Rough House Hockey

[Sittler]

The Hockey Stick Is A Pro's Big Weapon Right? Not Always --- For Hitman Joe Kocur, It's His Fist -- and a Scarred And Swollen Mess It Is
By Robert L. Rose. Wall Street Journal. Apr 5, 1988.

If the hand popped onto the screen in a horror movie, the audience would cringe.

The knuckles are red and puffy. A hideous scar extends from one finger to the wrist. There are two open sores: a small one on the pinkie and a large one on the knuckle by the middle finger. The overall appearance is a little like raw meat, yet the hand is leathery to the touch.

The owner of this monstrosity is Joe Kocur, a pro hockey player for the Detroit Red Wings. Mr. Kocur (pronounced KOHsur) is a big bruiser of a man whose main function is unique to the North American version of his sport: not to score goals, steal the puck or make deft passes, but to batter and intimidate the foe. He is what in hockey is known as an "enforcer." His season statistics as the Red Wings enter the National Hockey League playoffs tomorrow: seven goals, 24 fights.

Fighting in pro hockey has long been controversial. To some it is a barbaric sideshow to a game of finesse, but others see it as good, clean fun -- that just happens to fill arenas. The debate, in any case, rarely focuses on the physical results of the slugfests.

But to see Mr. Kocur's right hand up close is enough to make one blanch. Cynthia Lambert, a hockey writer for the Detroit News, calls it "a grotesque sight." The middle knuckle looks as though it had swelled to double or triple normal size, only to have someone slice off the top with a knife. Unfortunately, the sore developed in a more painful way, the bulging skin worn away by repeated blows to opponents' teeth and helmets.

The long scar dates from a particularly violent encounter. A punch to a minor-league opponent's teeth ripped a long gash down the back of Mr. Kocur's hand. (The other guy was knocked out.) Two days later, Mr. Kocur was in surgery as doctors tried to halt an infection spreading into his arm.

Infection is a constant threat, and trainers must clean Mr. Kocur's hand after practices and games. While playing, he wears a special glove, stitched at home by a trainer, that allows extra room for soft bandages. Of course, that's of limited value in a sport where fights begin with the dropping of the gloves.

Mr. Kocur concedes that the mangling will be a worry after he retires -- when, he says softly, "arthritis comes." Traumatic arthritis, this is called. The team doctor, John Finley, says Mr. Kocur risks permanent damage, and perhaps sooner rather than later. "I'm not saying he has arthritis now," Dr. Finley says, "but it's certainly possible he could develop this from the repeated trauma."

Off the ice, Mr. Kocur often tries to hide the hand. The problem is, it's too sore to put in a tight pocket. Teammate Harold Snepsts, who fought Mr. Kocur twice while playing for another team, describes the feeling: "When your knuckles are dented in, you might just scrape a sweater and it will hurt."

The Red Wings are considering paying for plastic surgery on Mr. Kocur's hand after the season. "Whatever is needed, we're going to take care of him," says Coach Jacques Demers. Mr. Kocur is reluctant. NHL careers are tenuous, and he fears that surgery could disrupt his, despite a three-year contract. Besides, why repair what next season will only tear up again?

This doesn't mean he doesn't do what he can to protect his right hand. For instance, he is working on improving his left. Before the season began, the team sent Mr. Kocur and fellow hitman Bob Probert to a boxing trainer, Emanuel Steward, who helped them with their left hooks.

Though damage to his fist could end Mr. Kocur's career early, not using it would finish him even quicker. Mr. Kocur doesn't hide his "policeman" role. Asked why he was penalized for roughing an opponent in a recent game, he replies, "I was punching him in the head. I knew I'd take a penalty, but he hit Stefan {Greg Stefan, a goalie}. Nobody hits the goalie."

The team says this kind of action protects its valuable players from abuse. "Joey knows his role," says Coach Demers. He cites the time a St. Louis player swung his stick at a Red Wing not known for his fighting skills. "I told Joey to go out there and tell him not to do it again," says the coach. The message got through, if not necessarily in words.

