CHL debates fighting in hockey (again), and hey, there's a rule for that

The Canadian Hockey League put the debate over fighting back on the agenda at its annual meeting last week, in discussions that CHL president Dave Branch was said to have described as “cordial and productive,” according to the Globe and Mail’s James Mirtle.

The language, straight from Diplomacy 101, is rather fitting in a hockey country where the CHL’s  Western Hockey League is almost twice as likely to feature a fight as its Ontario and Quebec counterparts. When it comes to frontier justice, this has been the cultural lay of the land for some time: east is east and west is west and never the brains shall meet. Branch, a decent, reform-minded kind of guy who’s been at this a lot longer than most in the game, is headed back in for more dancing around the pyre. Just two years ago his OHL organization enacted a bureaucratic answer to the question -- and if 10 fights equalling a two-game suspension is the best the relatively pacific OHL can offer in this regard, what can we expect this time around?

More to the point, perhaps, is whether this is even a topic worth arguing anymore. We live in a sporting age where the ground underneath the likes of Branch and his colleagues has shifted dramatically. Talking about the efficacy of fighting in a time of dying NHL enforcers and increased awareness of head injuries seems something like resurfacing the floors while the roof upstairs is falling in. Sports like hockey and even moreso, football, that have traditionally been coached and played with a strong emphasis on the physical and yes, even the excessively violent, are in a descending phase and face a kind of existential crisis. This is no longer an argument solely about fighting, but about the very future of such endeavours, and whether it’s worth keeping them around.

It’s an argument that deserves more amplification another day than this one. For now, in the little picture, there’s no need for trying to come up with a consensus where none seems to exist nationally: a regulation in place makes things quite clear. Rule 6.7(a) of Hockey Canada's Official Playing Rules puts it this way: “A Major penalty and a Game Misconduct penalty shall be assessed any player that fights with an opposing player.”

In other words, you fight, you’re out. No more two-game suspensions for 10 fights, the OHL approach that introduces a tactical element, turning it into a game of cards to be played by the designated. And no more of the world wherein junior hockey, just the sort of place where skills development should take precedent over exploiting physical disparities among its 16-to-20-year-old age group, is more prone to feature fighting than the pros of the NHL.

As Dave Branch put it himself about fighting, “we don’t need it.”

Time to use a novel approach, gentlemen: the rulebook.