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I'm noticing a controversy brewing over the interpretation of a fatal collision that occured at a hockey game recently.
What's interesting to me is that every mainstream site reporting on this issue that I clicked on refuses to name the player responsible for the death, Matt Petgrave, and always refers to the incident as a "freak accident," rather than something more neutral, which I have attempted to do so far. The guy who died is Adam Johnson.
On 4chan you see people posting the video and saying it's intentional. On reddit you see some removed comments and people wondering whether neck guards will be mandatory now. One comment I saw did mention that it looks intentional, but actually isn't, if you think about it. I haven't played hockey, so I feel I'm not in the position to speculate how "freak" of an accident this is, but, from the video, it does look like an intentional manoeuver.
Oh, yeah, Petgrave is black, and hockey is one of the whitest sports around. I recall in recent years the NHL making some abortive attempts at being more woke that didn't go over well with the players or the fans, but someone who knows more about hockey should add context for the rest of us.
I'm not the one that should be making this post, but no one else has! So I must.
I finally caved and watched it. I had seen Malarchuk, I had seen Zednik (much less worse), wasn't particularly interested in seeing this one until I became aware there was a debate over whether it was intentional or not.
Do I think Petgrave deliberately kicked him in the throat? No. Do I think he deliberately raised his leg? That's harder to say. I play hockey and I flatter myself into thinking I have a generally decent understanding of this sort of thing. It's really, really difficult to try and parse intent by slowing down a video frame-by-frame. Hockey is a very fast sport and these sorts of collisions occur in fractions of a second. It is extremely tempting to read into these sort of things more than is actually there.
A little bit of background: about 15 years ago pro hockey started cracking down on hits to the head. There were a rash of bad concussions to high-profile players like Sidney Crosby and the general rumblings about the concerns of CTE, so the NHL, fans, and the general public were supportive of further restricting what was legal. (Before you could more or less hit people in the head without getting penalized, provided you did not commit another penalty in the process - this resulted in hits like this being entirely legal and generally celebrated). Before players were generally held to be responsible for themselves - don't want to get hit in the head? Don't skate through the neutral zone with your head down. Now the onus was reversed; it was the responsibility of the player hitting not to target their opponent's head.
This created two general trends: first, since the ban players have been generally less "heads up" in their play. It used to be keeping your head up was important for not getting concussed by the meathead on the other team; now you can more safely watch the puck while you're stickhandling. Part of the reason Johnson gets caught in the neck here is that he's looking down as he comes across the blueline (previously a very risky move), and so he's both unaware of the player coming at him and more crouched over.
Secondly, it has created a professional and hobbyist enthusiasm for watching slo-mo videos. In order to determine whether a hit merits a suspension, the league would look over video repeatedly from different angles and with different speeds trying to parse intent, and when they would announce the results of an inquiry they'd produce a handy film, JFK style (example). Similarly every time there's a big hit in the NHL you will see on social media fans poring over every frame trying to prove or disprove intent to injure. Very frequently you will see very absurd manipulations by fans to try and conjure up something that isn't there. A favourite tactic is to slow down the video before impact, and then speed it up at impact; this gives the impression of more deliberation by the hitter and a more violent impact.
So for Petgrave's hit: no I can't say for sure either way. It looks somewhat suspicious; he may well have been trying to stick a leg out to sort of block or hamstring Johnson. He might have lost his balance. He might have been trying to stick a leg out and then lost his balance. I think it would be fair to rule out any deliberate intent to hit Johnson so high, but whether the play itself was dirty I feel like I could be convinced either way.
What this incident reminds me of is a play about a decade ago where Matt Cooke, notorious head-hunter, severed the Achilles' of superstar Erik Karlsson. This was another incident where a notoriously dirty player injured a star, and there was an intense debate over the time whether it was deliberate or accidental. The discussion on it was inevitably coloured by the reputations of the two players.
What's wild about the Matt Cooke incident is that Cooke was never suspensed.
