NHL End-of-Decade-in-Review feature for HockeyPrimeTime.com
| Bertuzzi's attack on Moore continues to resonate |  |
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| Written by Denis Gorman | |
| Tuesday, December 22, 2009 00:00 | |
| Editor's note: This is the first in a series highlighting the NHL's most memorable and important moments of the decade. It is the night of March 8, 2004, and Denver’s Pepsi Center is hosting a regular-season game between two NHL Western Conference rivals, the Vancouver Canucks and Colorado Avalanche. There is an air of expectation. Something is going to happen.
Twenty-one nights prior in Vancouver, Avalanche role player Steve Moore checked Vancouver’s Markus Naslund, incurring a concussion to the captain and a vow of vengeance from his teammates. In the final period of what would be an 8-2 win for the Avalanche, Naslund’s linemate and arguably the league’s most dominant player, Todd Bertuzzi, decided to extract his pound of flesh. He trailed Moore closely, challenging him to a fight. It did not matter that Moore had fought Bertuzzi’s teammate Matt Cooke early in the match. Bertuzzi wanted Moore. He may have wanted to send the proverbial message, to both his team and the Avalanche. What happened next was horrifying, and almost certainly not what Bertuzzi had in mind. Bertuzzi punched Moore in the back of the head before driving him head-first into the ice. Avalanche players and Canucks jumped onto the two men, creating a mountain of humanity. Eventually, the players were pulled off of Moore. The Avalanche winger did not get up. Moore had to be taken off the ice by the on-site emergency medical technicians after suffering a concussion, facial lacerations and three fractured vertebrae in his neck. Neither man has been the same since. Moore has not played an NHL game, while Bertuzzi has become a journeyman. Moore has twice filed lawsuits against Bertuzzi in Canadian courts. According to a recent report in the Denver Post, Moore's lawyer believes an Ontario court will hear the case before the end of next year. Bertuzzi filed a negligence lawsuit in 2008 against Marc Crawford, his coach in Vancouver. The suit charges that the current Dallas Stars coach should have had the foresight to recognize that Moore would be attacked, and should share the responsibility of paying damages with Bertuzzi, if the court rules in Moore's favor. As the first decade of the third millennium comes to its end, did the Bertuzzi-Moore incident change anything in the sport of hockey? The answer, simply, is no. Following the lockout and the rewriting of the league's rules, there was speculation that fighting, while not abolished, would not be a frequent occurrence. Instead, the opposite has happened: Fighting majors have gone up every year, from 466 in 2005-06, to 497 in 2006-07, to 664 in 2007-08 and 734 last season. As of this writing, the league's 30 teams had combined for 534 fighting majors, an average of 1.078 per game. When the Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007-08, they led the NHL with 69 fighting majors. The Ducks' general manager that year was Brian Burke who, at his introductory press conference with the Toronto Maple Leafs, was quoted as saying that “we require, as a team, proper levels of pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence. That's how our teams play. I make no apologies for that. Our teams play a North American game. We're throwbacks. It's black-and-blue hockey. It's going to be more physical hockey here than people are used to." On the night that the lives of Bertuzzi and Moore became forever attached, Burke was the general manager of the Canucks. He, too, was named a responsible party according to motion records filed by Moore's lawyers and obtained by the Toronto Star:
“There have been classic violent episodes going back to the mid-1930s, and Eddie Shore and before that. Eddie Shore nearly killed (Ace Bailey). Ace Bailey’s father tried to shoot and kill him with a gun. It was a running story for a long time,” Stan Fischler said prior to a recent New York Rangers home game. Fischler, who has covered the NHL for more than half a century as a writer and broadcaster, may be the best man to opine on hockey's history of violence. “These things happen over and over and over again. The Bertuzzi thing was redundant. …The more media, more replays. The Bertuzzi thing was one hundred times worse because it was played a hundred times more,” Fischler said. It is an inarguable statement. Am examination of the league's history of violent occurrences refutes the notion of Bertuzzi-Moore as an isolated incident: • March 13, 1955: The legendary Maurice Richard was suspended for the final three games, and all of the playoffs, for punching a