What did people expect from Jay Beagle?

If you're going to insist on glorifying and promoting fighting in the NHL, you're also going to have to be prepared to deal with ugly incidents from time to time

Tongues clucked everywhere when Jay Beagle got into a fight and badly beat up Troy Terry Friday night.

So, let’s see if we have this straight. If those expressing outrage and indignation over Jay Beagle and his beatdown of Troy Terry last Friday night are indeed correct in their assessment of the situation, prior to fighting with Terry, Beagle should have: 1) instantly have come to the realization that he had three inches and 25 pounds on his opponent; 2) logged onto www.hockeyfights.com, where he would have been made aware of Terry’s zero career fights; and 3) then logged onto www.nhl.com and clicked to the stats page, where he would have seen that Terry is a 30-goal scorer in the NHL.

After all, that’s what The Code – that ridiculous set of so-called rules that governs fighting in hockey, a set of rules that nobody can properly articulate or codify – demanded of Beagle. And because Beagle did not do any of those things, Terry and the NHL are sporting an enormous black eye. Terry, meanwhile, gets off the hook for not realizing any of these things himself and gets nothing but sympathy and pity for being vulnerable and defenseless…after making the ill-advised decision to go after Beagle. If Terry is such a big star and he’s so inexperienced at fighting, why on Earth would he put himself in that position in the first place? Oh yeah, because The Code.

For those of you who didn’t see it, the sequence of events went something like this:

• The Anaheim Ducks are leading the Arizona Coyotes 5-0 late in the third period of a game in which the Ducks’ young stars have skated circles around the Coyotes. Earlier in the game, Trevor Zegras scored on ‘The Michigan’. And according to the mouth breathers, because that happened, the Ducks had what was coming to them.

• With just over five minutes remaining, Zegras pokes at Coyotes goalie Josef Korenar, an action to which Beagle responds by crosschecking Zegras to the ice.

• Terry decides to stand up for his teammate, engages Beagle and proceeds to get repeatedly punched in the face without even being able to get his gloves off.

• Tongues cluck in unison.

What exactly did people expect to happen in that exchange? As much as those who love this stuff wish every on-ice fight would end with the combatants praising each other for being so noble and admirable, then having the two loveable teddy bears go off and visit kids in the hospital, they don’t. These are two unusually large men standing on a quarter inch of steel and punching each other in the face with bare knuckles. Stuff’s going to happen.

And that’s why the NHL will not further discipline Jay Beagle. He received a two-minute crosschecking penalty, a five-minute fighting major and a game misconduct – presumably for being the aggressor as defined by the rulebook – because that’s what was called for in the NHL rules. Beagle cannot receive supplemental discipline for fighting a guy who is smaller, more skilled and less experienced. And the penalty for continuing to punch Terry after the fight had already been decided is clearly spelled out in definition of the aggressor in the fighting rule: 

Beagle did what the culture of hockey tells him he should do in that case. If your team is getting embarrassed and a guy pokes at your goalie, you’re duty-bound to send a message. And Coyotes analyst Tyson Nash could not have possibly put it any better when he said, “That’s the problem with these young players. You wanna embarrass guys? You wanna skill it up? You’d better be prepared to get punched in the mouth.” The outrage was predictable, of course. But this isn’t Nash’s fault. He’s a product of hockey culture, too.

The problem here is that if you’re going to promote, glorify and approve of this garbage, these kinds of things are going to happen from time to time. And if you’re expecting the NHL to do something about it, you are truly living in a dream world. That’s because, and this is not a news flash, these guys love this stuff. For most of them, it’s as vital as oxygen. Fighting is on the decline in hockey, not because of anything the NHL has ever done, but because teams came to realize that, for the most part, these guys who fight aren’t good enough to play a regular shift.

I was watching an Edmonton Oilers game last week and former NHL player and coach Craig McTavish talked about a staged fight between noted meatheads Zack Kassian of the Oilers and Mason Geertsen of the New Jersey Devils like it was the greatest thing the game has ever seen. It was abominable. The story goes that Geertsen asked Kassian for a fight and Kassian complied, on the proviso that they throw only lefts because he had just had the right side of his face busted up. Geertsen agreed to those Marquess of Queensberry rules. And, by golly, weren’t those guys just so honorable and brave and the epitome of everything that is wonderful in hockey.

Apparently, Kassian and Geertsen were following The Code. Apparently, Jay Beagle wasn’t. Fighting rules consume five full pages in the NHL rulebook, by far the most of any rule in there. But that’s not enough. Fighters also have to abide by The Code. It’s an awful lot to process when you’re in the heat of the battle. It’s no wonder incidents like the Beagle-Terry debacle occasionally happen. And it’s also no wonder that the hockey will forever be considered a fringe sport.

Carry on, then…