I mean I don't care.
Everything has risk. Everything kills you. You make decisions in life that affect your life. If you like having a few beers on the weekend it shortens your life. If you take up skydiving it shortens your life expectancy. And if you play contact sports - either recreationally or as a career - and it it slightly shortens your life expectancy, I don't care.
I don't necessarily have a problem with people assuming risk if they understand the risk the are assuming, but the question is really the morality of the NHL making money off of, and whether we should support as fans, something that is suspected of killing people. And that something isn't actually an integral part of the game, and most other leagues don't have it.
We could play women's hockey contact rules with a foam puck and foam boards and everyone would be safe. But f*** that.
This isn't the alternative though. The point isn't to make the NHL as safe as possible, its to remove something that has a correlation with concussions, CTE, depression and suicide. Physical play, or hitting, exists in hockey, arguably, for a bona fide purpose. And in fact, "intent to injure" is a penalized offense. So, while there may be concussions resulting, you can at least argue that the point of hitting isn't to concuss your opponent (although don't ask Marchand that f***ing rat!). There isn't really that same bona fide purpose for fighting. Guys are literally trying to punch each other in the head.
Like I said, 30 fights a year probably has unacceptable risks. 3 or 4? Don't care. I find those risks acceptable.
In the circumstances, I can't see how they are acceptable. But personally, I don't really care for fighting and don't want to see people intentionally punch each other in the heads knowing what I know about the consequences of concussions, depression and suicide. Like, 3 or 4 fights a year, for a guy that plays 10 plus years in the NHL? That's a lot of potential concussions.
I've also worked in the ski industry my whole life and everyone I know has had multiple concussions and has bodies held together with duct tape as we hit our 40s. And it was a decision we made, and we got paid f-all for it. So I don't have a ton of sympathy for people getting paid $5 million that might take the odd blow to the head.
Again, it isn't about the assumption of risk for me, assuming those people know the risks. I just personally don't like being a fan of something that's unnecessarily killing people.
I also find the whole dynamic where a person will be aghast that someone suffered a concussion in a hockey game but then turns around and pays for the next UFC PPV where the whole point is to concuss someone ... very odd.
I mean, I find UFC super brutal and have never gotten the appeal of it. B
Edit : and the other thing I'd add is that everyone had a few fights a year in in the 70s/80s/90s. But the only guys that really seem to be having much trouble are the guys who had 20 or 30 fights/year. And it's also probably exacerbated by the fact that the people who decided to get in hockey fights for a living tended to be violent, troubled people anyway.
If you listen to the podcast I shared you will see that the subject of it was a NCAA football player that, IIRC, committed suicide and there was evidence of CTE. So, I think its pretty clear that you don't necessarily have to have tons of years of fighting for you to suffer CTE.
Do you leave your seat or go to another room when a fight starts?
I may very well find it interesting to watch you get executed by the guillotine but that doesn't mean its right.
Like, people used to go to the Coliseum and watch gladiators get killed regularly for their entertainment. And even as recently as 19th century (and probably even the 20th) I think people were watching public executions.
The fact that people are entertaining by things doesn't mean that they are right.
