Tasting one's own medicine is evidently very bitter indeed.
There lay Ottawa captain Daniel Alfredsson on the ice partway through what was to become an 8-2 Senators victory over the rival Toronto Maple Leafs. He had just been knocked into space, the stars orbiting his head likely from another solar system, by one Mark Bell, the oft-injured/arrested Toronto utility forward. Ottawa coach Bryan Murray would have the press and public believe it was a dirty hit: That Bell's knee came out, that it was a hit to the head, and that Alfredsson was blindsided.
In truth, replaying the video, it is hard to see just when and how Bell's knee came out. There wasn't even an elbow thrown as Ottawa reporter Allen Panzeri wrote in his inital game story (whether or not his view on the hit has changed in the days since is unknown). It was clearly a shoulder to the head of Alfredsson, a shot that no doubt caught him looking the other way. Now, two out of three on the part of Murray wouldn't be so bad if his words didn't reek of hipocrisy. Last February, as pointed out by TSN's Michael Landsberg a few short days ago, Ottawa forward Chris Neil similarly blindsided Buffalo Sabre Chris Drury in a game. The hit sparked a brawl of sorts in the game and apparently a stick of dynamite that is just now blowing up in Murray's and the Senators' faces. Not only did the Senators lose Alfredsson for an unspecified amount of time going into the playoffs, but Mike Fisher is out as well (also "taken out", so to speak, by Bell, coincidentally).
There has been some heated debate on this issue, but, to end it all, let it be known: Bell didn't break any NHL rules on the play in question. He did however break several unwritten ones. He hit a vulnerable player, he hit him square in the head, thereby causing injury, and he did it all with reckless abandon. According to Panzeri, Bell even tripped defenseman Wade Redden in the third as the two were battling out an icing call. So, in one game, Bell took out two Ottawa players and, had things turned out slightly differently, he could have seriously injured yet another. This is not how it should be at this stage of our arguably ethically advanced civilization, hockey players trying their best to incapacitate opponents at their earliest opportunity. No, Bell should not be suspended. He should be persecuted for his style of play, at least for his style of play in that one game, since his play otherwise has been of the practically invisible variety from the point at which he broke into the league. Bell did score in the game, to his credit, so it wasn't all bad. Just most of it. Sickening, actually.
For his part, Alfredsson shouldered, no pun intended, a lot of the blame for the hit, saying he should have been more aware of his surroundings on the ice. It was a classy move by a classy player for an act that was anything but. Teammate Jason Spezza coined it perfectly when he said it was a clean, dirty hit. In recent years, there have been too many of them. Hockey, almost by definition, is a violent sport, but it is far from being the Kumite, as depicted in a certain 1988 action movie. If Mark Bell and the others who have sinned in the same vein consider themselves to be the next comings of Jean-Claude Van Damme maybe they ought to make a career change, because all they're doing now is dragging down what is, by actual definition, just a game.
