Nazem Kadri: eight games for a high hit on Justin Faulk.
Ryan Reaves: two games for attacking Ryan Graves.
Mark Scheifele: four games for charging Jake Evans
And those are just the acts of barbarism the NHL’s Department of Player Safety deemed worthy of suspensions during this year’s playoffs. Other players received fines. Still others escaped punishment they probably deserved. And that’s not even including accidental violence such as the collision between Corey Perry and John Tavares.
Tom Wilson did not get suspended this post-season, though his Washington Capitals lasted only five games. He remains the most feared player in the league. But let’s face it, every team would love to have him on its roster. After all, rough and rowdy play has always been part of hockey.
In its coverage of the first indoor match in Montreal’s Victoria Rink in March 1875, the Daily Witness reported that some kids, perhaps frustrated their usual ice time had been hijacked, started skating even as game continued. “An unfortunate disagreement arose,” according to the paper. “One little boy was struck across the head, and the man who did so was afterwards called to account, a regular fight taking place in which a bench was broken and other damage caused.”
A few days later, the story perhaps growing with time and retelling, Kingston’s WeeklyBritish Whig ran this front-page brief:
After watching a match in 1894, Lady Aberdeen, wife of Lord Stanley’s successor as governor general, lamented the sport’s roughness in her diary. Yet she also observed, “it is beautiful to see the perfection of skating that is involved in the playing of the game.”
But when she attended another match the next month, the barbarity overwhelmed the beauty. “The more I see of hockey, the less I like it—it presents too fierce a temptation for roughness & unfairness for any average person,” she wrote. “I am sure I should murder my opponents if I were to play at such close quarters & with a stick in one’s hand.” Despite the referee’s best efforts, “the number of the hurt & the maimed & the disfigured . . . is distressing.”
P.D. Ross (seated, second from the right) with the Rideau Rebels
P.D. Ross, the Stanley Cup trustee and Ottawa Journal publisher, is a major character in Klondikers: Dawson City’s Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey. The violence concerned him and he worried that “many men and most women” were turned off by it. In 1904, under a “Decadent Hockey” headline, he wrote: “Unless a radical change occurs at once in the conduct of hockey matches, the noble winter sport of Canada must, in at least this part of Canada, sink in the public estimation to the level of pugilism.”
But the press played both sides: often condemning violence in editorials and frequently glamourizing it in game reports. Papers regularly decried the visiting team’s dirty tactics while overlooking the home team’s infractions or putting them down to grit and toughness. Or they mocked the other team, especially if it was from Toronto, for its lack of toughness.
Weldy Young of the Ottawa Hockey Club
Sometimes newspapers covered scraps with a wink. Before Weldy Young moved to Dawson City, the Gazette reported on an 1898 incident in which the Ottawa cover point had “more than a wordy discussion with [Cam] Davidson and there was an exchange of fistic compliments. They did not send long letters to the papers saying pleasant things about each other. They just got their difficulty over quick and then the referee gave a five minutes rest, to discuss the situation. There were a few other little incidents of a like nature which relieved the monotony in a way not to be commended.”
While Ross and others worried that unnecessary roughness would be the ruin of the game, for some spectators, the rowdiness was part of the attraction. When Ottawa and the Wanderers battled in 1904, Montreal’s Arena remained full of paying customers when the vicious game finally ended after midnight. As the Citizen noted, “Everybody stayed until the last moment to witness what was about the most hair-raising finish ever seen in a Stanley Cup game.”
None of this is to defend the actions of Kadri, Reaves or Scheifele, only to note that the debate over violence in hockey has been a part of the game since the beginning.
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The publication date for Klondikers is Oct. 5. Which feels close. A few weeks ago, my publisher created a digital Advanced Reading Copy (ARC). It’s a file of the book in close-to-final form. I sent it to two writers I admire who’d generously agreed to write blurbs for the book.
After a proofreader read the ARC closely, finding problems ranging from a missing period to style issues to embarrassing spelling errors, it was my turn. I went through the proofreader’s edit and waited for the arrival of printed ARC (we used to call these bound galleys). I read it carefully, finding additional problems. Even though I’d read the manuscript countless times, reading it in book form was revealing. Not only did I find more typos and other problems, I was alarmed at how often I’d used the word “controversial.” I was relieved to have an opportunity to change several of them.
I now have a new digital version of the book to go through one last time. But my scary instructions are: “This last round of checking pages is to look for anything absolutely incorrect grammatically, factually, or design-wise, just to ensure that things are completely clean! Only essential changes will be made.”
At a certain point, an author just has to accept that the book is finished and he can’t do anything more to make it better.
Meanwhile, two flattering blurbs came in (more on those in the next newsletter) and next week my editor and I will discuss the final copy for the back cover.
I should get my first copy of the finished book in early September.
If you have any questions about my book or about the roots of our love affair with hockey, send them my way and I will do my best to answer them in a future newsletter.
• Reading: “My Father Vanished When I Was 7. The Mystery Made Me Who I Am,” by Nicholas Casey is such a fabulous story. If you have a New York Times subscription, please do read it. The Times also did a great job on this oral history of the Pentagon Papers, which I highly recommend. And even if you don’t have a Timessubscription, which will let you read this story about the guy who jumped in Lake Michigan every day for a year, you can check out his Instagram or Twitter feed. Love this guy. And the fact that he turned it into a fundraiser for Chicago music venues makes it even better. (Warning: I ended up spending a long time going through his Instagram feed and you might fall into the same trap.)
• Streaming: Like a lot of other people, I was impressed with Mare of Easttown (Crave). Powerful performance from Kate Winslet. And I’m excited to start season two of Lupin (Netflix). Hope it’s as good as the first season.
• Listening: “NPR’s 50 Favorite Songs of 1971” is a Spotify playlist that’s great fun to listen to, especially if you are old enough to remember 1971. It was an astonishing year for music.
