to generate a collection of anniversary all-stars as well as their considered effort, which earlier this month saw them release a long-list of 100 superlative Bruins.

The 30 members of the selection committee are broadcasters and Bruins beat reporters, a distinguished crew that includes Doc Emrick and ESPN’s Kevin Weekes along with the Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont and Fluto Shinzawa from The Athletic. The NHL’s resident historian, Dave Stubbs, is aboard, as is Richard Johnson from Boston’s Sports Museum, who’s the author of the forthcoming Bruins’ centennial book. Harry Sinden, too, who, at 91, is as senior a Bruins eminence as you’re going to find.

The list? It’s fun. It’s fine. Love the illustrations.

As I wrote in 2017 when the NHL and the Leafs both indulged in centennial outbursts of this same sort, I’m all for any exercise that illuminates hockey’s all too dimly lit history, as sentimental, whimsical, and/or puzzling as the results might be. As I wrote then, I’m all for these efforts, if for no other reason than the opportunity they offer to bandy words about Frank Brimseks and Lionel Hitchmans, Bill Cowleys and Fern Flamans. There’s no science at work in a list like the one the Bruins have produced, no such thing as a perfect collection of names. It is — and was always going to be — an arbitrary concatenation, a monument to recency bias and amnesia as much as to the historical record.

That’s why, I think, there’s no criticizing the choices the panel settled on. That’s not to say that some carping isn’t in order.

If I were doing that, I’d begin by pointing out that the way it skews to recent, remembered times at the expense of bygone Bruins from the team’s earliest days whom none of us were around to watch is too bad, if not entirely unexpected. As Bruins historian Jeff Miclash has noted, the era in which the Bruins were most prosperous (i.e. finished among the NHL’s best teams and/or won Stanley Cups) was from 1924 through to 1949, while their least successful was the quarter-century spanning 1974 to 1999. But as per the Bruins’ centennial list, only 16 players from the former rate in the top 100 while more than double that number, 34, emerge from the latter (latter-day) epoch to make the cut.

I’ll name some missing names, but before I do, would I first consider the Bruins’ own framing of the list? I would, and will.

In 2017, the 100 players the NHL was touting were the “greatest” in league history. The Leafs, likewise, named the “best” players — they even went to the trouble of ranking their stars, with Dave Keon ending up atop all the rest.

The Bruins avoid that. Instead, the players of highlighted as the team’s so-called “Historic 100” are pitched as the “most legendary players in franchise history.”

I know that word, legendary, have used it myself, on occasion. I’m just not sure how it applies in this context. I assume that whoever came up with it over at Boston HQ was thinking of “legendary” as an adjective applying to legends, as in famous people, rather than to heroic stories from the past that can’t necessarily be verified. (It doesn’t help, of course, when the list includes someone like Eddie Shore, a legend whose legends are legion.)

I’ll venture that the word was selected as a respectful dodge: it conveys stature on the men chosen while seeming at the same time to avoid the unresolvable questions and quibbles that come when you declare betters and bests.

But most legendary? I don’t think that’s a thing. If it is, are there also just plain legendary Bruins lingering somewhere just off the published chart, on a slightly lowered dais overlooking the even-lower and often-flooded one occupied by the least legendary Bruins?

 I have no wish to oust anyone from the top tier of legendary Bruins. Naming names of Bruins who failed to make the list, I wonder whether the team’s first goaltender, Doc Stewart, deserves to be on there. Or maybe Carson Cooper, whose nickname was “Shovel Shot,” reason enough to include him even if he hadn’t scored the winning goal in Boston very first game in 1924?

Or Mel Hill, a winger who in 1939 scored three decisive overtime goals in a playoff semi-final series against the New York Rangers, propelling Boston to the finals, where they beat the Toronto Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup? As mythical as that sounds, it’s actually a legendary deed that did happen, even if the rest of Hill’s career was fairly uneventful. He had a great nickname, too, of course: “Sudden Death.”

Overtime Hero: Mel Hill had himself a Stanley Cup playoffs in 1939, when the Bruins won their second championship.

Former Bruins’ captain George Owen isn’t on the list. Nor is Red Beattie. Does that make them less legendary than, say, Ted Donato or Keith Crowder, who are? What about the absence of another (recently remembered) Boston captain, Hall-of-Famer Nels Stewart — not so legendary, apparently, as Nathan Horton?

The neglect of one Bruin in particular glares more than any of those. By no measure could you claim that Sprague Cleghorn was the most purely talented defenceman ever to wear a Bruins sweater, though he may well have been one of the most effective defenders in NHL history. “A block of granite,” King Clancy called him; “face-breaking” was Peter Gzowski’s considered epithet. He was very skilled and very smart, wily, a proven leader, and a Hall-of-Famer, funny and charming in person, by many accounts — also, on the ice, exceptionally mean and merciless, a man whose tendency to violence saw him suspended by his own manager when he captained the Montreal Canadiens, and also called “a disgrace to hockey” by several of his contemporaries, including referee Lou Marsh and Frank Ahearn, owner of the Ottawa Senators.

I’m not here to offer a character reference or claim that Cleghorn was a role model or good for the game: he probably should have been barred from the NHL before he joined the Bruins in 1925. He wasn’t, though, and so Art Ross brought signed him to partner Lionel Hitchman on the Boston defence, even named him captain of the team — he was, of course, the Bruins’ very first. He played three seasons in Boston, his last stop as a player in the NHL. Again, Sprague Cleghorn may not have been the Greatest Bruin ever, or the Goal-Scoringest, or the Stanley Cup-Winningest. And while are probably sound arguments as to why he was no Gary Doak, Don Sweeney, Gord Kluzak, or Dennis Seidenberg, I submit here that if the category you’re staffing is Most Legendary, then Sprague Cleghorn rates a hearing as much as Eddie Shore or Bobby Orr.

boston’s castaway captains: history takes time

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Captain, My (Former) Captain: On the day he announced his retirement, the Boston Bruins celebrated Patrice Bergeron with this portrait. “A career to cherish” was the caption alongside when it was posted this afternoon on the app formerly known as Twitter.

