Sports Fighting Culture
I was watching a recent piece on ESPN where NBA players were comparing their passing game to that of hockey players. Watching NBA’ers think about playing hockey made me think about the different styles of fighting in sports. It’s funny how different they all are.
In the NFL, for example, there’s not that much fighting because there’s not really much point. Those guys aren’t really going to be able to hurt one another anyway, what with all the armor they’ve got on. I mean, they basically get into a street fight every time the ball is snapped. There’s just not much point in adding more.
Now in Major League Baseball, fighting is always a team sport. Think Sharks and Jets style street brawl. If one player fights, his teammates all fight too. All of them. Even the bullpen runs in from the outfield to get involved. No one usually gets hurt too badly; there’s generally just a lot of shoving and trash talking. It kind of looks like two college fraternities having a fight, where most of them really don’t want to actually fight, but they feel honor-bound to represent.
The NHL takes fighting seriously, it’s built right into the product. There’s centuries of history here and the players, and most fans, know and understand the detailed unwritten laws of these gentlemen’s diagreements. Honor and toughness are taken seriously here and violations of the code are not tolerated very well amongst other players. It’s really a phenomenon to watch. Two guys will square off, and instead of breaking it up, the refs all back up, give them room, and basically referee the fight. It’s crazy, but somehow it just doesn’t seem out of place in hockey. It’s all part of the appeal.
In the NBA, you just don’t see a whole lot of fighting. There’s been some notable exceptions, like the Ron Artest incident and the famous Rudy Tomjanovich shot, but those may be magnified by the relative rarity of these kinds of incidents. Also, the NBA hands down super-harsh penalties for fighting. You’ll get a harsh suspension just for leaving the bench to get involved. Carmelo Anthony got a month suspension last year for throwing one sucker-punch. Also, it just seems like these guys just don’t get as worked up. Why should they? They’re young, rich, happy, and they’ve got 64 more games to play. They just don’t seem as interested in duking it out on the court. Some guys obviously don’t like each other out there, but they aren’t likely to come to blows. So it’s pretty funny to think about these guys playing hockey. They wouldn’t last 10 seconds out there.