referee in a fight with Boston Bruin Hal Laycoe. • September 21, 1969: Wayne Maki of the St. Louis Blues hit Boston’s Ted Green in the head with a stick in a 1969 preseason game. • April 28, 1993: Washington Capitals center Dale Hunter inexplicably checked a defenseless Pierre Turgeon, less than a second after the Islanders' star had scored a playoff goal. • May 29, 1996: Colorado’s Claude Lemieux checked Detroit’s Kris Draper face-first into the boards, sparking a rivalry and leaving Draper with a broken jaw, nose and cheekbone, and a concussion. • February 21, 2000: As a member of the Boston Bruins, Marty McSorley slashed then-Vancouver Canuck Donald Brashear in the head, another incident that was tried in criminal court. • March 8, 2007: Islanders forward Chris Simon cross-checked the face of Rangers forward Ryan Hollweg. • April 26, 2009: Brashear, now with the Washington Capitals, sucker-punched Rangers center Blair Betts in a playoff game. Many in and around the game believe the instigator rule has eliminated a code of honesty, saying that current players such as Patrick Kaleta, Sean Avery and Matt Cooke, among others, would not be allowed to perpetuate their deeds without being held accountable. In a November 25 Q&A with Canada’s National Post, commentator Don Cherry sermoned from The Book of The Game Was Better When The Players Held Each Other Responsible. “It is fear and respect. Fear should be in there, because they don’t fear one another. There is no way a guy like Tuomo Ruutu would be running guys from behind if Bob Probert was on the ice,” Cherry told the newspaper. “There is no way guys would be running guys from behind if they knew they had to pay the price. It’s not no respect; the players don’t have any fear that they will have to pay the price. “That’s the problem. They call them hits to the head, but I call them cheap shots.” “[Cherry] is not the only guy -- everybody is saying that," Fischler said. "It’s a bad rule for that reason.” He also pointed at across-the-board physical changes to players, while rink dimensions have stayed the same, as one cause of violence in the modern game. “The game is no more violent than it was before the lockout. When it was a six-team league, it was a different kind of violence than it is now. The big distinction is the speed of the game, the rule changes that made it faster. So you have bigger guys colliding at high speeds. All the protective equipment is a load of (garbage) because it really doesn’t protect that much. And the worst part of it is that encourages [players] to think that they’re invulnerable. It’s like everything else. Cars go faster, they crash harder. You turn on the radio every morning, the traffic, and I hear accidents are all over the place. Hockey’s changed just like everything else has changed. “In the old days, the players skated slower. Body checks were used by the hip ... it was open ice. There was no glass around the boards. The boards were not used to whack guys they way they are now. That’s why they use the boards. It’s easier to line a guy up and hit him into the boards.” There have always been violent incidents in team sports. Jack Tatum paralyzed Darryl Stingley with a vicious hit on a football field. Kermit Washington threw the most devastating punch in basketball history and shattered Rudy Tomjanovich’s face. Juan Marichal attempted to imbed a baseball bat in the head of Johnny Roseboro. More recently, basketball's Ron Artest and baseball's Frank Francisco were prominently involved in riots with fans in Detroit and Oakland, respectively. Then-Tennessee Titan Albert Haynesworth stomped on the helmet-less face of Dallas Cowboys center Andre Gurode. Still, there is a perception that some members of the media take great pains to criticize hockey's fighting culture following particularly ugly episodes. An anchor for a national morning news television program expressed her shock and desire to see changes made to the sport after a video of a Canadian mite-league brawl was aired. “Hockey is the easiest scapegoat of all the sports," Fischler said, "because it’s not an American sport. Most of the media do not understand it, so they jump on it. It’s easy.” As the NHL begins its ninth decade of existence, the Bertuzzi-Moore incident begs an obvious question: Will there be another? “Do you drive a car? Are there accidents on the LIE (Long Island Expressway), the Jersey Turnpike?” Fischler asked rhetorically. “There will be more. It’s inevitable. How can there not be? It will be a miracle if there isn’t.” And so the clock ticks. Uneasily. http://www.hockeyprimetime.com/news/features/bertuzzi-moore-incident-continues-to-resonate |
posted by Denis P. Gorman at 4:14 PM
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