The Boston Bruins are finally coming around to acknowledge their own history. I don’t know if grudgingly is the word — diffidently might be closer to the mark. Maybe both?

So yes, it’s true, we here at Puckstruck have been keeping up a clamour (to the point of occasional clangour) regarding the Bruins’ forgotten captains for, what —why,  it’s been more than two years now. True enough, it was on the occasion of Patrice Bergeron’s appointment to the role, in January of 2021, that we pointed out, in one of our regular paroxysms of historical hockey punctiliousness, that Bergeron was not, as the Bruins were saying, the team’s 20th captain, but its 26th.

Captain, My (New) Captain: The Bruins introduced Patrice Bergeron as their 20th captain in 2021: wrong.

This wasn’t particularly controversial or, for that matter, disputable: the history, not to mention the math, was all there for anyone to examine, and add up. It was straightforward enough: somehow, somewhere, six distinguished Bruins who’d served the team as captains — Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer — had had their names effaced from the official list. The evidence of their respective tenures wasn’t hard to find: there are photographs, newspaper articles, game reports, programs, plenty of all of those. I wrote about all of this, the history, the math, the evidence — and the Bruins’ surprising lack of interest in hearing about any of that.

Others, like Bruins historian Kevin Vautour, a tireless advocate for recognition of Bobby Bauer’s captaincy, have been trying to correct the record for years. The Bruins weren’t having it, based on — well, what the team told me was that Bruins centre, coach, GM, captain, and all-round legend Milt Schmidt had been asked years ago about Bauer’s captaincy and he didn’t remember it, so that was what they were going with. (It was never really clear whether he’d opined on the rest of them.)

You can read my original Puckstruck barrage here. If you’re interested, there’s this follow-up, in which I tried (and, I think, succeeded) in tracing just who it might have been who originally forgot about the missing six. A corrected list of the team’s early-era captains is here.

Why am I back to barracking the Bruins again now?

Not to point out that the good people at Hockey Reference, the go-to non-league resource for NHL statistics, adjusted their online page in December of 2021 after I shared evidence of the Bruins’ forgotten few with them. (I’ve already raised a ruckus about that, after all.)

And it’s not because I’ve heard from several unofficial sources that, after all the years of neglect, the Bruins have a plan to (finally) acknowledge the facts and the math as a present to themselves on the occasion of the team’s centenary, which is coming up this fall. That makes sense, I guess, and if it’s true, many happy returns of a hundred years to the Bruins, along with congratulations for (better late than never) taking the trouble to pay attention to their own history.

Richard Johnson from Boston’s Sports Museum has put together an official book to help the team celebrate: Boston Bruins: Blood, Sweat & 100 Years (Triumph) is due out in November. I suppose that’s where we’ll see the Bruins (at long last) give Barry, Stewart, Shore, Beattie, Cowley and Bauer their due. Maybe we’ll learn more about the whys and what-happeneds, though I suspect that if there is a correction, it will come without fanfare or further explanation.

In the meantime, the Bruins could adjust the record now on the official NHL page where they keep track of their honoured leaders, just as they could have done at any time in the past two years. I just checked, and the missing six are still missing — although the list of Bruin captains has been amended to reflect Patrice Bergeron’s retirement today: as of now it reads “(No Captain): Present.” [See Update below.]

Also new, and the point (also better late than never at all) of this entire post: the Bruins today, belatedly, got around to correcting the count on Bergeron’s captaincy. If you study the banners overhanging Bergeron’s honoured head in that portrait at the top of this post, the one the Bruins posted this afternoon on Twitter, you’ll see that the one on the right numbers him (tinily, blurrily) “26th Captain In Boston Bruins History.” That’s the first time the team has used that number in a public way, as far as I know. It would suggest that the list of captains will duly be (can it be true?) recalibrated.

Call it a soft opening of a correction. If anyone but me noticed it, they managed to keep their excitement safely stowed. It’s a start, I guess. And if the Bruins don’t at some point blare the news of the sudden proliferation in the number of their captains, you know where to be listening for that.

Correction: A detail of the banners hanging in the Bergeron portrait posted by the Bruins today acknowledges him as the team’s 26th captain.

Update, September 20, 2023: In announcing the appointment of the, um, yes, 27th captain in franchise history, the Boston Bruins today corrected the record on its missing captains. A review by Eric Russo of the history of the captaincy posted on the team’s website includes an Editor’s Note that explains that it was originally written in 2021, when the Bruins announced that Patrice Bergeron was the new captain. And continues:

At the time, Bergeron was tabbed as the 20th captain in club history, but during the club’s extensive research surrounding the Bruins’ Centennial – as well as with assistance from several independent hockey historians, including Hockey Hall of Fame volunteer Jeff Miclash, and the NHL’s Stats and Research Department – it was discovered that six other men have also been captain of the Black & Gold over the course of the franchise’s 100-year history.

As such, the Bruins are now recognizing Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer as former captains of the club.

flashback

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Flash Hollett, who died at 88 on a Tuesday of today’s date in 1999, was a son of North Sydney, Nova Scotia, and a star on defence for the Boston Bruins and Detroit Red Wings in the 1930s and ’40s. That’s him here in 1937, on the far left, helmet in hand, along with fellow Boston defenders Sylvio Mantha, Eddie Shore (who was out with a cracked vertebra), Al Shields, and Jack Portland.

