The mood of Canadian fans, in general, was beginning to pick up. Canadian teams were doing better. The value of the Canadian dollar rose; teams could afford to keep their players and compete against U.S. teams to sign others. There was a salary cap, which went some way toward levelling the playing field. Teams in bigger U.S. markets couldn’t spend that much more than Canadian teams—and, as hockey markets, not many of them were much bigger anyway. No Canadian team had won a Stanley Cup since Montreal in 1993, at the beginning of the low-Canadian-dollar years, but the country’s three smallest-market teams—Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa—were in three straight Cup Finals from 2004 to 2007. Canada won the gold medal in the 2002 Olympics, lost in 2006, and hasn’t lost since. And for the first time in many years, Canada had the best player in the world, Sidney Crosby. Strong Canadian teams were making the NHL stronger and feel better about itself.
More than a century after hockey had moved indoors, it moved outdoors again in 2003 for a regular-season game at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, between the “team of the past quarter-century,” the Oilers, and the “team of all-time,” the Canadiens. It was a frigid, prairie-clear winter afternoon. Canadiens goalie José Théodore wore a toque; you could see the players’ breath. It was magical. Players who normally complain at the slightest imperfection of the ice surface looked like little kids on a very imperfect back pond having the time of their lives. Their joy came through the screen. Canadian fans got it; so did sunbelt American fans. It was like watching Abner Doubleday and his friends on a pasture in Cooperstown; like watching a long-imagined legend made real. The Edmonton game led to many more outdoor games in the following years, each one greatly anticipated by the fans in the stadium; each hugely enjoyed by the fans at home.
These outdoor games earned the league increased TV attention. There were also now more all-sports networks with time to fill that needed programming. Using new technologies, any show could be watched at a viewer’s convenience; but sports were live. Ratings went higher; sports programming became more valuable. In the late 1990s, the NHL signed big new network contracts in the U.S. and in Canada.
Hockey was also gaining traction in the U.S. In 1965–66, 1.6 per cent of NHL players were from the U.S.; 97.7 per cent from Canada. Twenty-five years later, in 1990–91, 16.7 per cent were American, a tenfold increase; 73.6 per cent Canadian. Today, less than half of all the NHL’s players are from Canada (46.4 per cent); just over one-quarter is from the U.S. (26.5 per cent). American fans always had their teams; now they had their own players to cheer for. Hockey was no longer exclusively a Canadian game.
When the players returned for the 2005–06 season after the lockout, they had new rules to adapt to. The red goal lines that extend across the ice were now two feet closer to the end boards, and the blue lines two feet closer to the centre line, giving attacking players four additional feet in the offensive zone to find open ice; to elude defensive players trying to shut them down. As a consequence, the distance between the blue lines was reduced by four feet, which would have constrained the game in the neutral zone where it normally speeds up, except that passes were now allowed from the end boards in one zone, over the centre red line to the far blue line, a distance of one hundred and twenty-five feet—twenty-five feet further than before. This meant more open ice, better opportunities for players to pass, and more space for them to pick up speed.
The “tag-up” rule was also reinstituted, allowing attacking players to re-enter the offensive zone onside; and goalies were penalized for delaying the game if they “froze” the puck unnecessarily—both rule changes intended to keep the game moving. For defenders and coaches looking to slow the game down, to offer some safety to a defenceman retreating into his zone for the puck with a checker speeding after him and hunting him down, the league’s referees were given the following directive: There would be “zero tolerance on Interference, Hooking, and Holding/Obstruction.”
One other change had a remarkable, unintended effect. The NHL hates tie games. Baseball and basketball didn’t have ties; ties are infrequent in football. But scoring is so difficult in hockey that if a game is allowed to be extended into overtime without a time limit, as in the playoffs, it might go on forever, which is a big problem when a team plays so many games a week and TV networks have schedules that viewers depend on. In 1999, the NHL had introduced a new rule: the five-minute overtime for regular-season games was now played four players against four; with more open ice, a goal was more likely to be scored. Yet many games still ended in a tie. So, six years later, the league decided there would be a shootout for games that were still tied after overtime. Critics were not happy. Four-on-four overtime, at least, was hockey-like; the shootout, borrowed from soccer, was a sideshow novelty whose only merit was that it guaranteed a winner. It took several months for teams to realize that, in a league of extreme parity, this “sideshow,” which also happened to earn the winning team an extra point, might make the difference between making the playoffs, a player earning more money, and a coach keeping his job—or not.
This is where the unintended effect comes into play. Since that very first game at McGill, hockey players stayed after practice to work on their own special, outrageous moves that they had spent hours dreaming up; and coaches spent hours telling them to stop wasting their time on something they would never use in a game. But now there was the shootout. Goalies quickly came to learn even a shooter’s best moves, which meant a shooter needed to surprise the goalie with something he had never seen before. All that post-practice time and the hours of dreaming up tricky moves suddenly didn’t seem so dumb, even to coaches. And because of all-sports networks, the best of the best of these moves were showcased every night to fans—and the next day, to players too busy to watch them the night before—triggering even more outrageous moves. This was also at a time when shooters were finding it harder to score, because goalies were filling more of the net with bigger equipment and a new, butterfly style of goaltending suited to their now-oversized dimensions. With practice, the players got better at the shootout, and began using their moves not only in the controlled environment of the shootout, but in the frenzy of a game. And again, players would be glued to the next day’s highlight clips.
