Hockey violence cuts no ice

I went to a fight the other night - goes the oldest joke in American sport - and an ice hockey game broke out. Well, something strange is happening in the most self-consciously masculine of all the team sports over here: when people go to watch ice hockey, that's what they are getting. Fighting is going out of fashion.

The number of five-minute penalties awarded for major ruckuses in the National Hockey League is running at its lowest level in 27 years. More than 60% of games now finish without a punch-up. And up in Canada, where they sublimate their lack of national external aggression by whacking each other on the ice, traditionalists are getting restless. "The next thing is going to be skirts, I'm telling you," snarled the commentator Don Cherry. The only people happy about the change were "tree-huggers", he said.

Not coincidentally, this month Bob Probert, once a member of the Detroit "Bruise Brothers", has retired. He is sixth on the league's list for all-time penalty minutes (3,300) and experts were arguing last week whether he was the greatest scrapper of all time. "Nobody has ever hit harder than Probert," wrote Jim Matheson of the Edmonton Journal, "or with more malice for a longer time."

The problem is that the rules have changed. The NHL has cracked down on obstruction in general, meaning more "power plays": two-minute periods when the offender is out of the game and his team have to play a man short. So coaches are increasingly inclined to play their pretty players and leave the tough guys on the bench for emergencies.

Also, ice hockey - like most American sports, a mixture of fast pace and dreary longeurs - has been trying to get through games quicker. There is simply less time for aggro.

But even the league itself is ambivalent about this. "You don't see many people hanging round the concession stands when there's a fight going on," one official admitted this week. He insisted, however, that he liked to bring his wife and kids to the game, and that they wanted to see hockey not brawling. I am not absolutely sure he was convinced by this himself. And even the roughest players are not exactly being banned for life: just a couple of extra minutes out of the game here and there. Ice hockey is a sport that's a strange mixture of grace and disgrace, and it needs the disgraceful element to compete in the marketplace.

As a spectator sport, it trails behind American football, baseball and basketball. Here in Washington the local team, the Capitals, share an arena and compete for dollars with the basketball side: Michael Jordan's Washington Wizards, who habitually sell all 20,000 seats and score 90 or 100 points a night. It was nearing bedtime in a two-thirds empty stadium on Tuesday evening when the Caps, playing the San Jose Sharks, finally ended a run of 129 minutes without scoring. I was rather itching to see an old-fashioned barney myself.

Still, the old ways are not dead yet. At the home of the Halifax Mooseheads (yup, they're in Canada, all right) last week, there was a game with umpteen fights and 23 separate ejections. Even the two goalies took off the helmets and began belting each other. This bout was in a junior league, for 16- to 19-year-olds.

However, even in Canada there is a trend to settle disputes in a more modern way. In New Brunswick, a father is suing a local league because his 16-year-old son failed to win the Most Valuable Player award, even though he was the leading scorer. He wants £150,000 in damages.

This follows a series of hockey-related court cases in Canada, which included the father of one player, John Bijelic, suing the coach of a rival minor-league team who he said threatened to "put a bounty on his son's head". Bijelic is nine years old.

Case dismissed. But another family wants damages from a coach who they say publicly humiliated their 15-year-old and, in Ottawa, a boy is suing because he was not given enough playing time.

Maybe there are worse ways of settling ice hockey disputes. The parents of two 10-year-olds in Massachusetts got into a fight two years back over allegations of rough play. One died after being badly beaten up; the other is doing 10 years for manslaughter. The tree-huggers are some way short of total victory.