With Matt Cooke, there is at least a plausible explanation that it was a typical attempt at a typical play that ended up being screwed up as a huge outlier. Going into the boards like that, it's extremely common to "ride" the opponent into the boards. You're not trying to lay a huge hit on their upper body; that would be boarding and illegal. Your main decision is, do you 1) Hold back, not really make contact at all, and then try to read whether they break left/right so that you can follow them, or 2) Ride them into the boards and try to control their body so that they can't break left/right in an attempt to get around you. (2) happens all the time, and usually without incident. The typical thing to do when you have someone against the boards and don't want to let them escape in either direction is to pin your knee hard against the boards, right between their legs. You raise it up a little bit; it's like up in their crotch. Your plant foot is literally pushing your knee hard into the boards. To explain why this is effective, imagine being the offensive player. You can't cross your feet over to turn in either direction. You can't push off hard in either direction. They're literally preventing your legs from being effective at moving your body laterally. Typically, the goal of the offensive player is to use their arms to push as hard as they can against the boards, moving the defender a foot or two away from the boards, so that you again have room to maneuver. I have personally played this exact situation hundreds of times, and as a defenseman, I was usually in the role of trying to control the offensive player's body, but I have definitely done both sides in drills. I've done it as the offensive player against guys who are much larger than me, and can viscerally tell you how hard you have to push against the boards to get them to move a few inches in order to give you room to make a break in one direction or the other (or even just room to get your stick/foot on the puck to slip it out to one side or the other to your teammate).
Matt Cooke's knee may have been a little bit of an outlier high as he was trying to ride, and he obviously got his skate not directly between Karlsson's legs, up above the tendon guard and off to the side too much. Was it in part because Karlsson was already trying to change directions, and Cooke didn't read it/couldn't follow in time? Was it that Cooke is a criminal who found a way to cleverly disguise his criminal intent? Who flippin' knows. But the whole thing is actually so close to a legit hockey play that I would be likely to believe the result of the league's investigation, especially considering Cooke's reputation and Karlsson's value to the league. All the pressure would be to finding guilt of intentionality if at all possible.
I didn't look super long, but I didn't find a video that showed this whole thing in its entirety. They were all cut to miss a lot of the critical portion. However, skates almost never come up anywhere near that high unless someone completely blows a tire and completely loses control of their body. Would a better video show me that dude actually was just trying super hard to change directions, blew a tire, completely lost his balance/control of his body, and went flying head over heels? Possibly. But you almost never see anything that looks remotely like that in any regular play, not even examples of guys who look silly because they get juked out of their shorts and completely topple (away from any necks). I would expect an investigation would look into all of this, including questions like, "Did he play an outsided number of minutes so far in the game; was he super late on a shift?" If dude was just extra gassed, it's possible that he really did just completely lose it, trying to change directions in a way that he would normally be able to do, but just wasn't capable of at that time, and completely sillyfied himself. Who knows.
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Also worth a mention for people that don't know is that hockey has long had a culture of policing things that aren't quite illegal, but considered excessive via player-based enforcement in fights. There is an element of "keep your head up", then a related element of, "but if you hit our star in the head on purpose, you're going to be dropping gloves and fighting". In concert, these elements meant that while big hits to the head did happen, deliberate targeting wasn't as common as one might intuit under such a rule-set.
In every sport, these replays and the ensuing enforcement are one of my least favorite things. In the name of "getting it right", they suck away time from the game and create a comical view of things like what constitutes a catch in football, where a tiny shift of the ball can be interpreted as losing possession when literally no one would have made that claim if they simply watched the same clip at real-time speed.
Why are fights between athletes considered just part of the game, rather than serious crimes? I assume that if I were to take a swing at someone in my office, in front of a million spectators and filmed from fifty angles, I would (quite appropriately) face jail time. But this doesn't seem to hold for, e.g., baseball players.
It's the same reason why in some places road racing cyclists that ride like dangerous jackasses and do things that are dangerous but not illegal wind up having accidents and crashing their bikes.
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At least in hockey it would be hard to prosecute against a mutual combat defense (granted there are a lot of arenas and all the states may not use the legal policy). The players isolate themselves, signal their intentional consent to fight, and engage in their fighting in a manner that is consistent with not injuring or damaging the property of bystanders.
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In the case of hockey, fights are (somewhat paradoxically) considered an outlet for violence rather than an escalator. Unlike most sports (and especially unlike workplaces), hockey players are engaged in constant intense physicality in an incredibly violent game. There are persistent opportunities to hurt other players even within the bounds of the rules and ways to do real, lasting damage with cheapshots that aren't even that special from a rules perspective. Instead of teams engaging tit-for-tat while skating 25MPH and slamming someone in the boards, the sport tolerates the low-level of violence of brief fightfights, which rarely result in any meaningful injury and are limited to stopping as soon as someone goes to the ground. The pain and embarrassment of taking a whupping in front of 18,000 people suffices to keep people from becoming genuinely dirty players most of the time.
Baseball doesn't have the same opportunities to deliberately inflict injury within the standard ruleset of the game, so the same sort of culture never developed.
