Matthew is also the editor at Hockey Heaven, a Sabres blog. For more articles like this one, visit www.hockey-heaven.com.
There are, if you can believe it, YouTube shrines to the thing. Nerdy collages of the same clip from different angles with different announcers — clips of the clip on SportsCenter, the nasally chirp of Barry Melrose saying, “clean hockey hit”. All of this played on top of some came-to-Jesus music, like we’ve just seen the light. It’s referred to as “the hit”, though I’ve never heard it called that anywhere else.
This is where I am reminded of what a college friend once said about sports: it’s dungeons and dragons for people with wives. Indeed, my wifeless college friend, indeed.
What I’m talking about, if you don’t know, is Brian Campbell’s devastating hit on RJ Umberger in the 2005-06 playoffs. I had seen more bone-crushing contact before in my time as a sports fan, but no hit sooner endeared me to a team and player than that one. I was shocked.
Brian Campbell just did that? To a Flyer?
It was precisely at that moment that I forgave the lock-out and again loved hockey. If the underdog season had not done it or the no-name band of AHLers and misfits, that hit certainly did. I had never felt more involved in the game and team that season than there.
Of course, in the new, “head shot” conscious NHL, a hit like Brian Campbells would lean dangerously close to illegal territory. Campbell led with his shoulder into a player admiring a pass exiting his own zone. Umberger’s head was considerably lower than it should have been, and as a result his temple and jaw crashed right into the side of #51’s body. It was a clean hit at the time, but may be considered profoundly dirty in today’s game.
It is amazing how something so innocuous in terms of the outcome of the game and violent in terms of the delivery can be amongst the top few moments that many of us remember from a particular playoff run.
And doesn’t it seem that we follow all of our sports in that way? That we celebrate the catastrophic as much as the nearly divine? Not just the Bill Buckner moments, but also the teeth-shattering collisions, the bone crunching mishaps. (I guarantee you, for instance, that Boston Bruins fans will not soon forget the hit on Nathan Horton, or from earlier in the playoffs, we are still seeing replays of Raffi Torres destroying multiple Chicago Blackhawks).
It certainly says something about what draws us into sport. Sure, we are compelled by the loyalty to team, the game story, the spectacle. But we are also profoundly drawn to the drama of sport — a drama that sometimes includes aggression and, yes, bloodlust.
The science of sports is ever-evolving, but has grown more in the past decade than in any other time in history. Call it whatever you want, but it is readily apparent that we now exist in a time and place in which we have to luxury to exert time and dollars to understanding more accurately what sport does to our body. One of the first things we’ve come to clearly understand is that the velocity at which professional sports takes place leaves little room for error.
Built like gladiators — forged from stone practically from birth, athletes are unique specimen in many of their physiological functions. They simply possess unique biology that allows them to do what they do for a living at the level at which they are able to do it. Most often though, they are eerily similar to the average citizen in one critical area: the fragility of their brains. High speed, hard contact sports thus result in stunning amounts of damage, particularly to those most willing to absorb large amounts of punishment to collect a pay-check.
This has led to terrifying possibilities: high profile athletes, millionaires — the Greek Gods of our time, left to die decades earlier than the rest of us. Instead of fading off into the sunset, they crumble in their 40’s and 50’s, shadows of their former selves. The threat of such things has led all major North American sports leagues to drastically retool their policies on the most dangerous of all collisions: head shots. In particular, the NHL and NFL have re-written specific sections of their player conduct books to prohibit violent hits to the head.
There is, by no argument that I am able to formulate, a rational debate against such rule changes. Attempting to eliminate potentially dangerous head shots is as sensical an act as anything I can think of a sports league doing in a long time. It maintains the possibility for big, popular hits in games while attempting to remove the most dangerous. It elongates player’s careers, helps insure the stability of their health after their careers, and in most cases encourages what most American sports fans pay to see: offense.
So it’s firmly reasoned: establishing and enforcing rules that eliminate head shots is a good thing. But this does not answer another fundamental question: if head shots *do* occur, should I be appalled? Should I really even care at all? After some consideration, my answer is this: No, not by a long shot.
A fan’s sole responsibility in watching sports is to be entertained. You pay the money, you endure the advertising, you buy the merchandise. This is not an infomercial on the fundamental principles of physical education, this is not a kinesiology class, this is entertainment. There are many amongst us who aren’t entertained by hard hits and head shots and that is certainly their prerogative. I, on the other hand — and perhaps this is a dirty admission — enjoy the “car wreck” as much as I do the sporting portion. I am equally as entertained, equally as interested in the crazy things that occur in sports as I am in the spectacularly athletic things. I am just as curious about the events I don’t anticipate will happen as those that I am certain will happen.
And big hits, head shots — car wrecks, if you will — certainly fall into that category. You almost never see a huge collision coming. That, in and of itself, is part of the appeal. Just as many of us rubberneck on the road at the scene of an accident, or raise our eyes and ears to attention when we hear a police siren, so to are we enthralled by the unexpected in sport. So too are we compelled by what it means in the greater story of the game. No major hit that I can think of has not fueled the motivations of a game further. If a player delivers a big hit, it is a momentous war cry for our team: a signal of our collective toughness as an organization, as fans. If a player receives a big hit, it is a rallying marker: something behind which we get to turn the tide against our foes.
Head shots are lethal, and in the long term terribly damaging. But they’re also damn interesting to watch. And admit it, a few years ago when a Pittsburgh Steeler defender and Willis McGahee, playing for the Baltimore Ravens, collided head first in mid-air, when it looked like McGahee was close to complete decapitation, a little part of you, deep down inside, uttered, “Good.”
Then, when you heard McGahee was okay — that he would walk and play and possibly even dominate again, you didn’t even have to feel bad about it.
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