The ongoing debate in the NHL over headshots (that’s to say, one player deliberately targeting another’s head) is probably going to get hotter before it gets cooler.
The headshot debate, however, is part of a broader reckoning in professional sports that has seen a transformation in how head injuries are regarded and treated.
The catalyst to all of this was the concussion Sidney Crosby suffered in early January. He hasn’t been back on the ice since.
As many commentators have pointed out, not many players have returned from concussions as bad as his and performed as well as before. The prospect of the game’s most dynamic and marketable player going down for the last half of a season and possibly being permanently damaged has opened many eyes.
It’s next to impossible for the casual fan to guess if Crosby would be playing through his pain if this were 10 or 20 years ago when concussions were not well understood. A recent spate of health problems, some of them even fatal, amongst long-retired professional athletes (notably in the NFL) has led to the idea that teams should seriously rethink how they handle their injured athletes.
The problem with concussions is that they’re not visible or even noticeable in most cases. Prior to advancement in medical knowledge about what concussions really are and do to us, athletes would have played through them because locker room culture stigmatizes males in their 20s who miss playing time when there’s nothing discernibly wrong with them.
Hockey is unique among sports where head injuries are a problem in that the majority of them are caused by plays that can’t really be justified other than by Neanderthal-like aggression.
Baseball MVP Justin Morneau was shut out of the sport after a concussion last July. But his injury happened on a freak play (as do most baseball concussions) so there has been no league-wide crisis with an obvious root cause. Pitchers are not throwing at hitters’ heads in pandemic numbers.
And in the NFL, physical violence is unavoidable and a part of the game. A football player crushing a receiver with the ball and hurting him is a much more justifiable play than a hockey player blindsiding another player who is nowhere near the puck.
In hockey, some traditionalists worry that those obsessed with reducing headshots them are impeding on some kind tradition or besmirching the game’s heritage and character. But they have missed the train as far as public opinion goes. Everyone, from the parents of very young players to the administrators of leagues for teenagers to the NHL itself, is re-evaluating violence in the sport.
And the consensus is, the times they are a-changin’.