Hollett was the first full-time NHL blueliner to score 20 goals in a season, which he did for the Red Wings in 1944-45, when he put a puck past Toronto goaltender Frank McCool to secure a 4-3 Wings victory over the home team at Maple Leaf Gardens on March 17, 1945.

It took 24 years for another defenceman to break that record, Bobby Orr by name: he scored 21 in 1968-69. Paul Coffey holds the record for d-men nowadays with the 48 goals he scored for Edmonton in 1985-86, with Orr’s 46 from 1974-75 next best. If you run a finger farther down the NHL’s list for this category you’ll find Hollett lodged in 120th, between Baldy Northcott (who’s credited with 20 goals for the 1933-34 Montreal Maroons) and Zach Werenski (20 for the 2019-20 Columbus Blue Jackets). I’d submit that Northcott’s season should be withdrawn. He did play some defence during his career, it’s true, but in ’33-34 he scored his 20 goals playing predominantly as a left winger on a line with Hooley Smith and Jimmy Ward.

 

(Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

 

on this night, 1933: the leafs appeared carrying bailey, and the bruins were carrying shore

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Aftermath: Teammates attend Ace Bailey on the night of December 12, 1933, in the moments after he was knocked unconscious in the second period after a blindside hit by Boston’s Eddie Shore. Leaf goaltender George Hainsworth is there, in back, gazing down the ice, and captain Hap Day is in the foreground, facing the camera. Number 10 is Joe Primeau, number 17 Buzz Boll. The Bruins’ number 5 is Dit Clapper; Leaf Bill Thoms is just in front of him. The referee is Odie Cleghorn. The six other Toronto players are harder to identify. The player at the extreme right, on the move, could possibly be Red Horner, on his way to take revenge on Shore. (Image: Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library)

The forecast for Boston and vicinity on this date, 89 years ago: partly cloudy and slightly colder, with strong northwest winds blowzing in. December 12 was a Tuesday in 1933, and if you’d paid your two cents and picked up a copy of the Boston Globe — that’s what it cost, two cents for 24 pages! — the front page of the Globe would have reminded you that just 11 shopping days remained before Christmas.

Otherwise, in the day’s news? Rear-Admiral Richard Byrd of the U.S. Navy was off on his second Antarctic expedition, and Colonel and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh were preparing to fly from Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, to Trinidad. The nation’s dry cleaners were resisting government attempts to regulate their prices. Just the week before, the Congress had ratified the 21st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ending 14 years of Prohibition, and now it was reported that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt, for the moment, that battling bootleggers was more important than talking about liquor taxes. For their part, Boston police noted that that the previous Saturday they’d arrested 153 men and six women on charges of drunkenness. Sunday they collared 73 men and no women.

It was hockey night, too, at the Garden, with the high-flying Toronto Maple Leafs making their first visit of the NHL season to Boston. Art Ross’ Bruins were lagging a little in the standings, but they’d won two games in a row as they prepared to welcome Conn Smythe’s Leafs.

“There’s likely to be an old-fashioned turnout of Garden fans,” ran the preview in the Globe. “The fans are like to see a good hard game, chock full of action and involving much body checking, particularly on the part of Bruins. Toronto always has welcomed the man to man stuff, and no matter which was tonight’s match runs there will be nothing in this little Garden party to suggest to the followers of the Bruins that they are watching any ‘pink tea’ affair.”

The Leafs would win, 4-1. The game would be the last hockey one their 30-year-old right winger Ace Bailey would ever play. In the second period, Boston defenceman Eddie Shore hit Bailey from behind. His skull was fractured in the fall, and he was carried from the ice. Doctors feared for Bailey’s life in the days that followed, and he underwent two brain surgeries before he was in the clear.

The NHL suspended Shore for 16 games. Bailey bore no grudge. “During the first year and a half I suffered some bad after-effects of the injury,” he later said. “Since then, I’ve felt fine. For probably a year after I was hurt, I got the jitters just watching hockey. I could see an injury shaping up every time there was a solid check. But that wore off too. No, I never bore any ill-will toward Shore. He and I are good friends.”

 I wrote about the incident in my 2014 book Puckstruck. Some of that went like this:

Dr. G. Lynde Gately was on duty one night in 1933 at what was then still the Boston Madison Square Garden, when the Maple Leafs were in town to play the Bruins. The New York Times: “Both teams were guilty of almost every crime in the hockey code during the slam-bang first session.”

Then, in the second, Eddie Shore skated in behind Ace Bailey, and “jamming his knee in behind Ace’s leg, and at the same time putting his elbow across his forehead, turned him upside down.”

Afterwards, Frank Selke said, Shore stood there “grinning like a big farmer.” The rural glee ended, presumably, when the Leafs’ Red Horner punched him in the jaw, a heavy right that knocked Shore flat, causing him to crack his head on the ice. Horner broke his fist.

The rumpus, the Globe called it. Other contemporary accounts preferred the smash-up. Dr. Gately was treating a Garden ticket agent who’d been punched in the chin by a scalper. “I had just finished with him when a police officer was brought in with a finger someone had tried to chew off. I sewed him up and just then the Leafs appeared carrying Bailey and the Bruins were carrying Shore, both out cold.”

Dr. Martin Crotty, the Bruins’ team doctor, was working on Shore, so Dr. Gately looked after Bailey. Gately’s diagnosis was lacerated brain. (Later what he told the papers was cerebral concussion with convulsions.)

When Bailey woke up, Dr. Gately asked him what team he played for.

“The Cubs,” he said.

The doctor tried again a few minutes later.

“The Maple Leafs.”

Who’s your captain?

“Day,” Bailey said. He wanted to go back to the ice. 

When a revived Shore came in, he said, “I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t mean it.” Bailey looked up, according to Dr. Gately’s recollection, and replied, “It’s all in the game, Eddie.”

