Following my January posts, Don Cherry, are you happy now? and Don Cherry promotes “you’re a dead person” on same night Sanderson is honoured, I received a handful of emails from readers alerting me to the 5th Estate program on fighting in hockey.

The 5th’s piece combined with a personal weekend experience has me adding another chapter to this saga. The cure, I am convinced, is to treat the cause, not merely the symptoms.      

First, kudos to programs such as the 5th estate and last month Steve Paikin’s The Agenda – Fighting and Our Game, as well as many others such as Bob McCown for giving this topic the attention it deserves.

Two months ago I thought nothing, or very little, would come of the attention fighting in hockey has received. Today, I am slightly more hopeful. But I am concerned the attention is off target.

Eliminating fighting in hockey is easy. Introduce zero-tolerance lifetime suspensions for fighting and you won’t see another fight. And maybe that’s a good, although radical, idea.

But treating only the symptom is no cure for the cause.

Beyond watching the puck a lot else goes on in many hockey games – not the least of which is bad officiating – that leads to fighting. As much as he is part, if not the cause, of the problem, Don Cherry is correct in one aspect of the issue. Ninety percent of the urge, or rather the rage, that causes one player to go after another is due to something an offending player did. The offensiveness, or not, of a particular action leading to a fight is another issue for a different day.

The problem isn’t so much what a player does in retaliation, although retaliation is certainly a serious problem in and of itself. Rather, the root of the problem in hockey is what any given player is allowed to get away with in the first place. Where Don Cherry’s logic fails miserably is in urging players to take matters into their own hands. But that’s okay, I don’t expect much of a person with Don Cherry’s level of academic and social education.

But for those who aren’t barbarian it’s pretty simple to understand the cure is dealing with what offending players do in the first place, not just what other players do in retaliation. Worse, is to ignore both.

In my twenties I recall watching New York Islanders goaltender Billy Smith famous for every night mercilessly hacking-away with his stick at the calves of opposing players who, in Smith’s opinion, were standing too close to his goal-crease blocking his view.

With officials night-after-night and year-after-year closing their eyes to Smith’s slashing infraction I recall thinking if it was me, and knowing my own temper in such situations, I likely would have swung around with both hands on my own stick and decapitated the guy. Let that tell you something about why I never got very far playing hockey, or why Don Cherry type thinking is alive and well.

This past weekend in a game against St-Catharines, on their turf, I watched as my 15 year old son got violently rammed into the boards from behind. Was I happy that two bigger players on my sons team “took care of the problem” a la Don Cherry? On the spur of the moment and as a father caught up in the emotion in seeing his son flat on the ice, bloody chin, bruised knee, and bruised ego? Yeah, perhaps a little. But was that the right thing to do or emotion to feel?

The answers to those questions are irrelevant. The only point of importance is the official who only handed out a 2 minute cross-checking penalty instead of immediately ejecting the offending player from the game per the rules. From there the game disintegrated where, by the end of it, gloved punches were flying about.

Yesterday my son’s team played another game against Hamilton, this time on our turf in Oakville. A late game slash by one team (does it matter which team?) led to an even more vicious retaliating slash, followed by an all-out brawl in which the official who tried to break-it-up ended up flat on his back under the mêlée.

When my son’s team plays its third playoff game tonight, I am certain the team will be short one or two players due to suspensions for fighting. It’s a safe bet a couple of Hamilton players will be warming the stands too. But what of the initial slashing infractions that got the ball rolling? Any bets those are long-since forgotten?

But that’s okay, next week on Coach’s Corner the boys will hear from Don Cherry that settling-up the score for what officials don’t officiate is ‘part of the game … and that a few more Don Sanderson’s are worth it!’