Ray Ferraro was in Anaheim last week, about to do a game, and a video was playing full of the hits of his hockey era. Ferraro almost laughed.
“I said, how the hell did I survive that? They’re crazy hits, vicious, and I can see why some people love that,” says Ferraro, a 400-goal scorer who played from 1984 to 2002 and now TSN’s ace hockey analyst. “But every one of those hits were penalties. The game has evolved.”
On Wednesday, Ken Dryden will sit down and he will read a prepared statement to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health’s subcommittee, which has been formed to examine sport-related concussions. The hall of fame goaltender and former Liberal cabinet minister has decided to push hockey toward banning hits to the head for no other reason than he thinks it’s the right thing to do.
“This isn’t about hitting,” says Dryden. “That’s a distraction and that’s a confusion. This isn’t about hitting at all. You think Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin don’t hit? Of course they do. They play tough, hard games, that’s what they do. That’s what virtually every player does.
“It is a false argument and it’s actually a dishonest argument to talk in terms of taking hitting out. Give me a break. That’s not what this is. That’s not what I’ve ever said. Not even close. This is about hits to the head.”
There hasn’t been much traction within the game. Nobody in the league has deigned to meet with him in any capacity. The argument within the NHL against banning head hits is this: Fighting is being bred out of the game — though, as Dryden puts it, not because of enlightenment. The apex predator hits, the Scott Stevens hits and the Matt Cooke hits, are all but gone. The league introduced Rule 48 for blindside hits to the head, took out the blindside aspect, and has crept toward putting more responsibility being placed on the hitter. There has been improvement.
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And after a fallow period under Stephane Quintal, the league has a reinforced suspension office under former enforcer George Parros. (Parros had to divest himself from his Violent Gentlemen line of merchandise, which can still be seen on fans with the slogan: Make Hockey Violent Again. This was a Very Hockey Thing.)
And hockey’s same old worries run under all of it. The NHL disagrees with Dryden, and worries banning head hits will breed out hitting. The fear of unintended consequences abounds. They didn’t eliminate the red line to help eliminate enforcers. It just happened.
Dryden tilts against these windmills, because he thinks he should. He points to how much the game has changed over the past century: the forward pass, the introduction of an elbowing penalty, the red line, change. Evolution.
“Think of the best players, then go to the next 10, then go to the next 20, then go to the next 100, then go to the next 400,” says Dryden, who wrote the book Game Change centred on the late Steve Montador, the NHL tough guy who died at age 35. “How do they play? They don’t play the way players did 40 years ago … they play in a way where they don’t put at real risk, and serious risk of head injury, the other guy or themselves. So the choice doesn’t have to be, this is the game and the game that I played is the game now and forever. No, the game is different anyway. And the game is already starting to leave it behind.”
It’s a lonely position in hockey, where the sport’s culture so often overrides its brotherhood. Dryden has gotten supportive calls from Scotty Bowman, from former head of officiating Terry Gregson — whom Dryden quoted as saying: look up Rule 48.1, Illegal Check to the Head, and delete Illegal — and from Ferraro, TSN’s lead hockey analyst and one of the sharpest voices in the game. There are pockets.
“I support what Ken’s doing because I think, with no skin in the game, he’s just trying to find a way to a better path,” says Ferraro. “It’s not a perfect path; there is no perfect path. Just better. If you step onto this path and you don’t like it in a year, change it. You know how many times they changed the offside rule? When I played, half the time guys would yell from the bench at the linesman and the linesman would say: ‘Guys, they changed that rule in the summer.’ And we’d say: ‘Oh, missed that one.’
“I don’t think much would change if you went to an international standard, which is every hit to the head is penalized with (two minutes and a 10-minute misconduct). Maybe you give referees the latitude to say, that’s clearly an accidental hit to the head, and there’s no 10.
“I’m for anything that would lower the number of hits to the head: intentional, unintentional, doesn’t matter to me. The game is terrific. I don’t want to come off like a grumpy old, ‘Oh, I hate everything the NHL does.’ I think the game is awesome. There are amazing parts to it, but what’s wrong with trying to be a little better? What’s wrong with trying to be a little safer?
“Say there’s 100 (head hits) in a year and we take out 10. Isn’t that better?”
The subcommittee will listen Wednesday to Dryden and others: athletes, coaches, administrators. Maybe nothing will result. Maybe things will continue to get better.
Will hockey ever move that little bit more, further into a different game? Will it ever find the confidence to make every hit to the head illegal, and value the brains of those who get hit over anything else? It seems doubtful, doesn’t it? But so would a lot of changes, if you asked about them 20 years ago.
“Life goes on,” says Dryden. “The game goes on.” He will tilt against the old windmills Wednesday. They seem eternal, but maybe they aren’t.
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