Aftermath: A month to the day after he was knocked to the ice and nearly killed, Ace Bailey faced the camera in Boston with his wife Gladys.

 

gaineyesque

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“The curly-headed lad from the lakehead has speed, power, and a vicious shot. He revels in the heavy-going and can carry a big load alone when a team is faltering.” That was the Montreal Gazette‘s 1927 scouting report on Jimmy Ward, the young right winger from Fort William, Ontario, who’d just signed with the local Maroons. A steady scorer and tenacious checker, Ward went on to play 11 seasons with the team, becoming one of its most respected players, and winning a championship, to boot, when the Maroons claimed the Stanley Cup in 1935. He suffered a serious concussion that same year after a mid-season collision with Boston’s Eddie Shore. Ward’s luck was better than Toronto’s Ace Bailey, whose NHL career was ended as the result of a 1933 clash with Shore; Ward was back on the ice after a little more than two weeks’ convalescence. After the Maroons folded in 1938, he played his final NHL season with the Canadiens. In the 1980s, Gazette columnist Tim Burke asked a colleague who, as a boy, had watched Ward play whether he was the Bob Gainey of his time. “Yeah, but I think he was better,” Marc Thibeault opined. “He scored more in the clutch.” Ward died on a Thursday of today’s date in 1990, at the age of 84.

herb gardiner: in 1927, the nhl’s most useful man

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It was on a Friday of this same date in 1891 in Winnipeg that Herb Gardiner was born in 1891. If you haven’t heard of his stardom as a defenceman on the ice in Calgary and Montreal, well, here’s an introduction to that. Gardiner, who died in 1972, aged 80, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1958. A quick browse across his biography shows that the adjectives stellar and two-way and consistent were sometimes applied to his efforts on the ice, along with the noun rock. Also? That he won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL MVP in 1927, edging out Bill Cook on the ballot, as well as the impressive likes of Frank Frederickson, Dick Irvin, and King Clancy.

Browsing the Attestation Papers by which Gardiner signed up to be a soldier in Calgary in 1915 at the age of 23 and the height of just over 5’ 9”, you may notice that the birthdate given is May 10, which is two days late, must just be an error, since a lie wouldn’t have made any difference to Gardiner’s eligibility. Listing the profession he was leaving behind to go to war as surveyor, he started a private with the 12th Battalion of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, went to England, was taken on strength with the 2nd CMR, who went unhorsed to fight in France in 1916. Gardiner was promoted corporal that year and then lance-sergeant, and we know that he was wounded in June, probably near Hooge in the Ypres Salient in Belgium. The nature of the wound is inscribed in Gardiner’s medical record as “GSW Nose” — i.e. Gun Shot Wound Nose. That’s as much as I know about it, other than it seems that he was brisk in his recovery, and kept on winning promotion as 1916 went, to company sergeant-major, then temporary lieutenant. The following year he spent a lot of time in hospitals with (as per the medical file) bronchitis, pleurisy, catarrhal jaundice. He was invalided back to Canada, eventually, where he was playing hockey again for various Calgary teams before he was demobilized in 1919.

Most of the starring he did in those post-war years was on defence for the Calgary Tigers of the old Western Canadian Hockey League, where he played with Red Dutton and Rusty Crawford, Harry Oliver, Spunk Sparrow. In 1926, when the league disbanded (it was the WHL by then), Cecil Hart of the Montreal Canadiens bought Gardiner’s contract.

Gardiner took Georges Vézina’s number 1 for his sweater in Montreal, which is a little surprising, but there it is: the team didn’t retire it from circulation after the iconic goaltender’s death in March of 1926. (Herb Rheaume, Vézina’s successor in Montreal’s net, inherited the number before Gardiner arrived; the following year, 1926-27, Montreal’s new goaltender was George Hainsworth, who wore 12.)

Gardiner played his first NHL game in November of 1926 at the age of 35 in the old Boston Arena on a night when another WHL import was getting his start on the Bruins’ defence: 23-year-old Eddie Shore. Boston won that contest, 4-1, and even in the Montreal papers it was Shore’s debut that rated most of the mentions, his rugged style, and some pleasantries he exchanged with Canadiens’ Aurèle Joliat. Oh, and goaltender Hainsworth was said to be hindered by the fog that blanketed the ice. “The heat in the rink,” the Gazette noted, “was fearful.”

Along with Hainsworth and Joliat, Canadiens counted Howie Morenz in their line-up that year, and Art Gagne and Pit Lepine, along with a talented supporting cast. Gardiner joined Sylvio Mantha and Battleship Leduc on the defence — and that was pretty much it, other than Amby Moran, who played in 12 of Montreal’s 44 regular-season games. Gardiner, for his part, was not so much busy as ever-present, relied on by coach Cecil Hart to play all 60 minutes of each game. With the four games Canadiens played in the playoffs, that means he played 48 games — italics and respectful props all mine — in their entirety that year.

“And sometimes it was 70 or 80 minutes,” he recalled years later. “We played overtime in those days, too. But it wasn’t as hard as it sounds. I never carried the puck more than, say, eight times a game. And besides, I was only 35 years old at the time.”

By February of 1927, Elmer Ferguson of The Montreal Herald was already touting Gardiner as his nominee to win the trophy for league MVP that was named for the father of Montreal’s coach. Another hometown paper called Gardiner “the sensation of the league.” When in March sportswriters around the NHL tallied their votes, Gardiner had garnered 89, putting him ahead of the Rangers’ Bill Cook (80) and Boston centre Frank Frederickson (75). I like the way they framed it back in those early years: Gardiner was being crowned (as The Ottawa Journal put it) “the most useful man to his team.” For all that, and as good as that team was, those Canadiens, they weren’t quite up to the level of the Ottawa Senators, who beat Montreal in the semi-finals before going on to win the Stanley Cup.