What had begun as a sideshow changed the game.
The players also realized that if goals were more likely to come from creative new moves than from long-range shots that goalies just smothered with their Brobdingnagian-sized padding, they needed lighter sticks to give them the precision required to take these shots. And lighter sticks, coincidentally, also allowed them to pass more accurately—which meant the game moved faster, and shifts got shorter. There was even less coasting, less circling; it was just moving—from the instant a player’s skates hit the ice to the instant they left it. One shift, the next, the next, the game a sixty-minute relay race, the baton passing every forty seconds.
Since rosters had increased in size in the 1960s, teams had run four lines. A scoring line, a scoring/checking line, a checking line, and a line of “specialists”—energy guys; bangers and fighters. Coaches tried to match lines against their opponents, to put their checkers against the other team’s scorers, to keep their scorers away from the other team’s checkers. Now the shorter shifts were too fast to control; even a ten-second mismatch meant having the wrong players against the wrong players for one-quarter of a shift. And what if the other team changed the order and threw out their scorers while your specialists were still on the ice? The puck would go quickly into your zone; you wouldn’t be able to get it out, or change. The result was bangers chasing, and fighters with nobody to fight. Coaches love fighters because they put their all so visibly into the game. Teammates love them because they fight for the team. But if having fighters on the ice hurts the team, coaches and teammates don’t love them that much. A game that is a sixty-minute sprint needs all four lines playing; and the fighters can’t keep up. Somehow, in this game played in an enclosed space, that moves so fast that fights are ine
vitable, fighters have become obsolete. That decades-long explanation of hockey’s exceptionalism regarding fighting turned out to be a crock. And now, as specialists have been replaced by fourth-line players who can skate and play, and checkers can’t be matched up against scorers, the game has speeded up even more.
There are signs of this accelerating speed. The charging penalty has largely disappeared. It was a feature of a coasting game. It recognized the vulnerability of a puck carrier when an opponent took a few quick strides towards him and struck him with the full force of his body. But a full-sprint game is not played in a few quick strides, then a few more; it is played in ten, then ten more. It is all quick strides, so everything is charging, or nothing is charging—and the force and the frequency of collisions increase, with little to hold them back.
It is also a game too fast not to finish your checks, it seems. A player without the puck cannot be hit—that would be interference—because he doesn’t have the puck, and if he could be hit then any player on the ice could be hit at any time, with or without the puck, which wouldn’t make sense. But if a player doesn’t have the puck, but he did have it not too long before, he can be hit, even though now he is really no different from every other player on the ice without the puck—except somehow he is, because that’s what the rules allow. So he can be hit, even though he succeeded in passing the puck before the checker arrived—and the checker can hit him even though he failed to stop him before he made the pass. Furthermore, the checker, who failed, isn’t penalized, and in fact is rewarded, because he has taken his man out of the play, and the passer, who succeeded, is penalized, because he cannot continue up the ice with the play, and can get blasted by the checker and because he, the passer, who in making the pass now has no time to protect himself, “should have had his head up” and “should have seen the checker coming.” Because in hockey if you have your head down, you deserve anything you get—and anything you get, in this case, is called “finishing your check.”
Many players have had their careers shortened by injury. Some by eye injuries—Doug Barkley, Barry Ashbee, Pierre Mondou, Bryan Berard; some from knees—Bobby Orr, Pavel Bure, Cam Neely; some from back injuries—Mario Lemieux, Mike Bossy. Many more had their careers diminished by injuries. For others still, it was a combination of age and injury. In almost every case, the reason was specific—a hit, a stick, a puck—something careless, unlucky, weird, even dirty, but each with its own individual explanation, nothing that suggested a larger problem, nothing systematic to the game. It was instead something unfortunate, sad, that somehow just happens not because it’s hockey, but because it’s sports. It’s life. It was the same for head injuries, even the destruction of Ace Bailey by Eddie Shore, or of Ted Green by Wayne Maki. These incidents should never have happened, but they were one-offs—an individual player “losing it” in a dangerous way.
