What research do you need? How many blokes have to drop dead from punches to the head before you realise it's probably dangerous.
It's not cool. It's not sexy. It's not masculine. It's thug behaviour that has no place in modern society and damages the games reputation.
The right answer is to suspend blatant niggling for as much as they'd suspend punchers.
This is from the same article i referenced in my previous post. About fighting in hockey
If you took fighting out of the NHL tomorrow, nothing would change. As Mr. Dryden suggests, it will simply look like NHL playoff hockey. Or European hockey or U.S. college hockey. Nothing of the game's beauty or speed or skill would be lost. The game would be more emphatically itself. Because if the excuse is that you need a low-skills goon to protect your skills player from the other team's low-skills goon, simply doing away with all goons solves the problem. Goons beget goons beget goons. Get rid of goons and what the game has left are all skills players. Only disarmament makes everyone safe.
You have to be taught to fight. There is no more natural occasion for a fistfight in hockey than there is in football or basketball or baseball or rugby.
There is, however, a great deal more he-man self-delusion.
The truth? You fight because they allow you to fight.
Because the roar pours down red-faced out of the stands and those thick-necked old crew cuts rise in their seats and the 10-year-olds pound on the glass. Because it got you here. Because it's what you were taught. Because your team has a boxing coach.
You fight because 150 years of North American hockey demand it. You fight because the culture of the game is deformed around fighting. You fight because you're angry. You fight because they're angry. To fire up your team. To short-circuit theirs. You fight because it feels good to hit another man in the face. Because you're slow. Because you're willing. Because you're afraid not to. You fight. You fight. You fight.
Because Don Cherry. Because Lord Stanley. Because Major Junior. Because Moose Jaw and Saskatoon and Guelph; because Kelowna and Chicoutimi and the 'Soo.
Because.
You fight because you fight.
The idea that fighting in hockey somehow curbs greater, dirtier violence committed with sticks or skates has never had any empirical support. There's no evidence that it's a safety valve -- or even that the game needs one. Bats and clubs and spikes and a hundred other weapons are common across every sport, and yet no other league encourages fighting. It's an absurdity used to sell the game to its old audience, its core constituency, and to sell hockey fight highlight DVDs.
All those ancient, circular arguments. There are always excuses to fight.
Even in a lunch-hour shinny skate in Manhattan. There's a low-contact pickup game at a rink on the West Side. Kids just out of Yale or Colgate or Hamilton up from the investment desks on Wall Street; middle-aged men from the publishing houses in Midtown; actors in from Hollywood on a location shoot. One of whom has backed in and parked himself in the crease for years. And for years I've tapped and hacked and slashed at his ankles without conviction or success. I've never thought of fighting him and he never thought of fighting me. But another well-known actor plays in this game, too, and when he does, he picks fights. He chips. He hacks. He wants to go. He drops his gloves.
The rest of us roll our eyes and skate on.
He fights because he wants to fight.
Bang! Boom! Pow!
Check out the lists of most famous hockey fights here and here and here. Then ask yourself why there's no mention anywhere of Bob Probert's degenerative brain disease. Or Derek Boogaard's death.