With Hart in hand, Gardiner asked for a pay raise in the summer of ’27. When Montreal didn’t seem inclined to offer it, he stayed home in Calgary. He was ready to call it quits, he said, but then Canadiens came through and Gardiner headed east, having missed two weeks of training. He wouldn’t say what Montreal was paying him for the season, but there was a rumour that it was $7,500.

So he played a second year in Montreal. Then in August of 1928 he was named coach of Major Frederic McLaughlin’s underperforming Chicago Black Hawks, the fourth in the club’s two-year history. Gardiner had served as a playing coach in his days with the Calgary Tigers, but this job was strictly benchbound — at first.

As Gardiner himself explained it to reporters, Montreal was only loaning him to Chicago, on the understanding that he wouldn’t be playing. The team he’d have charge of was a bit of a mystery: “What players they will have; what changes have been made since last winter, and other matters pertaining to the club are unknown to me,” he said as he prepared to depart Calgary in September.

The team trained in Winnipeg and Kansas City before season got going. When they lost five of their first six games, Gardiner got permission from Montreal’s Leo Dandurand to insert himself into the line-up, but then didn’t, not immediately, went to Ottawa and then Montreal without putting himself to use, and remained on the bench through Christmas and January, and Chicago was better, though not at all good, moping around at the bottom of the league standings.

He finally took the ice in February in a 3-2 loss to New York Rangers, when the Black Hawks debuted at their new home: due to a lease kerfuffle back in Chicago, the team was temporarily at home at Detroit’s Olympia. Gardiner played a total of four games for Chicago before Montreal, up at the top of the standings, decided that if he was going to be playing, it might as well be on their blueline, and so with the NHL’s trade-and-transaction deadline approaching, Canadiens duly ended the loan and called him back home.

Well out of the playoffs, the Black Hawks finished the season with (best I can glean) Dick Irvin serving as playing-coach, though business manager Bill Tobin may have helped, too. Major McLaughlin did have a successor lined up for the fall in Tom Shaughnessy. Coaches didn’t last long with McLaughlin, and he was no exception. While Gardiner oversaw 32 Black Hawk games, Shaughnessy only made it to 21 before he gave way to Bill Tobin, whose reign lasted (slightly) longer, 71 games.

Gardiner finished the season with Montreal, who again failed to turn a very good regular season into playoff success. In May of 1929, Canadiens sent Gardiner to the Boston Bruins, a clear sale this time, in a deal that also saw George Patterson and Art Gagne head to Massachusetts. Gardiner was finished as an NHLer, though: that fall, the Philadelphia Arrows of the Can-Am League paid for his release from Boston and made him their coach.

Sont Ici: A Pittsburgh paper welcomes Canadiens Herb Gardiner and goaltender George Hainsworth in 1927, along with (between them) Gizzy (not Grizzy) Hart, who in fact played left wing rather than defence. Canadiens and Pirates tied 2-2 on the night after overtime failed to produce a winner.

I am the egg man

/ puckstruck

Farm Hand: In the spring of 1928, after his Boston Bruins were summarily dismissed from the Stanley Cup playoffs by the New York Rangers, the eventual champions, the Bruins’ 25-year-old superstar defenceman Eddie Shore bought himself an Alberta spread, paying $16,400 for Albert Elliott’s Duagh farm, north of Edmonton’s northern city limits. Through the 1930s, it’s where Shore spent his off-seasons (and annual contract holdouts), ploughing the fields, collecting the eggs.

under review: writing the good fight

/ puckstruck

 

A version of this review appeared in the December, 2021 edition of the Literary Review of Canada.

Why did a couple of Zacks feel the need to shed their gloves that October evening in Edmonton in early October to fling fists at each other’s heads? Could be, I guess, that Zack Kassian, a winger for the NHL Oilers, disparaged Zack McEwen’s manhood, mother, or mien. It was the NHL’s pre-season still, so maybe McEwen, then a Vancouver Canuck, wanting to audition for his own coach, asked his rival for the pleasure of the punch in the time-honoured way of these things: “You wanna go?”

Was this a warning we were seeing, or maybe a dose of vengeance? Was it fulfillment of an arcane rite only understood by Zacks? There was some suggestion that Vancouver’s forwards had sinned by skating too close to Oiler goaltender Mike Smith, and so there was (in the parlance) a price to be paid, which required (as laid out, possibly, in the game’s opaque Code) a message to be delivered.

It’s easy to make light of hockey’s theatre of the brutally absurd, but in the quick chaos, Kassian lost his helmet, then his footing, fell, headfirst, to the ice, was knocked out. He revived, eventually, and left the ice under his own power, a towel pressed to his right temple. It was all over, then, except for the talking. “He’s got a pretty good bump on his head,” said Kassian’s coach, Dave Tippett. “It’s one of those ones that upsets you when that happens.”

“It’s scary, it’s terrible, it’s not cool,” said a young Vancouver defenceman, Quinn Hughes. “It probably didn’t need to happen.”

And that was mostly it, so far as further reckoning went. There was nothing, certainly, forthcoming from the NHL, which maintains both a rulebook and a Department of Player Safety.

According to the website hockeyfights.com, where these things are reverently logged and parsed, that Zack-on-Zack fight was the 39th (and counting) of Kassian’s 12-year NHL career, the 13th in four years for McEwen. Nowhere is there such a ready archive where you can look into the motives of any given hockey fight, no register of messages sent and received, no docket of damages done. In Canada, we’re so generally socialized to hockey’s culture of on-ice assault that October’s clash of Zacks made no more impression within the sport, the culture, or the Edmonton Police Department than the last time one hockey player punched another in the head. Will the next time be any different?

•••

Questions, questions, questions.