The other thing to understand is that hockey developed on the Canadian frontier: it was the game of soldiers, hunters, fur-traders, trappers, prospectors. Hard men, violent men, playing a sport that was adapted from indigenous stick-and-ball games that were themselves proxies for war. The need for a self-policing element to the game was clear, and fighting was already entrenched enough in the culture of the game that by the time it established itself in "civilized" areas, the first official rules accommodated it.
I think it would be fair to say all sports are proxies for war. Every sport has some element that mimics a violent act.
Except maybe basketball.
Hockey though kept direct fighting.
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Yeah, I think in ice hockey especially, fights aren't seen as pathological, but rather as an important part of a self-policing culture. I can understand that. What I don't understand is why the local district attorney would take that stance (and not prosecute offenders).
Interestingly, and consistent with your theory, my sense is that the proximate cause for most professional baseball fights is a perception of inappropriately aggressive play on the part of the opponent: high-and-inside fastball, sliding into 2nd base with spikes up, and so on. It's also interesting to me that in both baseball and ice hockey, the culture broadly prohibits using weapons in fights. The first thing a hockey / baseball player will do at the start of his fight is throw down his stick / bat. Again, this is consistent with the theory that fights serve to self-police / enforce expectations for conduct.
I actually don't know what the statute looks like there, but prosecutorial discretion with regard to a scuffle between mutual combatants with no injuries involved probably suffices to cover most cases, even if the locale doesn't have a carveout for athletics specifically. How many bar fights where nothing happens other than a few punches thrown and both guys walk off, with neither one all that aggrieved or interested in pressing charges end in convictions? Likewise, on the flip side, I would guess that criminal charges would be likely in the event that a hockey fight happened, didn't get broken up for some reason, and the winner of the fight proceeded to continuing raining blows on the downed man until he was severely injured. There's also going to be something related to the nature of athletic events, because you're obviously not going to pressure charges for throwing a nasty check either. Whether a hockey fight qualifies as "just part of the game" in that sense or not is probably close enough to any reasonable line that you'd need a particularly grandstanding prosecutor to show it any interest.
There have been criminal/civil prosecutions for hockey violence in the NHL. They usually involve pre-meditated acts where the victim was unable to consent to fight. Two recentish examples would be when Marty McSorley hit Donald Brashear with his stick, and Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punching Steve Moore, both incidents where the aggressor attacked a player unawares.
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Pedantic point: the UK doesn't have district attorneys, they have crown prosecutors.
As to why the crown does not prosecute, my understanding is that it is because the governing case law (R v Donovan) holds that athletes are inherently consenting to be harmed, so long as the injury does not rise to the level of grievous bodily harm.
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Well baseball does have the whole “if you throw at our players we will throw at yours”
Yeah, for sure. Likewise, baseball used to enforce things like not showboating by throwing at guys. Even then, the culture of this is pretty tightly policed - throwing at someone's head has pretty much always been unacceptable and can quickly escalate to actual fights. If you did wrong, you're going to get drilled in the ribs or ass, that's just how things have always worked and it's not even a bad system for controlling behavior. Not really all that dangerous, but it hurts like hell and represents a tit-for-tat that doesn't necessarily invite escalation.
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Nor for boxers -- fighting has been a part of hockey since the beginning, it wasn't so long ago that it was pretty normal for the fans to be fighting during the game! (mostly in minor/local leagues, but still)
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Fights on the job are often enough considered just part of the job, rather than serious crimes. It's the white-collar world which is weird in that you so rarely get fights and if you do not only is someone going to get fired they're likely going to jail.
Idunno what professions you are talking about but between all the manual labor jobs i've ever done the boss uniformly does not think its part of the job to be fighting the other guys instead of like, working. I've seen dudes get jumped outside of work for stealing another guys pill bottle and shit like that but if it happened "on the job" people would for sure be getting fired.
Construction was the main one, but I know of another though it's a bit too specific. And yeah, the bosses don't like it and people get fired, but if the cops got called every time someone on a construction site got into it, they'd have no time to do anything else.
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I, too, have never seen any fights when working construction. Edit: checked with a career tradesperson. When fights occasionally occurred, they would be offsite, usually while drunk. In rare cases of on-site fights, people would quit preemptively or be fired.
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Cycling too, in some places - there are a lot of legal ways to be an asshole, even a dangerous asshole, in a bike race. Riders can also swerve and take each other out. So there's basically a gentlemen's agreement going in cycling.
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