Regulating Hits to Head Tests N.H.L. Tradition

By JEFF Z. KLEIN

The debate in the N.H.L. over how to curb concussions is only the latest example of tensions between liberal and traditional forces that have shaped hockey since its beginnings in 19th-century Canada.

The extremes in the current standoff include general managers, sponsors and fans who favor a ban on hits to the head and their old-school counterparts who see such a drastic rule change as potentially robbing the league of its rugged appeal just when its popularity is growing.

“The nature of the game is always being changed, but the rules, regulations, understandings and mythologies don’t change,” Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie from the Montreal Canadiens, said in describing the traditionalist impulse.

“That’s when you get into trouble,” he added, “when you don’t recognize the immense changes on one side, and don’t have the corresponding changes that make sense to the different game that evolves.”

Dryden broke his long silence on hockey matters this month, joining the team sponsors Air Canada and Via Rail, and the team owners Mario Lemieux of Pittsburgh and Geoff Molson of Montreal in urging the league’s general managers to recommend a prohibition of all hits to the head. The International Ice Hockey Federation, the N.C.A.A. and the Ontario Hockey League — all feeder organizations to the N.H.L. — have bans.

At their recent annual meeting, the general managers took a middle path, calling instead for stricter enforcement of boarding and charging rules, and for harsher fines and suspensions. In 2010, the league imposed a partial ban, outlawing blindside hits to the head and those that deliberately target the head. According to league statistics, 14 percent of concussions sustained by N.H.L. players were the result of legal checks to the head, meaning ones delivered from straight ahead.

Still, the N.H.L. remains bound by an ethos of toughness, an arena where fighting is tolerated and even encouraged as rough justice, and where playing through concussions and gruesome lacerations are marks of courage.

A leading voice among traditionalists is Toronto Maple Leafs General Manager Brian Burke, who has spoken often about the need to preserve “the fabric of our game.”

Recently, Burke said: “We want that hit in our game. What’s distinctive about our game from anywhere else in the world is the amount of body contact. So we have to try to take out the more dangerous hits and make it safer for the players, but keep hitting in the game.”

The calls for change grew in volume in response to increased speed in the sport, a result of stricter rules against obstruction adopted after the 2004-5 lockout. That change undoubtedly made the game more exciting, but some of the spectacular collisions that followed led to more concussions. And it happened just as scientific evidence was emerging of the long-term damage caused by brain trauma.

Charting a middle course between rock ’em, sock ’em hockey and greater player safety has long been characteristic of the N.H.L., which has one of the most comprehensive concussion-evaluation and postconcussion return-to-play standards in professional sports. Only in 2009 did the N.F.L. adopt hockey’s protocol.

The N.H.L. policy, in place since 1997, was strengthened this month. Now, a player suspected of having a concussion is taken from the rink to a quiet room and evaluated for 15 minutes by a team doctor. The move was praised by several general managers, including Pittsburgh’s Ray Shero, Carolina’s Jim Rutherford and Buffalo’s Darcy Regier.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Shero, who sustained a concussion as a college player and who this season has dealt with concussions to his star player, Sidney Crosby, and his 15-year-old son, Chris.

But traditionalists were not pleased.

“This is an overreaction, a knee-jerk reaction,” one general manager told The Calgary Sun, saying the 15-minute examination period was too long. “This is what doctors told the league is best to do, but we’re the ones to have to put the thing in practice and it doesn’t make sense.”

Dryden, a member of Parliament from Toronto since 2004, said a pattern of resistance to change followed by change was a recurring theme in hockey.

“At one point, one of the prides of hockey is this is a game when you stay on the ice the whole time, like soccer,” he said. “It’s not real hockey if you have substitutions. But substitutions were allowed.

“Then it wasn’t real hockey if you can pass the puck forward — that’s like cheating — instead of skating it forward like an individual. And then it’s not real hockey if you use helmets or goalie masks. And so on and so on.”

To many, there is a sense of inevitability regarding the eventual adoption of a ban on head contact. A poll of Canadian hockey fans by MacLean’s magazine revealed this month that 83 percent support the outlawing of all checks to the head. (And if there is doubt that Canadian fans have gone soft, only 13 percent would outlaw fighting.)Dryden said, however, that today’s traditionalists were unable to conceive of hockey as being hockey if hits to the head were banned. But the faster game has made hockey so dangerous, he said, that change is necessary.

“What has changed all of this is the shorter shifts,” Dryden said. “If you’re playing for two minutes as people were in the 1960s, you coast and circle and circle, and then when you see an offensive chance off a defensive problem, you burst. In the 1970s, shifts are a minute long, but it’s still a coast-and-burst sort of game; players don’t finish their checks — they peel off and keep looking for the puck.

“But today, it’s 35 seconds, so the player can go full sprint from the moment he comes over the boards. People skate faster, they’re fitter, they’re 20 pounds heavier, they’ve got hard-shell equipment, and they’re only on for 35 seconds. So you have the enormous force of bodies hitting at full speed. It allows for players to essentially target the guy who has the puck all game long, splattering them against the glass if they have the puck or even if they’ve just released it.”

Adam Gopnik, a writer and editor at the New Yorker and a lifelong Canadiens fan who will speak about the history of hockey at the University of Toronto’s prestigious Massey Lectures this year, traced the resistance to change to hockey’s origins in Montreal.

There, he said, English-Canadians, French-Canadians and Irish-Canadians all played their own versions of hockey, making it “a clan game, with clan ethics and clan traditions.”

“The thing to do for the commercial good of the game is to eliminate fighting and head shots — you’d double the audience, because women would watch,” Gopnik said. “But they’re not able to do it,” he said, in part because of the traditionalism inherent in what he called “Canadian clannism.”

Some of the reluctance to take the final step toward a full ban on hits to the head may come from a simple lack of knowledge.

“No one wants to see anyone get hit in the head, but what is a hit to the head?” Lou Lamoriello, the Devils’ general manager, said recently.

He added: “We’ve got to be very careful on how we determine that. But you cannot just come out and say ‘a hit to the head.’ How do you define what a hit to the head is? Going into the boards? Getting hit and then hitting your head on the ice?”

Regier spoke of finding a balance between health safety and preserving the game’s rugged traditions.

“We effectively have in excess of 50,000 hits in the N.H.L., of which approximately 100 a year are going to involve some sort of injury deemed concussion,” he said at the meeting. “So if you could just go in and pull out those 100 hits, that’d be great, and we’d be at 49,900.

“But if you have to take 10,000 to pull those 100 hits out, is that worth it? If you have to pull out 20,000? If you have to pull out 30,000?”

Sometimes evolution is given a nudge by a notorious incident, like Todd Bertuzzi’s retaliatory attack in 2004 that ended the career of Steve Moore and has resulted in lawsuits that are still pending. Since then, there has been a softening of the rhetoric — among players, coaches and even journalists — about retribution.

Concern over lawsuits could also nudge the league toward a full ban on head contact, said Len Kotylo, a Toronto lawyer and member of the Society for International Hockey Research.

“If the league knows that danger exists and they do not do anything about the danger, they could potentially be liable for a failure to act to correct it,” Kotylo said.

Dryden said the N.H.L. must overcome whatever reluctance remains and deal decisively with its concussion problem.

“The writing is very clearly on the wall,” he said. “If the N.H.L. thinks these things are going to go away, they are mistaken.”