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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.
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.
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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