Dead Ends by Paul Willcocks

challenge. The two threw off their gloves and started fighting.Brashear—twelve years younger and bigger—won, finishing with a powerful body punch that left McSorley in obvious pain and then tossing him to the ice. The Canucks’ fans loved it.
    Enforcers know they’ll lose fights. They trade punches with other big, strong, and skilled brawlers, whose livelihoods depend on their ability to inflict pain.
    But losers have to show they aren’t intimidated. That they still are the intimidator, still ready to battle.
    After the fight, Brashear broke one of the rules in hockey’s mysterious, unwritten code of conduct, skating past the Boston bench and dusting off his hands as Canucks’ fans cheered. Showing up your fellow combatant is bad.
    So McSorley had at least two reasons for wanting a rematch. Ten minutes later, he cross-checked Brashear, knocking him to the ice, then shoved at him several times, grabbed his sweater, and refused to back off when the linesman intervened and the fans screamed for action.
    â€œCome on, Don, you have to fight me again,” McSorley challenged.
    â€œNo Marty, I’m not going to fight you,” Brashear said. “We’re beating you four-nothing.” (The first-name friendliness is a reminder that hockey violence, particularly between enforcers, is usually just business.)
    McSorley’s attempt hurt his team, as he received a pair of two-minute penalties and a ten-minute misconduct. While he was off the ice, Brashear fell on Bruins goalie Byron Dafoe during a melee, and Dafoe left the game clutching his knee. Another violation of the code.
    Later, after another Bruin was penalized for slashing Brashear, he taunted the Bruins again, striking a muscleman pose on the bench.
    With a minute to go, the Bruins were ahead five to two. McSorley was sitting on the bench, waiting for the buzzer.
    But with about twenty seconds left, Boston assistant coach Jacques Laperriere ordered him on the ice.
    The order was clear, McSorley said. Fight Brashear again. (Laperriere was not known as a fighter in his long career withthe Montreal Canadiens, and quit his first coaching job in junior hockey because of the goon tactics dominating the Quebec league.)
    Brashear didn’t want to fight, and actively avoided McSorley.
    McSorley wanted to do his job, and maybe boost his team’s confidence. Time was running out. So he decided to slash Brashear to provoke an unavoidable confrontation.
    With three seconds left, he hit Brashear in the side of the head with a two-handed swing. The Canuck’s helmet flew off, and he fell unconscious to the ice, striking his head. He lay unconscious, legs splayed, eyes open, experiencing a seizure as fans booed and threw trash, trainers rushed to his aid, and the players on the ice brawled. The concussion kept him from any physical activity for a month.
    The fight was over on the ice. Off the ice, it was just beginning.
    The NHL always argued that hockey existed in a separate world and criminal laws should not apply. The leagues would use suspensions or fines to keep order. Players would impose their own violent retribution on those who broke the unwritten code that defined acceptable and unacceptable violence. It had been twelve years since Minnesota’s Dino Ciccarelli was sentenced to one day in jail and fined $1,000 for hitting Toronto defenceman Luke Richardson several times in the head with his stick.
    Vancouver Canucks’ general manager Brian Burke, even though his player Brashear could have been killed, said police should stay out of it. “Leave this stuff on the ice; leave it to the National Hockey League,” he told a radio station. “We don’t need the Vancouver police department or the RCMP involved in this.”
    CBC commentator Don Cherry said the head shot was wrong, but Brashear caused the problem by ridiculing McSorley. “If you want to play with a bull, you’re going to get the