They hang in a haze over the NHL’s ice that never quite dissipates, though the fighting goes on.

Are hockey fights a good idea? Is the difference between a brawl on the street outside Edmonton’s Rogers Place and one that breaks out inside, on the ice, still sufficient to accommodate hockey’s proud exceptionalism? Do angry physical attacks really deserve a place in a game that purports to be for everybody? What do they say about our civil society? What about the potential for harm? Why use them to market the product you’re selling? Could it possibly be true that the blows that the punches that hockey players punch are (actually) a marvelous safety measure without which the game would teach us all the true meaning of mayhem?

Madison Mayhem: “The fight was a honey,” the New York Daily News reported in November of 1937 after New York’s Phil Watson collided with Dave Trottier of Montreal’s Maroons. “They ditched sticks in a hurry and began throwing punches.”

You don’t have to be especially timid or a paragon of moral rectitude to interrogate hockey violence, despite what some fighting enthusiasts in the public square might suggest. You should know that the search for answers might take you in unexpected destinations. The bookshelf, for example, as old-fashioned a resource as that might seem in the digital present.

And yet it is true that the sport’s library has added, over the years, a positive melee of memoirs by former — I was going to say goons, but won’t, since that’s considered a dire insult to the honest folk who put in the time to do the dirty work that others won’t, the keeping of the peace, the protecting of the honour, the delivering of the messages, the doing of time in the penalty box. You’d know this if you’d come across Don’t Call Me Goon: Hockey’s Greatest Enforcers, Gunslingers, and Bad Boys, an actual book, from 2013, by Greg Oliver and Richard Kamchen, or if you’d spent weeks immersed in the prose of hockey’s rowdies, ruffians, heavyweights, tough guys, and policemen. Take note: the term of art preferred by the artisans themselves seems to be enforcer.

What exactly do hockey enforcers enforce? That’s not always easy to glean, whether you’re watching the game or reading about it. Not the rules, obviously. John Ferguson (52 fights) offers an explanation in his 1989 memoir Thunder and Lightning, in which he makes the case that he was the league’s original enforcer. His remit, as he understood it: beyond his regular workaday within-the-rules duties, he was to intervene “to maintain decorum if anyone tried to trifle” with Jean Béliveau (7 fights), or Bernie Geoffrion (6), or with “any of our other stars.”

Uh-huh. Of course, Ferguson is here using “maintain decorum” in the hockey sense, where it more commonly means “commit assault.” But if you pay any attention to the NHL at all, you’re used to the ways in which language abstracts the game’s violent tendencies.

There’s nothing particularly insidious in a broadcaster, rinkside reporter, Twitterer, or NHL executive resorting to arcane terms (donnybrook, fisticuffs) or euphemisms (dropping the gloves i.e. the mitts, squaring off, going at it, chucking the knuckles, in a boutthat may also be a tussle, scrap, scuffle, or maybe just someone was taking liberties, that’s what the extra-curriculars are all about, other than showing emotion, sending messages, & etc.). It’s normal, natural enough — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t downplay and normalize the bone-hard brutality of hockey fights, the injuries that result, the examples they set.

They’re a conservative bunch, the enforcers, until, sometimes, they’re not. Dave Schultz was the primary puncher for the Philadelphia Flyers when they ran roughshod to a pair of Stanley Cup championships in the 1970s. The Hammer they called him in the unruly years when he was bashing out new records for penalty minutes, throwing his weight into 164 fights. In 1981, a year after he retired from all that, Schultz enlisted Stan Fischler as his co-writer and published a memoir in which he all but renounced the life he’d been living, pondering withal what might be done to change the culture in which he and his Flyers thrived. He also accused his former captain, Bobby Clarke, of cowardice.

Clarke (36 fights) happens to have led a call for the NHL to abolish fighting in 1976, when he was head of the players’ association. (It wasn’t heard.) Champions of bellicose hockey like to point out that the game has always been violent, how can you possibly engineer it otherwise at this late date? Chris Nilan played 13 NHL seasons, helped Montreal win a Stanley Cup championship; the nearly 60 hours he spent in penalty boxes count as the fifth most ever to be accumulated in NHL history, and they include sanctions for 196 career fights. What would hockey be without fighting? “It is simply part of the game, deeply embedded in it, and at its core,” he wrote in his 2013 book Fighting Back, “and it provides hockey with so much of the emotion, spirit, and energy that make it special.”

•••

The first rule of the NHL’s fight club is that no-one in the league’s corporate structure really wants to talk too much about all the punching or its consequences. The worry is, I believe, that all those wolfish lawsuits that roam the land might hear, and circle closer, which just puts everybody in danger.

When someone like the league’s Commissioner, Gary Bettman, does speak up, the message to reporters and legislators and sundry detractors tends to come in same frame that Clarence Campbell carpentered in the 1970s, towards the end of his 31-year reign as league president. When he wasn’t telling critics to mind their own business, Campbell would settle back on his long expertise, advising (as he did in 1975) that, “I feel that the safest and most satisfactory reaction to being fouled is by retaliating with a punch in the nose.”

It was Campbell, too, who may have first come up with the formulation of hockey as some kind of steam-powered 19th-century industrial sporting locomotive whose machinery, which is ever in danger of overheating, has never been upgraded. With temperatures running so hot, of course you need a regulator. “Fighting on the ice is a safety valve,” Campbell explained in 1969. “Stop it and players would no doubt develop more subtle forms of viciousness.

Gloves Off: “The fight, or rather fights, were swell and snapped 5,000 dozing customers erect in their seats,” the New York Daily News advised after this Manhattan meeting between the local Americans and the Toronto Maple Leafs in March of 1940. Wearing #2 is Eddie Shore, along with (#6) teammate Charlie Conacher. Leafs’ Bob Davidson is their quarry.