Mr. Kocur's function in the NHL was clear from the start. In his first full season, his 377 penalty minutes led the league and shattered the team record. He had 42 in a single outing, spending two-thirds of the game in the penalty box. "If the fighting is there, he's going to have to answer the bell," said Brad Park, his coach at the time.

That he does. A 195-pound former Saskatchewan farm boy, he has powerful arms, the right one two inches thicker than the left. Scar tissue has made his right hand brick-hard. And when he winds up, says assistant coach Colin Campbell, "Joey throws his punch from Virginia." Mr. Campbell makes the statement in Maryland.

Smart opponents try to do one of two things about this weapon: grab the hand to deflect it, and tuck their heads so that if the blow does land, it hits their helmets. A helmet is not kind to a bare fist.

Neither ploy worked for a Quebec player in a recent game, and the man left with a broken nose. In another fight, Mr. Kocur cut a Boston opponent. Though rivals have hitmen too, the team of Kocur and Probert may be hockey's most devastating. They fight half their matches at home in Detroit, in the appropriately named Joe Louis Arena.

Fans love them, especially young women. A best seller among team memorabilia is a $12 T-shirt labeled "Bruise Brothers."

Yet it could be argued that Mr. Kocur is a hazard to his own team. Statistically, when Mr. Kocur (who plays right wing) is on the ice, the Red Wings are less likely to score and opponents more so. Coach Demers says Mr. Kocur's playing skills are improving, but hockey is a sport where hitmen come and go.

So Mr. Kocur is philosophical about his fist. "You do what it takes to stay in the game," he says. "I can't get away from doing what I do best."

Asked where he would be if there were no fighting in pro hockey, he replies, "Home watching it on TV."

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The Making of a Goon
by Johnette Howard. The National Sports Daily. 1990.

He went from nobody to notorious with a cudgel of a fist, and there was no rung of hockey to which it couldn't take him. Once he got to the NHL and stayed, the job then became one of maintaining his niche -- even after the bone showed through the sliced skin of his knuckles and he had to soak his punching hand in ice between periods, even after doctors nearly had to amputate his right arm.

Joe Kocur, the Detroit Red Wings enforcer, is sometimes referred to by the rabid cult of fight-video collectors around the league as "the Mike Tyson of the NHL." But earning that reputation was one thing; maintaining it led to a frightening night against Pittsburgh when Kocur's whistling right hand dropped Jim Kyte, a six foot five Penguin defenseman, to the ice unconscious; it led to a night against Quebec when he shattered Terry Carkner's jaw and the shaken Nordique team took a week to recover; and it led to a game last February when Kocur flattened New York Islanders winger Brad Dalgarno with a single wallop, then watched Dalgarno teeter off the ice, only to learn later that he'd fractured Dalgarno's left eye orbit, his cheekbone, and -- people now whisper -- his resolve to go on.

In the beginning, it wasn't Kocur's idea to fistfight his way to the NHL. His first fight? He was just fourteen, playing in his first exhibition game with a new team, and an older kid cornered him and dared him to go. He says he was just fifteen when his coach was Gerry James, a sort of Bo Jackson of Canada, who had dual careers with the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. James pulled Kocur aside and told him that if he wanted to make hockey a playing career, he had better start fighting with his fists.

"So I did," Kocur recalls. "I had about ten penalty minutes in the first twenty games. In the last forty games, I had two hundred fifty."

But Kocur's start -- his real start -- came at age seventeen, the night he knocked out a kid named Bruce Holloway in a Western League game in Kamloops, British Columbia. Not every man can recognize a peek at his destiny when he gets it, and even then, not everyone accepts it. But there was no question in young Joe Kocur's mind that he had done both after he saw Holloway collapse with a suddenness that was astonishing.

Word of his savagery preceded him -- "like wildfire," Kocur says -- in stops at Seattle and Portland, in Swift Current and Moose Jaw and Victoria, too. At every arena, scouts with wizened eyes and sharp pencils began pulling Kocur's Saskatoon coach aside, all wanting to know: "Was it a lucky punch or the real thing? Can the kid really fight? How hard does he throw?"

