ClayNation: Hockey fights must end, and here's how

Let's be honest, it's only a matter of time until someone gets punched in an NHL fight and dies from hitting his head on the ice or from the punch itself. Mark my words, it's going to happen. And when it does, fighting in NHL games is going to be over and done with. Gone in a flash. At that point all the arguments about fighting being essential to the game of hockey will evaporate as rapidly as April snow in Nashville.

But here's the deal: The NHL should step into the fray and end fighting before it gets to that point.

Arron Asham vs. Darren Reid (Getty Images)

That's because with the exception of combat sports, fighting exists as a fundamental weakness of sports' ability to attract fans. After Denver's Carmelo Anthony got into a slap fight back in December, I wrote that the NBA and the NHL were treated differently by the media when it came to fighting. And I said that had to do with race, which I stand by.

Since that column we have seen several flare-ups in the NBA but nowhere near the media attention. Instead we have suddenly been inundated with hockey fighting stories. I think this is a measure of much-needed equality. It's also a sign that the media has begun to take note of the fact that hockey is the only major professional sports league not based on combat to not eject players when they fight. And now we've entered into a legitimate debate about whether fighting is necessary in the NHL. It's about time.

This debate isn't going away anytime soon. Especially not since Colin Campbell, the NHL's own director of hockey operations and chief of discipline, recently asked if fighting in hockey had outlived its usefulness and was a necessary part of the game. Campbell later said it was only his intent to allow the subject to be debated among fans, players and owners. Good for him.

So let's debate. On the one hand you have hockey fans who argue that fighting is an integral part of hockey. On the other hand you have fans who believe that fighting isn't integral to hockey. And then you have lots of white guys who like to get drunk and watch other white guys fight. Somehow the drunk white guys end up roaring the loudest about fighting being necessary and scare the league from seriously examining this issue.

If this was only about whether fighting makes hockey safer (fighting prevents aggressive play, adherents argue), the Olympics, hockey leagues from kids through high school and college hockey all clearly demonstrate that fighting doesn't bring anything of value to the game itself. Name me another sport where you spend your entire life honing your skills on a field, court or track to one set of rules, and when you arrive at the highest level, the rules change and demand you turn into a common thug and fight during the game. You can't.

Michael Holmqvist vs. Brett Lebda. (Getty Images)

Fighting in hockey is a discredit to the amazing talent of NHL players. Welcome to the NHL, where in the misbegotten hope of attracting fans we turn our most talented athletes into on-ice hooligans.

Worse for the NHL, the on-ice thuggery they allow in their sport flies in the face of every other league's efforts to clean up their players' image. In a few months if any NFL player engages in a fight off the field he can face suspension from the league. Not so in the NHL, where fighting in the midst of an actual game draws no suspension at all.

The NBA cares so much about its off-court image that it instituted a dress-code for its players; the NHL cares so little about its on-ice image that it allows its best players to commit assault and battery with reckless impunity. The NBA even ejects its players for complaining too vociferously about calls they disagree with; the NHL doesn't even eject its players for sending opposing players off the ice on stretchers. At some point this dichotomy has to be resolved.

Put simply, a discussion about banning fighting in the NHL should have happened decades ago. Right now there's only one legitimate avenue to pursue -- fighting in hockey should be penalized at least as stringently as it is in college. Like baseball, basketball or football, hockey fights are going to happen in the course of a game. Passion and speed sometimes cause even our most favored athletes to lose their cool. But fights shouldn't happen more often than not in every game like they do in the NHL. Not if hockey wants to make the right decision when it comes to violence in the sport.

Fortunately for the NHL, the solution is simple. The league should institute a policy that is based on Division I and Division III college hockey, where fighting is simply not countenanced. In college hockey if players fight they are given a game disqualification penalty, ejected from the current game, and given a further one-game suspension. Subsequent disqualifications for fighting are followed by additional game suspensions.

Zack Stortini vs. Josh Gratton. (Getty Images)

So if, for example, a player engages in his second fight, he's ejected from that game and suspended for not just a single game, but the next two games. These suspension penalties continue to accrue for subsequent fights so a fifth fight would be followed by a five-game suspension. And they've been very successful in keeping college players from engaging in fights without making the on-ice product more violent. This would work perfectly in the NHL, particularly when suspended players are not receiving their paychecks for suspended games. At least in the case of fighting in hockey, less money means fewer problems.

Adopting the same rules as college in regards to fighting is a simple and straightforward solution that will end the farcical notion among young hockey players that on-ice fighting is something to aspire to. It's the ultimate indictment of a sport when its most talented professionals arrive on the largest stage of their professional careers and turn into the equivalent of drunken brawlers, slipping and sliding around in a stilted ballet of excessive violence.

It still baffles my mind that the same parents who have an issue with violent rap lyrics or violent movies about made-up violence will pay their hard-earned money to take their children to watch NHL games and cheer for actual live violence in the midst of a sport. Increasingly these parents with an absent hypocrisy gene are a minority of hockey fans. Most often fans who are more interested in fighting than a team sport will watch sports based entirely on fighting, like boxing or the UFC, or, more likely, fake fighting in the WWE. But the NHL can go on kowtowing to the hockey fans who only come for the fights and watch their sport continue to seep into sporting irrelevancy.

And the NHL's own increasing irrelevancy will ultimately spell its doom. A great sport played with passion and skill by millions of Americans, Europeans and Canadians will turn into a sideshow carnival to satisfy fans who come not for the games but for the fights.

Right now the NHL is like the Ice Capades with fist-fights. And unless the games themselves take precedence over the on-ice violence, sooner or later lots of NHL teams are going to follow the Ice Capades into bankruptcy. But that's OK. Until bankruptcy arrives, professional hockey players can continue injuring one another in awkward donnybrooks because of a misbegotten allegiance to fighting, something that is ultimately as alien to true hockey as a complete set of teeth.