People like to watch other people fight.
Not all people, and not in all circumstances. But the history of humankind would suggest that the old schoolyard instinct is powerful, and nearly impossible to suppress.
Combat as sport, as entertainment, undoubtedly predates the historic record, and into the 21st century there is no evidence that we as a species are evolving beyond it. Boxing is enduring one of its cyclical downs, but mixed martial arts have more than picked up the slack, and anyone who cringes at blood sport best not look too closely at the most popular video games on offer.
So like it or not, that's us, or a part of us, the lizard brain in action.
And if that was the hockey establishment's rationale — that we allow fighting because people like fighting, we're in the ticket-selling business and that's one of the elements that help spin the turnstiles — you could at least accept it at face value.
You could also then hold them accountable for issues of safety. Boxing is put under the microscope any time a fighter falls into a coma or dies, and over the years it has been forced to embrace changes designed to protect the competitors — from giving ringside doctors the power to stop fights to the reduction of title bouts to 12 rounds from 15 and to mandatory suspensions after knockouts. The rise of mixed martial arts to prominence coincided with its emergence out of the no-holds-barred, human-cockfighting dark ages into a sport that's closely regulated and safer than it appears.
But when something terrible happens as the consequence of a hockey fight — most recently the death of Don Sanderson after falling and striking his head on the ice — the ensuing debate instead takes all kinds of irrelevant twists and turns. The circle-the-wagons crowd falls back on truisms and convoluted logic, trying to suggest that fighting is essential to the sport, that it is tactically necessary and that it actually makes things safer by giving the boys a way to blow off steam.
The abolitionists fall into the trap of trying to be rational (fighting is violent, it's dangerous, it's dumb and it isn't allowed in other sports) or moral, failing in the same way that rational and moral arguments have failed to eliminate all kinds of other dangerous, counterproductive societal activities. You can't force people to indulge only in what's good for them and good for the world.
So in the wake of a sad, sad story, how about a little honesty?
If you have a sport in which big, strong men wearing skates, standing on ice, take off their helmets and punch each other in the head with bare knuckles, chances are that every once in a while, something terrible will happen. (The same way that if you allow players in a sport involving sticks and blades and pucks to compete without eye protection, eventually somebody is going to be blinded.) If you encourage a culture in which unwilling players can be goaded into fighting or can be hunted down in fulfilment of an extra-regulatory "code," every once in a while you're going to wind up with Marty McSorley clubbing Donald Brashear, or Todd Bertuzzi breaking Steve Moore's neck.
Everybody involved with the sport, especially everybody who makes a nickel from it, is complicit in those acts — from the players and their union, to the leagues and their commissioners, to television networks running the fight highlights and to the Saturday night demagogue peddling his videos.
Like fighting in hockey? Fine. But man up. Embrace it, and embrace the consequences. No excuses.
Once upon a time, Bob Dylan wrote a song about a dead boxer named Davey Moore, in which all of those involved in the fight in which he was killed, called upon to accept responsibility, said in one way or another, "It ain't me, babe."
Who killed Don Sanderson? Nobody. It was an accident. But it wasn't random. It wasn't a fluke. It was an unintended but not unimaginable consequence.
It's important to understand the difference.