The NHL has, it’s true, been beset by legal challenges in recent years. In 2018, the NHL arranged a US$18.9-million settlement with 318 former players who felt that the league has minimized the long-term risks of brain trauma. Hockey’s concussion crisis is separate from, if not unrelated to, the issue of fighting’s place in the game. The NHL doesn’t really want to talk about concussions, either, so that’s one area of overlap; another relates to what medical science has been steadily revealing about what can happen to brains that are battered in sports like hockey.

The brains of boxers have been showing signs of deep damage, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, going back to the 1920s. While post-mortem studies of the brains of football players confirmed the presence of CTE in 2006, the first hockey case wasn’t confirmed until 2009, following the death of a furious NHL enforcer from the 1960s and ’70s, Reggie Fleming (73 fights).

I’d contend that since then — post-Fleming — many of the default rationalizations that hockey leaders reach for when it comes to arguing that fighting is a necessity feel increasingly unconvincing. Less than plausible. Derek Boogaard (66 fights) died in 2011, followed by an appalling succession of other, too-young former fighters, some by suicide, other by “natural” causes: Wade Belak (136), Rick Rypien (38), Steve Montador (69), Todd Ewen (150).

Checking back in on Gary Bettman, he has at least updated the technological metaphor that his league uses to help stall on the status quo. “The threat of fighting,” he earnestly told a parliamentary committee in Ottawa in 2019, “has people believe it’s an important thermostat in the game.”

•••

Is there another sport with a literature so swollen with the memoirs of so many of its lesser talents? Can you name any other game that takes such serious interest in players whose main role and renown is in straying beyond the rules of play? Hockey’s goons are often, of course, beloved as teammates, fêted by fans. Tie Domi (278), Georges Laraque (142), John Scott (44), Bob Probert (242): all of them were celebrities in skates and out. Fans chanted their names, wore sweaters bearing their names and numbers; why wouldn’t they now buy the autobiographies the hockey fighters publish?

That they do is not surprising, or controversial. It’s not news that fans revere role players like Shawn Thornton, the latest heavily penalized NHLer, a puncher in 168 fights, to publish an autobiography. As Terry Ryan, an experienced hockey combatant in his own right (4 NHL fights) as well as a vivid storyteller, has written that hockey players who make a business of punching are “some of the most interesting, funny, charismatic players you’ll ever come across in sports,” as well as “the most genuine and charitable.” Do you have to deny that to wonder why it’s an argument in favour of keeping fighting in the game? You don’t.

•••

In his cocksure 2017 memoir Offside, Sean Avery (83 fights) tells how he once smoked a joint with actress Scarlett Johansson, also kissed her, and “gave her a bit of unexpected sass.” Tie Domi’s Shift Work (2015) explores the author’s views on manscaping, and divulges that he was the very first NHLer to own a Blackberry.

The literature of hockey enforcement, it’s fair to say, contains multitudes.

Some memoirs are livelier than others, more insightful, forthright, better-written. Georges Laraque’s self-titled 2011 foray, for instance. The son of Haitian immigrants, the former Edmonton Oiler winger reflects on the violence he faced from his own father and the racism that poisoned his childhood in Montreal. No-one he knew as a boy believed it was possible that he’d grow up to play in the NHL, “because of the colour of my skin, a colour that would never be suitable for the whiteness of the ice.” Hockeyfights.com tallies Laraque’s NHL combats at 142, and he spends plenty of time talking about those — when he’s not weighing in on why he’s vegan, his commitment to animal rights, or his time as deputy leader of the Green Party of Canada.

In The Grim Reaper: The Life and Career of a Reluctant Warrior (2019), Stu Grimson (207 NHL fights) offers a thoughtful and often surprising accounting of hockey violence — and of his Christian faith and the peace it’s brought him. “Not everyone could reconcile that I was a Christian whose job involved hurting others,” he writes. He never saw a contradiction: “Who better than Christian to take on the role of protector?”

Pain Killer: A Memory of Big League Addiction (2021) is a harrowing chronicle of the toll that hockey fighting took on Brantt Myhres (58 fights). He survived his addictions and built back a life, he tells us, which makes his book something of a companion to Boy On Ice, John Branch’s devastating 2014 account of the life of Derek Boogaard’s tragic trajectory that ended with his death, in 2011, from an overdose of painkillers and alcohol.

Sean Avery’s is as frank as any of the hockey-fighter memoirs, but if that’s a solace, it’s a sour one. Avery has many titillating tales to share in Offside, lots of disdain to distpense, scores to settle; what’s not entirely clear is what it was — ego? arrogance? — that curdled his personality and left him wandering the world as Not A Nice Person.

The further you trail back with these memoirists, the less defensive they are on the page. “Hockey’s a fast game and tempers flare real quickly,” the late Dave Semenko (73) explains in Looking Out For Number One (1989). “That’s when the fighting comes in. It only lasts a little while. You don’t see a lot of guys getting hurt from it. The majority of times you’ll get your equipment messed up and that’s about it.”

Other than Dave Schultz, these are authors without regrets. “If I could, I’d do it all over again,” Chris Nilan declares in Fighting Back. “Wouldn’t change a thing.” That’s right before he talks about “swimming in alcohol and burying myself in pills” to deal with the pain he still suffers, 29 years after he last played in the NHL.”

The enforcers don’t generally lash out at fighting critics, either. Rob Ray (248 fights) is one of the few to come out whingeing about people who don’t (as he writes) “get it.”

Ray punched people for a living, but he didn’t just punch people. How was it his fault if people watching NHL games didn’t bother to learn that hockey’s “intangibles don’t get printed on the scoresheet.” And hey, parents: it wasn’t his job to be a role model, or to teach kids the difference between right and wrong.

