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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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hockey has long had a culture of policing things that aren't quite illegal, but considered excessive via player-based enforcement in fights.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

What I don't understand is why the local district attorney would take that stance (and not prosecute offenders).

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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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