This is one of the reasons I hate all the ire that gets thrown at hockey officials. Sure, it’s all fun and games, until people start acting like maniacs, then it’s the refs job to clean things up.
At an All American Hockey League game (yeah, I had never heard of them either) between the Chi-Town Shooters and the Evansville Icemen, a line brawl turned bizarre when a player tried to fight a linesman. From HockeyRefs.com:
At the end of the second period, Chi-Town defensemen Clay Lewis received a match penalty for slashing, a match penality for spearing and a game misconduct for Category I Abuse of an Official for an on-ice incident where Lewis threw off his gloves specifically to fight a linesmen.
Reports from the game indicate that Lewis pulled the linesmen’s jersey over his helmet, and threw off his helmet before an IceMen player intervened.
In an unusual move, the team posted the video of the incident on YouTube.
And the video tells the story:
And don’t give me the “refs lost control of the game” line. How do you control that sort of thing? How do you control people that plain out and out want to brawl, fight, and push you around?
Refs have the hardest jobs on the ice. I don’t care how many times they blew a call against your team, they aren’t there to hose one more than another, they aren’t there to make things right for the fans. They are some of the biggest hockey fans out there, and they take more abuse from people who have zero understanding of their jobs. I doubt this ref woke up thinking he was going to have to defend himself in a fight at work.
2 responses to “Player Tries to Drop Gloves with Ref”
Wow, that’s awful. I hadn’t heard about this incident yet, or the other similar incident involving the AAHL this season (mentioned in the HockeyRefs piece)–also the Chi-Town Shooters, and involving a 20-game suspension. The team is actually in Dyer, Indiana, not that close to Chicago, but that’s all I know about them.
I do believe in players and teams policing themselves, but I also believe the best way to do that is to put the refs on the first row in the upper bowl at the centerline opposite each other and to stay with only two linesmen.
1. The refs would have a better view of the entire ice.
2. This isn’t the first time an official has been attacked. I’m not even sure if Maurice Richard was the first to hit an official (while watching “the Rocket” I believed that official “had it coming” but it was a movie that was praising the Rocket…what else would they do there?
3. The game happens too quick for a guy (or even two) at ice-level to really police all the action.
4. No-one breaks up a fight until the fight goes seriously bad or both contestants want it to end so moving to only 2 on-ice officials is not more of a liability than the current 4 (two refs and two linesmen.)
5. With only two on-ice officials we’d see much less interference with normal plays than we currently do. The players we love and pay money to see have to make many plays throughout the course of the year that they normally wouldn’t do because an official is in the way.
6. Fans should quit bitching about the officials in general, they are doing the best they can but they have probably a tougher job than anyone else in sports (outside of the guy that has to clean the urinals in any given stadium each night.)
Of course, I could be wrong…but I don’t care…These are just my thoughts.
While I do believe “he had it coming” should be a legal defense in an assualt case, the official in question here did nothing wrong and “did not have it coming.” Throw the book at the player and ban him for five years to life in hockey. That wasn’t skating a thin line, it was brazenly crossing over it into a total disregard for safety and total disrespect for hockey. How long had the puck been out of play before the official got hit? Time elapsed should’ve cooled his hot head well before the hit went out.