Les bagarres bannies du hockey amateur dès l'an prochain?

Selon ce que rapporte le NY Times, les circuits non-professionnels de hockey de partout en Amérique du Nord pourraient voir les bagarres prohibées. Des discussions sérieuses entre Hockey Canada et USA Hockey ont été entrepris dans cette optique et les changements pourraient entrer en vigueur dès l'an prochain.

NY Times a écrit:

FRESNO, Calif. — Viewing fighting as a safety issue in light of increasing concussion research, and unwilling to wait for the National Hockey League to propose changes, USA Hockey and Hockey Canada are seriously considering rules that would effectively end fighting in nonprofessional leagues as soon as next season.
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The rules would apply to dozens of leagues stretching from near the Arctic Circle to south Texas. Even the three top junior leagues in Canada, major fight-friendly feeder systems to the N.H.L., are considering immediate ways to make fighting a rarity, not an expectation.

“The appetite is there,” said David Branch, the president of the Canadian Hockey League, which oversees the Ontario Hockey League, the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and the Western Hockey League. “The time is certainly right to move forward.”

Hockey has long been a rare team sport that widely condones the interruption of a game so two or more players can trade punches. But for boys starting at age 16 or so, from the rough-and-tumble junior leagues to the N.H.L., fighting has usually been minimally penalized (often with five minutes in the penalty box) and thus widely practiced, condoned, even celebrated.

That may change soon. The increased recognition of the long-term dangers of brain trauma, across all sports, has forced hockey’s leaders to consider ways to reduce blows to the head.

The issue has dominated meetings of hockey’s umbrella organizations this season. Most leaders believe that rules to deter fighting will be significantly stiffened during organization-wide meetings this summer.

“The official stance from Hockey Canada is that we want to get rid of fighting as quickly as we can,” said Bob Nicholson, the organization’s chief executive, overseeing more than half a million amateur players across Canada, including about 32,000 adults and 10,000 juniors (16 to 20 years old) not in the top-tier Canadian Hockey League. “Our ultimate goal is to remove fighting.”

For decades, debates centered on whether hockey could survive without fighting. It is viewed by some as a necessary thermostat regulating the heat of a physical game, and by others as a way to draw bigger audiences.

Now the talk is about how long the sport can live with fighting.

That change has perched hockey at one of the most significant crossroads of its long history, as leaders see an opening to extinguish the game’s tradition of intermittent anarchy, particularly among teenage combatants.

“One of the causes of concussions is fighting,” Branch said. “And I believe that there is more and more recognition that our game does not need fighting to survive, to be part of the entertainment package, you might say, because of the concerns of injuries and other concerns that could very well be a byproduct of fighting.”

In January, USA Hockey’s Junior Council discussed emergency legislation that would combat fighting with much harsher penalties, starting as early as next fall. The council, composed largely of junior-league commissioners, may propose a system like that used in the N.C.A.A., where players are immediately ejected for fighting and progressive suspensions are doled out for subsequent bouts. Fights in college hockey are rare.

“A switch has been flipped within the United States to address the fighting issue in junior hockey,” said John Vanbiesbrouck, a former N.H.L. goalie who leads USA Hockey’s Junior Council.

Proposed changes would be subject to the vote of USA Hockey’s board of directors, which could come in June.

“We’re an amateur sports organization that is concerned most about the safety of our members and marketing our sport,” USA Hockey’s executive director, Dave Ogrean, said. “If our penalties for fighting were more onerous, that would serve both those purposes very well.”

Changing the rules may be the easy part. Changing the culture is something else entirely.

In Fresno, Adam Gorra realized how deep the issue goes when he saw his 5-year-old son drop his gloves to the ice and raise his fists.

Gorra grew up playing hockey in Connecticut and now works as a pediatric surgeon. New to Fresno last year, he helped coach a team in a local youth league, named for and sponsored by the Fresno Monsters, a North American Hockey League junior team for boys 16 to 20.

Talented teenage players from across the continent are attracted to places like Fresno and dozens of leagues like the N.A.H.L. because of the promise of college scholarships and possible professional careers. Fighting, for now, is part of the game.
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It was during a family skating event that Gorra, 36, came face-to-face with the conflicted state of junior hockey. His son and the 7-year-old son of a friend pantomimed what they had seen among teenage Monsters players. They circled each other in the widely recognized choreography of a fight’s preamble. The two fathers rushed to intervene.

“To see a 5-year-old do that, especially my own son, I was blown away by it,” Gorra said.

The Monsters, for a short time a couple of years ago, cast spotlights on their players as they traded blows. This month, the team was involved in a “line brawl,” where players, even goalies, paired off to fight. Some N.A.H.L. rivals still feature bare-knuckled teenagers on the banner of their Web sites.

The N.H.L. and most professional minor leagues in North America, while working to address blows to the head during the course of game action, have shown little appetite for altering rules to reduce fights. (There have been about 400 N.H.L. fights this season, occurring in about 35 percent of games. For most top junior leagues, the per-game rates are often double or more.)

In the past few years, four brains of deceased N.H.L. players have been found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a progressive disease caused by repeated head trauma. The most striking case involved the Minnesota Wild and Rangers enforcer Derek Boogaard, who died in May at 28 of an accidental alcohol-and-painkiller overdose. Like many others later found to have had C.T.E., including dozens of former football players and boxers, Boogaard showed early signs of dementia. Two other N.H.L. enforcers died last August, in apparent suicides.

N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman said the three deaths were a coincidence. Last fall, he said the league’s healthy attendance figures showed that fans did not want fighting banned, and he cast doubt on the science linking hockey fights to brain damage.

USA Hockey’s chief medical director, Michael Stuart, has consistently argued that no serious move to minimize concussions in hockey can be made without reducing fighting. As if to demonstrate how complex and ingrained the issue is, one of Stuart’s sons, Mark, is a relatively frequent fighter for the N.H.L.’s Winnipeg Jets.

On Monday, the Rangers, who already lead the N.H.L. in fights, acquired John Scott, a 6-foot-8 defenseman who has scored one goal in 140 career games and fought more than 20 times.

Hockey’s loudest cheers often come during a fight. The Web crawls with sites devoted to hockey fighting, and YouTube brims with videos of fights, like a five-on-five fight last year between N.A.H.L. teams from Wichita Falls and Amarillo, Tex.

“Come on!” screamed one radio announcer, annoyed that a goalie did not want to join the 10-man fray. “Come on, you wuss! Get out there! Do it!”

As the fights trickled to a close, four Wichita Falls players, bathed in spotlights, implored the home crowd to cheer even more. A fifth lay on the ice, attended to by a trainer.

The suggestion that some markets need fighting to sell hockey is being increasingly debated, and dismissed, by top officials.

“That’s been a fallacious argument,” Ogrean said, “for a long, long, long time.”

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Titeuf a écrit:

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Titeuf a écrit:

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