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A dangerous precedent You book McSorley, prepare for a new trend in sports
Posted: Tuesday March 14, 2000 02:24 PM
The Crown prosecutor in Vancouver had little choice but to charge Bruins defenseman Marty McSorley with assault with a weapon given the nature of this attack on Canucks winger Donald Brashear. It was an assault so premeditated that it more resembled a lion tracking an antelope on a Discovery Channel nature show than it did a sporting event. But while the charges are not the first to stem from hockey games -- Dino Ciccarelli once spent a night in jail after a stick-swinging incident -- it compounds a seldom-invoked but dangerous precedent. McSorley might have stepped over the line that separates competition from criminality, but do we really want to leave these matters in the hands of the legal system?
Consider a beanball war in the major leagues. Suppose a pitcher intentionally drills a hitter and, in the process, shatters his kneecap or breaks his ankle. This might happen once or twice a season; it's a depressing but accepted part of the game. In the hands of a prosecutor looking to make a name for him/herself, however, charges of assault would be a possibility. Or suppose a feckless, red card foul in a soccer match resulted in serious injury. Would the courts be called to adjudicate? The problem with the McSorley case is that it occurred in hockey, where stick swinging is not a once-in-a-decade improbability, but something that occurs often enough to be worrisome. The NHL has cleaned up much of the cartoonish brawling of two decades ago, but it has not clamped down hard enough on acts like the Sherwood lobotomy McSorley tried to perform on Brashear. In Vancouver McSorley will not be the only one on trial. The NHL's ability to police itself will be the subtext of the league's first trial of the century. Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Farber covers the NHL and appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated.
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