“I can’t define pornography … but I know it when I see it. I can’t define gutless … but if the shoe fits Niklas?”
Running interference with the Wings Niklas Kronwall
Havlat hit may not be interference but it shows lack of respect
By Terrance Seamus Gavan
A red herring led the sports headlines last weekend.
The red herring?
Whether the headhunting hit by the Wings defenseman Niklas Kronwall on the Black Hawks leading scorer Martin Havlat was actually interference.
Kronwall was issued a major penalty for the hit along the boards.
The hockey pundits all waded deeply into the pond, sharks to the bloodletting.
Most of the big hammerheads, including the three loopily partisan musketeers on TSN’s The Reporters hosted by Dave Hodge all jumped on the teetering bandwagon, citing that referee Dan O’Halloran and his crew quite simply got it wrong.
“If that’s interference, then we might as well remove Scott Stevens from the Hall of Fame,” said panel member and Sun media columnist Steve Simmons, who can always be relied on to chuck it all at the wall. The implication? Apparently that Scott Stevens earned passage to the Hallowed Hall for an unabashed predilection for mayhem. Which is just patently untrue. And that suggestion from Simmons, come to think, is another red herring. Because Niklas Kronwall is a lot of things, but he’s no Scott Stevens. Kronwall is just another built for bluster, journeyman mucker.
Michael Farber, another Reporters regular and an unmitigated apologist for all things career threatening in the NHL, said there should have been no penalty called. Farber viewed the hit as part of the day-to-day NHL shuck and jive. And the other panelist, the Toronto Star’s Damien Cox, was equally dismissive about the officiating crew’s so called “make-up call.”
The hit, for the record, put Havlat (a talented scoring machine) deep into a concussive coma for a good two minutes. As he lay on the ice, eyes rolled back to the nether reaches of his melon, the game officials on the ice conferred and finally called interference.
Was it a make up call? By strict definition of the rules, probably it was.
It wasn’t interference by strict definition.
But who cares?
That’s the red herring. Shift the blame. Change the conversation.
Discuss the call and not the brutal reality.
And here it is, the crux, the minutia of the incident.
It may not have been interference, but it was a devastating and malignant headhunting attempt to injure another player. Let’s not forget that Eric Lindros is not the first and will not be the last player whose career was cut short by too many cranks to the noggin. This is a problem that hinges on body armor, bigger bodies, and the changing parameters of a game that is outgrowing old standards.
So if not interference then what?
Well the officiating crew deemed it ugly enough to offer the game gate to Kronwall. That prompted a one game suspension.
Ultimately, it’s a hit that, like fighting, must be addressed by the NHL.
The National Football League has bowed to increasing scientific pressure and the eye-popping reports of early onset dementia caused by significant and ongoing head trauma. They responded by outlawing flagrant shots to the head.
Of course this is the NHL, ruled by a different set of standards, and an old school dinosaur named Garibaldi Bettmanasourus Rex, so we can’t expect too much in the way of redress.
Farber, Simmons, Hodge and Cox, all guys with some pencil-pushing pop and pundit, all said no foul.
Of course they’re not on the ice. But they love the mayhem. Figures. Voyeurs and pantywaists love the vicarious rush of adrenalin.
Brian Campbell, Chicago defenseman, who is part of the NHL competition committee, offers a different opinion.
“I thought it was gutless all around,” said Campbell. “I thought he [Kronwall] jumped. Marty didn't have the puck. His forearm came up high. He’s done it hundreds of time in the League, and it seems like nothing ever happens. I just don't understand it. We've talked about it, and eventually we've got to clamp down. These guys got to pay for it - guys that are taking shots to the head. It’s unacceptable and it’s not like it’s the first time it's happened with that guy. There’s no need for it in this game.”
And for me, that notation, and snippet from a player, rates higher than all of the swollen rhetoric emanating from the bloated couch-potatoes that spew forth in talking head segments on OTR, PTI and ESPN.
Was that a dirty hit? Was it headhunting? Was it a gutless hit?
The NHL and the old-schoolers state emphatically that it’s all part of the long history of the game.
But is it?
Remember Habs enforcer John Ferguson? Six feet and all of 178 pounds in his prime. How about Eddie Shack? Six foot one and 195.Gordie Howe? One of the biggest guys in the league. Six-one and 205 pounds.
They all played without helmets, and with body armor that resembled a rolled up copy of the Sunday Star on a slow news day.
I don’t recall if Leaf enforcer Eddie Shack ever took a loose footed, leaping run at the Habs’ Henri Richard [5’7” and 160] or Yvon Cournoyer [5’7” and 172], but I’m pretty sure that he never did. I’m also pretty certain that he and Fergie both had better things to contemplate than the notoriety engendered by the possibility of ending another player’s season or career. Back then there was less money and more chivalry extant.
Sadly none of that former gallantry seems to enter the equation these days.
Bone crushers, in body armor worthy of an ersatz Robocop on Tacks, don’t seem so enamored of tradition and respect for another player’s right to earn a living.
Saying that this type of rampant head hunting is part of the game, is equivalent to the NRA’s loopy logic regarding the second amendment right to bear arms in the USA. When that American legislation was penned, the arms referred to included single shot muskets and bowie knives.
The right to bear arms was never meant to include 50 mm assault rifles, ouzis and rocket launchers.
By the same token, clean hits in the NHL were never meant to include a blindside, leaping shoulder crank to an exposed and unsuspecting melon, from a body-armored, 6’6” 260 pound projectile traveling at 42 mph.
Geez. Someone could get hurt.
Just ask Martin Havlat – but you’ll have to wait until he wakes up
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