Bowling Green and Western Michigan dropped the gloves on Friday.
Jan. 24, 2008
By Elliot Olshansky
CSTV.com
ELLIOT OLSHANSKY
Elliot is CSTV.com's hockey editor and runs his Rink Rat hockey blog on CSTV.com. E-mail
Rich Rodriguez could have had any number of questions for Red Berenson when the new Michigan football coach was introduced to the Wolverines' longtime hockey mentor.
Rodriguez might have asked Berenson about bringing a national championship to Ann Arbor, as Berenson did in 1996 and 1998. He could have asked how the campus has changed since Berenson played for the Wolverines in the early 1960s. He may even have asked about being the No. 1 team in the nation. Instead, though, he asked a question that, to be fair, is undoubtedly common among those unfamiliar with hockey in general and college hockey specifically.
"He asked me about the players, `Do they get down?'" Berenson said. "I said, `What do you mean, "Do they get down?" He said, `Do they fight?'
"I said, `No, no, there's no fighting in college hockey, but you never know.' It's funny that he asked that question."
Funny indeed. One week after Rodriguez watched his first Wolverines hockey game, the Wolverines' victim that night, Western Michigan, did "get down." With 12 seconds left in the Broncos' game at Bowling Green -- a 4-1 loss for the Broncos that was close until a pair of empty net goals in the final minute -- a line brawl broke out, resulting in 166 penalty minutes and 10 suspensions for the next night's rematch.
On Saturday night, 125 miles south of Bowling Green, in Columbus, No. 7 Michigan State and Ohio State came to blows in the second game of their CCHA weekend series, but officials were quick to break up a post-whistle skirmish in the third period resulted in a pair of game misconduct penalties for "grabbing the facemask," as opposed to game disqualifications (and one-game suspensions) for fighting. Spartans head coach Rick Comley was happy for the swift actions of the referees to break up the fracas, and not just because he'll have his full complement of players for this weekend's home-and-home series with the No. 1 Wolverines.
"Thank God that the combination of the players and the referees didn't push it past what happened," Comley said. "Human nature is you come out and protect your goalie, but after the fiasco at Bowling Green, the CCHA certainly did not need another multiple [disqualification] situation like that. I give both teams credit."
At the same time, video of the fight on YouTube has been viewed more than 8,100 times in three days from the date of this column, more than any CSTV video posted to YouTube during the last week. The interest in the fight begs the question of whether situations like what took place at Bowling Green are damaging to the CCHA or any other college hockey conference.
Certainly, the NCAA can never endorse fighting, and as such, it will always carry a game disqualification penalty. However, if fans are happy to see a fight when it does happen -- and judging by the reaction at the BGSU Ice Arena on Friday, they are -- then what damage does it do to college hockey when a fight does break out?
"Considering the fact that the rules preclude having it," said Paul Stewart, currently in his first year with ECAC Hockey as the conference's Director of Officiating, "then it becomes an embarrassment."
"We're trying to be squeaky clean," Berenson said, "and we want our image to be the best that it can be, and you know there's going to be incidents that you have to accept and you have to live with, but you don't want more than your share. To have back-to-back incidents in one league would be an embarrassment to our league. It's not something we should accept, and it's not something we should be proud of.
"In pro hockey, that's acceptable, but in college hockey, it's not, because of the rules and because of the expectations. You have to trust the referee to be the enforcer in college hockey."
Stewart, who refereed in the NHL for 17 of his 20 seasons as an on-ice official, sees things differently when it comes to being the enforcer.
"The referee is a trained observer," Stewart said. "His job is to observe and judge. His job isn't to get hold of the game. He doesn't dictate the style a player plays. The coach does that for the first five days of the week in practice, and secondly, he does it by allowing that player to go on the ice and giving him tantamount approval when he runs a guy through the end of the rink, or hits him in the head, and doesn't sit him down."
Berenson isn't one to argue that point, recalling a fight between Michigan and MichiganState in January 2000. "The last big fight we were in, with MichiganState, they suspended both Ron Mason and I for the next game because they put some blame on the coaches, and they should. It was a brawl at the end of a period, and it shouldn't happen, but it did."
To a certain degree, of course, fights are going to happen, despite the best efforts of all involved.
"The fact of the matter remains that when you have a game played at high speeds and you have a small object being pursued in a confined area by athletic men, tempers begin to flare," Stewart said, "and then, when you add to that a hockey stick, and you have allowable hitting, then tempers continue to flare further. Then, you add the fact you're [dealing with] young athletes between the ages of 18-22, stocked full of testosterone and bottled up Monday through Friday and unleashed on the weekends, all of those ingredients create a volatile situation. To that end, no matter how deep the underlining is in the rulebook about fighting, you're going to have fights. It's just a fact of life."
For that reason, the number of fighting penalties that are called in college hockey is drastically different than the number of fights that could be called under a literal interpretation of the rule book: "A player shall not fight an opponent or participate in a fight, on or off the playing surface (punching or attempting to punch is considered fighting)."
"I think that one of the major ingredients to surviving in any particular job," Stewart said, "be it hockey or selling newspapers on the street corner, is gaining a degree of acceptability. People have confidence in your personality, your decision-making, how you carry yourself. There's supposed to be judgment on every particular call. You have to use your judgment, and you have to use your feel."
That said, coaches in the college game, for the benefit of their teams, would rather see players emulate the behavior of one Wolverine in a recent game.
"We had a game," Berenson said, "and one of our kids was challenged by this other player, and our kid told him, `Hey, there's no fighting in college hockey. If you want to fight, come and visit me in the off-season, and I'll fight you anytime, any place.' It was a good line, really."
Good line, perhaps, but there will always be situations when players are quicker with their fists than their wits.
"It's frankly the same as when you're raising kids," Stewart said. "You tell them, `Don't reach for the cookies in the cookie jar,' and you know they're going to. So, inevitably, be ready for it."
And when college hockey players "reach into the cookie jar," the fans will cheer.
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