NHL shoots itself in foot -- hey, cool!

Loved Dirty Harry. Loathed Bridges of Madison County. ``Shoot her, Clint. Make my day.''

Can't abide figure skating, golf, tennis and most other civilized athletic endeavors. Televised baseball lulls me comatose.

I'm plainly an unenlightened fan of controlled sports violence. A vicarious thug. My favorite all-time football team remains the infamous '90 Hurricanes. (Thought the Cotton Bowl refs violated UM's right to free expression.) I want a Heat team of scowling meanness.

But hockey . . . hockey stuns me.

It's the violence. Not the purposeful bashings committed in pursuit of the game. Not even the occasional hooking and slashing, which, after all, could have been accidental. Oops. Sorry.

It's when the game suddenly stops to accommodate a fight. Players discard their hockey sticks, litter the ice with equipment -- ``drop the gloves'' in the hockey vernacular for brawling -- and proceed to wallop.

No one minds. They fight, happy as alley dogs, without arousing more than casual interest from the referees, until one of the combatants loses his balance. Only then, the refs intervene.

It's an odd scene for a sports fan accustomed to prohibitions and hefty fines for fighting in professional football and basketball: that nonchalant referee, passively waiting for the fight's end like Aunt Martha watching for her 5:30 bus.
Unrepentant hockey

Earlier in the playoffs, in the Panthers-Boston series, I was in the stands when gloves dropped and players flailed about the ice, a brawl, a melee, a South Florida variation on the old Rodney Dangerfield line: ``I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out.''

After 20 minutes, the pugilists tired, the ice was cleared and penalties assessed -- most of them meted out in minutes for offenses that in the NBA or NFL would have rung up a fortune in fines.

Not in unrepentant hockey.

No, I'm not preaching a new love-soaked morality to hockey players, who generally seem less afflicted by punk attitudes than their less-violent counterparts in other major sports. But if the National Hockey League's nurturing attitude toward brawling startles a low-life like me, then the NHL is skating fast toward a marketing dilemma.

And as a taxpayer in a county peddling 30-year bonds for a $212 million hockey palace, I've developed a personal interest in the NHL's long-term prospects.
Should kids see this?

Hockey, as it abandons Canadian snows for the U.S. sun belt, dearly craves yuppies and prosperous suburbanites who can afford $40 ($54.40 Canadian) a ticket. But those are the very folks, new to hockey's rough traditions, who might hesitate exposing their 10-year-olds to the NHL's peculiar brand of conflict resolution.

Some of these folks escaped to the dull suburbs to protect their children from toughs and looming violence. How, then, to explain Ed Jovanovski?

The NHL, with fines and suspensions, could easily reshape hockey into something other than a bar fight. But the league hesitates to offend a smallish but insanely fervent base of fans -- some with tattoos -- who think individual combat is high entertainment, integral to the game.

NHL honchos treasure those blood-lust loyalists but they simultaneously want network TV contracts, a vast national audience, hero status for its stars and so many $212 million arenas in sun-splashed metropolitan areas.

They want their cake and violence too.