As might be seen to befit his blue-collar roots as an Irish kid from Oshawa, Ontario, Shawn Thornton isn’t blaming anyone, or shifting his focus too far beyond his own understanding of the value (and values) of hard work and personal responsibility. Thornton, who’s 44, played 14 NHL seasons, winning two Stanley Cup championships along the way. He seems like a stand-up guy, a stout family man, a good friend, great teammate. It’s easy to cheer for him, if only because, well, everybody’s doing it, all through the book. Plumped by fond tributes from many former colleagues Fighting My Way To The Top, published in the fall of 2021, often has the feel of a going-away card that’s made its way around the office ahead of the retirement of a cherished co-worker — supposing that at your office you now and then bare your knuckles over by the copier.

“I knew full well the job I signed up to do,” Thornton writes. “I did what I had to do.” Why? Because “the game is a pressure cooker, and fighting helps remove the lid and relieve some of that pressure.” Being a sous-chef in charge of crockpots wasn’t easy, Thornton explains in his entirely affable way. It was actually hard, kind of like being a cop, or working in a steel factory, sometimes the anxiety made it hard to sleep at night, sometimes a teammate got hurt, which meant Thornton had a duty to do, that he did, even if sometimes that meant fighting friends who played for other teams, who then got hurt, he hurt them, unfortunately, nobody wanted that, but, hey: “It was just part of the job.”

The reward? Well, Thornton was, of course, paid well, a handsome US$3-million for his last three seasons in the NHL, though that doesn’t come up in the book. Respect is the currency that he seems to value over most others, and he sounds satisfied that he earned his share as an NHLer.

Thornton doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to tutor the next generation, which, I guess, counts as some kind of progress. Because whether you’re an eager student or not, these books do, taken together, amount to some of kind of masterclass in hockey fighting. John Ferguson: “When I fought, I liked to keep my hands moving and get my legs set wide apart.” Bob Probert: “The fights I did best in were the ones I was truly mad and upset.” Dave Schultz: “My technique was predicated on getting my right arm free to swing at my opponent.” Sean Avery: “My strategy is to be tactical and to not actually get hit, but to show patience until BOOM you can catch your opponent with a solid punch after he’s thrown four or five wild ones and is starting to get tired.”

If it isn’t outlandish enough that sentences like those are a recurring feature of Canadian letters, wait until you get into what the fighters are writing about their own breakages and the prospects of what the future might hold.

“My situation went from bad to nightmarish when he connected with three left-hand jackhammer punches to my face,” Stu Grimson confides. Rob Ray: “I broke my knuckles fighting against Ottawa’s Dennis Vial in 1994. I had my jaw broken, and all the disks in my jaw are gone.” (Vial’s fight total, since we’re keeping score: 87.)

In some of the memoirs published since signs of CTE were discovered  in Reggie Fleming’s brain,  the enforcers gaze grimly into the future. “Getting hit repeatedly in the head is a bad thing that happens repeatedly,” Chris Nilan allows in the opening chapter of his Fighting Back. “The trauma has to do lasting damage.”

Tie Domi bustles by, quick as he can. “I am not one of those people who can weigh in on concussions or the other health issues that some guys in hockey are going through.” That’s Shawn Thornton’s line, too, more or less: “I see that some people express concerns about head trauma, concussions, CTE … But as I said earlier, we all sign up for this and we all get the benefits of being NHL players.”

Saddest of all might be Rob Ray, who published Rayzor’s Edge in 2007, when he was 39: “I try to hope that medical technology will have improved enough in the future so that they’ll be able to fix me up when I’m older.”

•••

Questions, questions.

If hockey’s fighting is so dreadful, why has it endured so long? Aren’t the fighters consenting adults? How come fans all leap to their feet every time the fists flurry? Doesn’t the violence sometimes enliven a team that’s lost its mojo; can’t a punch-up change the energy of a game?

I’ve heard the answers, mulled them. Do they contain compelling arguments for maintaining the status quo when it comes to fighting? I don’t see them. Any of those, for me, are superseded by the potential for harm that every bare-knuckle fight presents. No matter what messages need sending, there has to be a better way.

Does the NHL’s own Department of Player Safety have an opinion on this? Not to mention (may I just mention) the official NHL rulebook. If you’re dipping into the statutes contained therein at all, I’d suggest you bypass the five pages of hows and wherefores relating to Rule 46, the league’s official ordinance on fighting. Instead, I’d direct you to Rule 21, which governs match penalties. The latter is much more succinct in stipulating the fate of any player who attempts to injure another — out of the game, gone. Intent doesn’t figure in; you only need to be attempting to do harm. What is a punch in the head if not an attempt to injure? But no NHL fight, Zacks-only or otherwise, ends with match penalties, and no-one is surprised by — or even discusses — the league’s ongoing willful flouting of its own explicit regulations.

Earlier this year, in another NHL season, Zack Kassian missed 17 games after breaking a hand punching an Ottawa defenceman. In the aftermath of his more recent October fight, he was ready to ready to return to Edmonton’s line-up just a week after hitting his head on the ice.

“It’s an unfortunate injury,” shrugged his coach, Dave Tippett (1 NHL fight as a player). “You can get hurt with by a shot, you can get hurt in a fight. Injuries happen in hockey. Always, all different ways, not just fighting.”

Kassian himself was just grateful. “It’s an emotional game and things boil over,” he told reporters. “Obviously when you see pictures of my situation, first thing that comes to mind is stop fighting. But fighting’s been in the game a very long time, it’s what makes hockey unique.”

He owed so much to punching and being punched, Kassian said. “It’s one of my attributes that made me a unique player. It’s given my family a great life and it’s something I enjoy doing.”

Why.

Emptied Benches: A meeting of Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden during the 1977-78 NHL season.

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