Boston Bruins: Player-Turned-Analyst Gord Kluzak Assesses Fighting Perfectly

If you query the name “Gord Kluzak” on YouTube, you will promptly receive a menu of 19 different old-school clips of the former Boston Bruins defenseman engaging in a scrap. The selection is not much more varied on the subsequent pages.

Before chronic knee problems swatted his playing career after 299 games, Kluzak spent the mid-1980s playing the team’s defining "Lunch Pail" style. An unwritten part of his job description was casting his stick and gloves aside so as to reiterate Boston’s no-nonsense attitude.

For that reason alone, in his second career as a TV commentator, Kluzak is all the more entitled to a change of heart. He is all the more qualified to assert that fighting in hockey has “run its course.”

Those were Kluzak’s precise words during the New England Sports Network’s pregame show prior to Wednesday’s Bruins-Hurricanes match, when he came to the defense of fellow ex-enforcers who endured the wrath of Don Cherry last week on Hockey Night in Canada.

Considering the revelations of those whom Cherry singled out―Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan and Jim Thomson―to be chastised by an uncompromising violence-monger is insult on top of injury, at best.

These guys all made a chronic mistake, learned from it the hard way and have courageously proceeded to explain why habitual fighting is not such a good thing after all, because they know firsthand. And whereas Cherry alleges that the retired players in question “don’t want guys to make the same living” they did, they merely do not want them to suffer the same consequences they did.

Or worse, they do not want anybody else to meet the same fate as Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien or Wade Belak.

Kluzak boldly took it a step further in his discussion with Bruins studio host Dale Arnold. He said, “Hopefully, it won’t take someone dying in a fight in the National Hockey League to really wake the game up.”

A probable knee-jerk response from Cherry’s disciples would be along the lines of, “The NHL has had never had a death in a fight in 93 seasons of operation.” But that’s all the more reason to quit while it’s ahead.

And in today’s game, the players are bigger, stronger and faster compared to their average predecessors. Accordingly, they are already subject to more physical impact, as evidenced by the recent urge to phase out hits targeting the head. That debate did not exist in the past, in part because the game wasn’t as fast and the hitters not as brawny.

As Kluzak passed the floor back to his colleague on Wednesday, Arnold noted that he has been a steadfast fan of fighting, but maybe not for much longer.

“I have to admit that the deaths of the three guys in the summer have begun to have me rethink this thing,” he said. “We’re more knowledgeable about head injuries than we ever have been before, and should be. What can cause a head injury more than getting punched in the head nine or 10 times in a night?”

To that point, between body-checks that result in intentional or unintentional head-contact and repeated fist-to-face contact, who knows when the trauma might boil over the brim? If it ever does, that could turn Kluzak’s worst-case scenario into a reality.

Or it could take nothing more than a helmetless brawler hitting his head on the ice during a takedown. Look up “Bill Masterton” or “Don Sanderson” for unfortunate evidence.

It has always been bad enough that the anti-hockey crowd had long misunderstood the game because of fighting—that people are gullible enough to assert that hockey is represented better by Dave Schultz than by Wayne Gretzky.

It’s bad enough that the NHL is alienating prospective fans who love college hockey, but detest the supposedly “violent nature” of the professional game. And bad enough that there are kids eager to get involved in the game because they think it’s the perfect opportunity to get into fights and/or injure fellow human beings.

But now there has come the previously undetected evidence that being a hockey fighter is, in fact, a health hazard. And it has reached the point where it is all risk and no reward.

As Kluzak said on Wednesday, in recent years, “You’ve seen fighting decline, decline, decline. It’s become a more and more specialized, enforcer-type thing. And I think, as we know in the playoffs, where there is very little fighting, or very sporadic fighting, the game doesn't need it.”

Case in point: last year’s Stanley Cup championship. The Bruins may have a couple of regular fighters in Shawn Thornton and Milan Lucic, the latter-day Lunch Pailers. But those two are also, at the very least, decently skilled hockey players.

And while Thornton is about as adamant about the role of enforcing as Cherry, no one could blame him if he chose to let up on the tussling and focus instead on trying to break double-digits in the goal column again.

Realistically speaking, a fight is still going to break out once in a while. But something of the sort happens in every other sport. Emotions explode at times, but at least an effort is made to contain them and just focus on beating the opposition in a pure figurative sense on the scoreboard.

It is high time to, once and for all, abandon the hawkish hockey crowd. It is time to accept that toughness and courage can be expressed without putting oneself and/or others in short-term or long-term danger.

Former fighters like Kluzak and former advocates like Arnold have already demonstrated immense ethical fortitude by admitting they were previously misguided.

“And I’m not saying it won’t continue to be a tough, physical game,” Kluzak concluded, even though he shouldn’t have had to state the obvious. “It will, and it always will be.”

It’s that way in the college ranks. It’s that way on the international front. It’s that way at the grassroots levels, or at least as soon as youths are old enough to start learning how to hit.

Fighting is thoroughly outlawed at those levels. Why should anything change when these players reach the summit?

Kluzak is spot-on. The hockey community can live without fighting.