The Goon Squad

Imagine that Baltimore’s Ray Lewis flagrantly clotheslined Steve McNair and put him on the injured list for three weeks. Now imagine that, later in the game, a blocker deliberately dove at Jevon Kearse’s knee, causing Kearse to miss the rest of the season.

Now imagine that, for all the damage they purposely inflicted on two of the Titans’ best players—not to mention the damage to the team’s chances of a successful season—the Ravens as punishment received only two 15-yard penalties, a one-game suspension and a fine that, to Lewis, represented nothing more than a couple nights’ rental of a Lincoln Navigator limousine.

You can well imagine how fans of the New York Islanders and Montreal Canadiens feel this week after opponents in their respective playoff series appeared deliberately to target players for injury and elimination.

Last Thursday, Montreal fans were outraged when Boston’s Kyle McLaren raised his elbow and flew into Richard Zednik like a missile. Zednik, one of the promising young stars on Montreal’s promising young team, left with a broken jaw, a broken nose and a concussion.

Then, on Friday, Toronto scored a double-whammy on the New York Islanders, another upstart in the NHL playoffs. In the first period of the fifth game, Toronto left wing Gary Roberts knocked New York’s Kenny Jonsson unconscious with a goon-squad blow. Jonsson left with a concussion and will miss the rest of the playoffs. According to the rules, Roberts should have been ejected. Instead, he sat for five minutes, then returned for more thuggery.

A few minutes later, Toronto’s Darcy Tucker went for the knees of Islander captain Michael Peca, who left with a bad sprain. Tucker stayed in. The Maple Leafs went on to win easily, 6-3, and took a 3-2 lead in the series.

The three whacks showcased what may be becoming a trend: a conscious attempt to injure key players on an opposing team. The Bruins and Maple Leafs took out their targets as surely as hit men with rifles.

In the not-too-distant old days, much of the fighting in hockey was between designated goons, who enforced a rough justice. That was bad enough, but at least it did not involve attempts to eliminate opponents by eliminating their stars.

When things reached the point that North American hockey became synonymous with brawling, the league finally acted to ratchet down the mayhem. But there remains a culture of tolerance for violence that has allowed cheap-shotting that other sports would not stomach. Even after last week’s high-profile casualties, you could find plenty of suits around the league who shrugged it all off as part of the game.

After allowing McLaren to play in Game 5, the league skated in the right direction on Sunday by suspending him for the rest of the Bruins-Canadiens series. While Boston will miss him, it won’t be for long enough, since McLaren’s penalty is for a maximum of only two games.

Meanwhile, the Leafs’ barely penalized hooliganism beget an extended brawl on ice during Game 6, with eight players penalized for fighting (though no injuries). Irate Islander fans even drowned out “O Canada” with boos.

The headhunting is becoming worse in other sports, too. Just ask anyone around the NBA who has received hammer-blows from New Jersey’s Kenyon Martin while heading for a layup. And, come to think of it, McNair did receive an injury-producing blow from Ray the Knife.

A few fines and brief suspensions won’t adequately deter the calculated hits we’ve seen. We need penalties that more neatly fit the crime.

How about suspending guys like McLaren not only for their present playoff series but the next one, too? If a flagrant foul produces a season-ending injury, then suspend the offender for the rest of the season, too. Or, if the victim’s team chose, they could have one of the offender’s draft choices instead.

We might just find that progress for hockey lies in going back 3,000 years to the law of Moses: an eye for an eye and, appropriately enough, a tooth for a tooth.

Anybody who remembers the movie Breaker Morant can empathize with the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos. That film, among the first from a cinematic flourishing in Australia during the 1970s, depicted the fates of three soldiers during the Boer War.

Following a massacre that occurred during the confusion of a guerrilla war, the British army tried the three Australian troopers as scapegoats, both for the killings and, by extension, for the government’s own floundering policy in South Africa. Unfortunately for the army, the soldiers’ appointed attorney wasn’t eager for his clients to be marched before a firing squad, and he put up an unexpectedly spirited defense.

Cue the Twins and Expos, whose demises have been similarly preordained under baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s contraction scheme. Like the Australian soldiers, these two nominees, particularly the Twins, are not going to make it easy for the authorities.