And even if there were signs, the signs seemed only enough to make you notice, to wonder a little, not to make it into a major priority. There were so many other things to think about—the value of the Canadian dollar, the competitiveness of Canadian teams, the empty seats in many U.S. sunbelt cities. TV contracts. In 1997, the NHL and NHLPA created a Concussion Program made up of medical experts that they each appointed. Three years later, they formed an Injury Analysis Panel of team doctors, trainers, GMs, referees, players, and league and NHLPA officials. But these were contentious times. The CBA was set to expire, a lockout was looming, whatever the league thought important about anything, the players wondered why, and didn’t. And vice versa. Panel members might find common ground among themselves; upstairs in the NHL’s executive offices, they knew, there were bigger fights to fight. “Environmental” issues, as panel members called them, were easier, less potentially disruptive—regulations surrounding mouthguards, chinstraps, elbow and shoulder pads, ice conditions and seamless glass—and brought discussion and occasional agreement. Prospective rule changes were harder. They brought out dark suspicions, especially among the NHLPA members. A different game was to the advantage of some players, to the detriment of others, and the NHLPA represented all players. Change the rules and maybe good old Tommy, Pierre, and Andrei can’t play anymore—even if good new Chris, Jean-Marc, and Igor now can. As teammates in the NHLPA, how would they ever be able to look Tommy, Pierre, and Andrei in the eyes again? The players, who seemingly had the most to gain with such safety related changes, reacted as if they had the most to lose. For them and for the league, this was still primarily a time to concentrate on playing conditions, not life conditions. And the marching orders for everyone were indisputable—no hooking, no holding, no whistles—keep the flow going.
Even in the late 1990s and early 2000s when more players were suffering head injuries, each one seemed its own unique case. Mike Richter, from a shot off his mask; Scott Stevens, from one that struck him in the face: they were flukes. Eric Lindros: no matter how big a player is, how many times can you go up the ice with your head down? Paul Kariya: he scores on a shot; his opponent, Gary Suter, is angry and levels him; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stu Grimson, Gino Odjick: just too many fights. And all the others: Brad Werenka, Dean Chynoweth, Paul Comrie, Jeff Beukeboom, Geoff Courtnall, Adam Deadmarsh, Jesse Wallin, and many more—lesser known players. For them was it age, or injury, or maybe they were no longer good enough? One season they were there, then they weren’t.
Some players tried to come back; some many times. The public understands knee injuries. They know that stuff can be taken out of a knee, or a knee can be sewn together only so many times. They could see Bobby Orr limp, and probably knew before Orr did that the end of his career was near. It wasn’t the same for Pat LaFontaine, or Kariya—not at first—and for them, things never seemed not possible. They looked healthy, they sounded good. There was no outward indication of their injuries. They had symptoms, but then, as if overnight, as with Keith Primeau, their symptoms would disappear. If injuries can be experienced in mysterious ways, why not recoveries? These head-injured players seemed to stutter, then fade into retirement. There was no dramatic, career-ending moment; nothing to bring attention to them or to their injuries. Many of them retired months, even years, after the public had assumed they were already gone.
Even in football, head injuries had long seemed individual and isolated. NFL star quarterbacks—Steve Young of the San Francisco 49ers in 1999; Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys in 2001—retired because of head injuries. A few scientific studies had been conducted at the time and made public; articles were written; stories came out about the 2002 demise of former Pittsburgh Steelers’ centre Mike Webster. There were even a few suicides, but these were chalked up more to players’ mental issues than to injuries sustained on the field, so the attention paid to the issue came and went. But then there were more studies, and more articles. There were congressional hearings and conferences. More than that, every day there were the games themselves. In every NFL and major college game, every NHL game, if a hit was big enough it was played across the continent on the “Top Ten” plays/misplays/hits of the day. Stuff that made viewers moan, and laugh, and cringe, and groan—often at the same time. Stuff that to viewers eventually didn’t seem like one-offs, that came to seem connected to other injuries and other tragic stories—of players they had once followed and loved—to injuries and tragedies of athletes from other sports, even to stories of servicemen returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with PTSD. And all of it, in time, came to seem connected crucially, frighteningly, to their own kids. Around 2009, the head injury pieces began to come together. Concussions had become a major problem in sports.
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On January 1, 2011, during the NHL’s Winter Classic at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Sidney Crosby was hit by David Steckel of the Washington Capitals and received a concussion. Crosby had been circling in the Capitals zone, and had turned his head to follow the puck as it was going back up the ice; Steckel, moving after it, clipped Crosby’s jaw with his shoulder. The next game, Crosby was
hit again, much less hard, but then he didn’t play again for ten months—until late November the following season. Before Crosby’s injury, the increased number of players with concussions had been described in terms suggesting an epidemic, or bad luck, something that had come out of nowhere and would disappear on its own just as quickly; certainly not reflective of how the game is played. Crosby’s injury and his rehab were monitored by fans and media almost as intently as his goals and assists had been. At first, there was routine concern. He might be out for a few games, or maybe longer; these injuries are unpredictable. Then days turned to weeks, and then months. What was important now was that he be ready for the playoffs, it was suggested, just as it had been for Primeau. Then the playoffs came and went. Even better, some said, now Crosby has the whole summer to get healthy, to go into the next season at the same starting point as his teammates and the rest of the league. Then the beginning of the next season came and went. Concern, which had turned to hope, turned to fear. Crosby’s career, or at least his career as a superstar, might be over.
The Crosby injury hit the public hard. Not just because Crosby was so good and so young—he was twenty-three at the time—but because he played the game the way it is supposed to be played: hard, physical, with the puck, on the puck, never shying away from the corners or the front of the net, driven to score and to win. He wasn’t small, he didn’t play with his head down, he rarely fought; his injuries came as a result of normal plays, not flukes. All of the individual, one-off explanations didn’t apply. If a player like Crosby was at risk, the game was at risk.