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Hockey is a game that fuels itself on the emotions of the players who are out there working at play. All of the early mornings, the uncomfortable skates, the damp and cold equipment, the pins and needles of your toes, frozen fingers, the cuts, the bumps, the bruises, windsprints, sore muscles: All these things make it part of the total investment to be in the game.
One of the saddest things that ever happened to professional hockey is that the lawyers and coat holders -- folks who never played the game and are legislators rather than doers -- took over as it became big business. Over the years, our sport has wasted time, effort and money trying to win over segments of the public and the media who NEVER liked, understood or cared about hockey and never will.
Let the game have some personality. Let it be emotional. If you take the emotion out of the game, you lose hockey. At the same time, players have to know how to better protect themselves.
Back when I was playing, and in the early part of my officiating career, there were far fewer predatory hits and incidents involving dirty plays such as kneeing. A big part of the reason was that we protected and policed ourselves.
People nowadays ask me what a player can do to prevent being victimized by those steamroller late hits that certain opponents seem to specialize in after the puck is gone. In years past, players were taught to bring up their stick as a protective barrier -- a defensive shield, not an offensive weapon -- from someone taking a run at them.
Not even the biggest cementhead on the ice was dumb enough to willfully skate himself full force into the heavy lumber. Self-defense was OK when I played.
Players also knew not to put themselves into vulnerable positions if at all possible when receiving a body check. Get up against the boards. Don't leave yourself at someone else's mercy by facing the wall, especially from a few feet away. Nowadays, players do it all the time.
Coaches bear some of the blame, both for the increase in bad hits and in the reduced emphasis on self-protection. They talk out of both sides of their mouth, but what they really want is a "29-Team Rulebook" that does not apply to their own team.
On one hand, checking and hitting are not supposed to be punishment. When you have a chance to bump a man, the objective should be to try to separate him from the puck. It should NOT be to try to separate him from his head and, puck or no puck, knock him out of the game.
On the other hand, the player who deliberately turns himself to the boards and/or exaggerates the effects of a hit in order to draw penalties should not congratulated when he gets back to the bench.
Today's game has been over-legislated. There are suspensions and fines galore, yet is anyone deterred from it? Has the game actually become safer? Not in my view.
As I said, we used to police ourselves. In the past, paybacks for dirty hits were expected, even if it was not in the same game. Perhaps the comeuppance came in the parking lot after the game. Perhaps it happened on the ice years later. But there was no statute of limitations.
I am told that the only time anyone ever saw my Dad get upset at a game was when Dave Lumley swung his stick at my head and broke my nose in a collegiate game I played for Penn at the University of New Hampshire. We won the game, 2-0, and it was one of the best games of my career. I assisted on both goals. Defensively, I shut down my check, Gordie Clark (who was the leading scorer in all of NCAA hockey at the time and later briefly played for the Boston Bruins in a long career spent mainly with the AHL's Maine Mariners).
Out of frustration and because he didn't like my aggressive style, Lumley took his baseball bat swing and my face. I didn't forget about it. It took a few years, but I extracted some payback.
It happened in an AHL game in Nova Scotia, where he was playing for the Voyageurs. I was playing for the Binghamton Dusters. I skated up to him and said, "Hi, Dave. Remember me?" Then I kayoed him in a one-punch fight. He fell hard to the ice.
Something else to keep in mind: enforcers once had a valuable and important role in our game. Tough guys actually kept it fair and safe for clean play. We had a code and what we "enforced" was the accountability of the game. Alas, like the Shot gun driver on the Stage Coach of the old west, those days are done. Hockey is now a game run by the legislators and lawyers.
The honest tough guys who worked their way up the hockey ladder one rung at a time -- a latter day example would be the now-retired Jody Shelley, who spent several years in the ECHL and AHL before carving out a 600-plus game NHL career -- get pushed out more and more with each passing year and are now on the endangered species list.
Some folks celebrate that, and that's their prerogative. However, I don't think the game has changed for the better in regard to making it safer.
The way I learned the game, if a guy hit my guy, we used to file it and wait until we played again and then our justice happened. We did not have to worry about an instigator penalty.
For instance, going after a goalie back in the day was almost certainly equal to drinking the red Kool Aid. There was never a good reason to smack a goalie. If you hit Cheesy, Bernie or Tony O, you would soon be meeting one or many of his friends. A few years later, if you touched Smitty, Hexy or Barrasso, you'd still be picking out the splinters from the goalie's Sher-Wood or Victoriaville stick two weeks later.
Likewise, if you were guilty of a bad hit, players on your OWN team would get on you about it on the bench or the dressing room. I can tell you firsthand that there were times that players on my team did something to an opponent that I didn't like. I felt they deserved what would come to them and did not relish having to fight on their behalf.
I took my belief system into my officiating career. In September 1983, I was a young referee in my first training camp. I sat in a room, leaning back on my chair during a rule enforcement meeting. Scotty Morrison, John McCauley and Jim Gregory stood at the front of the room. When they got to part about John Ziegler (then the NHL's President) and the Board of Governors demanding officials to penalize fight instigators regardless of the circumstance, I literally fell out of my chair.
Here we are 30-plus years later. The rulebook has been expanded and expanded again to react to bad hits, and yet they are still commonplace. The NHL has its Department of Player Safety to hand out fines and suspensions, and they stay very busy. The instigator rule was strengthened in the 1990s and, in the new millennium, enforcers have been all but pushed out of the league because self-policing is no longer allowed.
What's the solution here? We can't go backward in time and bring back old-time hockey. Creating a slew of new reactive rules on hitting sure as hell won't solve the problem. Rather, I think we need a multi-faceted and proactive approach.
1) We need to more former players to officiate. It's not enough just to know the rulebook as an official. An official has to understand the flow and feel of the game.
2) We need to get more young people -- including those who also play the game -- involved in officiating. Hockey parents and coaches also need to stop abusing these young officials and let them learn their craft.
3) Coaches should attend officiating clinics to get a better grasp on the rulebook and then to ref a game or two to see how difficult it is.
4) You want more legislative changes, coaches? You want more accountability? OK, how about this one? When a team has multiple suspensions during a season for things like checking to the head or boarding, the coach gets suspended along with the offending player. They might think twice about those "finish your check" commands. Again, the object of a hit is to force a turnover and gain puck possession. This is good hockey. But using hits to recklessly attack an opponent is unacceptable, and that goes for YOUR players, too.
5)We need players at all levels to understand that by illegally checking or using their stick as an aggressive weapon on their opponent, they not only eliminate the opposition, they potentially eliminate themselves from playing because they are dangerous and not good for the game or themselves.
6) We need to teach players to protect themselves. There's not enough teaching in this regard. We also need to coach them to think safety first and not about taking one for the team to draw a penalty.
In hockey, things trickle down from the top before they filter up from the grass roots. The NHL needs to take the first steps because young players emulate what they see the pros do. We can put a dozen "stop signs" on the back of young players' sweaters and it won't stop hits from behind as long as they remain so commonplace in the NHL.
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
Today, Stewart is an officiating and league discipline consultant for the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) and serves as director of hockey officiating for the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC).
The longtime referee heads Officiating by Stewart, a consulting, training and evaluation service for officials. Stewart also maintains a busy schedule as a public speaker, fund raiser and master-of-ceremonies for a host of private, corporate and public events. As a non-hockey venture, he is the owner of Lest We Forget.
Stewart is currently working with a co-author on an autobiography.
Blogger •Former NHL Referee • 
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