Holloway's coach, a celebrated tough guy named Bill LaForge, said back then: "Kocur took a couple real tough shots that didn't faze him, then he came back and threw a bomb that, I'm sure, Bruce will remember the rest of his life." The other guys on Kocur's team remarked later how he seemed changed as he lunged after Holloway. At that moment, the Saskatoon kids said, Joey Kocur was someone they did not know.

"I never really remembered this myself -- I mean, the other guys had to tell me -- but I just clicked... I mean, something inside of me just snapped," Kocur says today. "I just remember I was coming across neutral ice and he high-sticked me. And I remember saying something -- screaming -- that I was going to get him.

"Up to that point I'd been fighting before, but I never really got mad because I guess I was just enjoying it. But right then, against that guy, I just got mad. After that, it was odd because I didn't really know what had happened to him, didn't know what to do -- it was the first time, you know? I just remember standing there, thinking, 'Geez, what do I do? Do I hold him up? Do I hit him again? Should I just keep fighting or let him go?' But the refs jumped in quick and the trainers came out running."

And Kocur's teammates were right -- he was changed.

"After that, I just threw caution to the wind," Kocur says. "After that, I just felt that I could fight and not get hurt. That I would never lose."

It was a far cry from his first hockey fight two years earlier. "That one, I didn't throw too many punches, but I sure received a lot," Kocur says. "As I skated off I just though, 'What a way to make a living.'"

*

When the NHL All-Star game convened in Pittsburgh last month, Joe Kocur was not one of the skaters who glided out for a pre-game bow. In fact, in his six NHL seasons, his name has never even appeared on the ballot. But if you were to take a poll among the NHL's players and coaches, you would certainly find Kocur, twenty-five, mentioned among the league's top five "heavyweights" -- NHL parlance for players whose main role is to police the ice, always ready to punch a nose when the team needs a boost or to mete out retaliatory justice as seems fitting. In his particular case, Kocur says, that especially means "keeping the flies off Stevie" (Yzerman, that is, the Red Wings superstar center and Kocur's sometimes linemate).

Any poll would show one more thing, too, says St. Louis Blues center Adam Oates: "No one in our league punches harder. In that regard, Joe's the absolute best at what he does."

If any pangs of conscience come with the job, if Kocur feels a measure of regret on those mornings when he wakes up and finds blood on his pillow from his mangled right hand, he will not confess them. Doctors have told him to expect arthritis and calcium deposits in his punching fist. "Put it this way," Kocur says drolly, "I'll never play piano."

Detroit General Manager Jimmy Devallano hopes to find Kocur a job with the Red Wings after his playing days are through because "he's given his hand for the organization."

Devallano's assessment of Kocur's contribution is closer to the literal truth than perhaps he intended.

Along the back side of Kocur's always bloated right hand, a three-inch red scar carves a crooked path from the middle knuckle toward the wrist. He split the hand open during a 1985 minor league game in Halifax, when he knocked out a six-three, two-hundred-pound Nova Scotia defenseman named Jim Playfair.

In the dressing room later, a doctor needed forty stitches to close the gash. But when the rest of the team came off the ice, Kocur got some good news, too: The Red Wings had called him up to the NHL.

The next morning, Kocur took the first plane out and flew all day. He checked into a hotel room in Detroit, then spent an excruciating, sleepless night watching his right arm balloon to three times its normal size. When sunrise finally came, he got to the rink early for the Wings' morning skate. But a trainer noticed the new kid was wearing only one glove. The team doctor was summoned, then a hand surgeon, too.

"This was about two P.M.," Kocur says, "and then next thing I knew, they got me a hospital room, got me an IV. I was in major surgery by five P.M."

Because doctors in Halifax didn't realize that Kocur had cut his hand on Playfair's teeth, they sewed the wound shut, preventing it from draining and allowing infection to take hold. Just a day and a half later, the poisoned tendons and tissue between Kocur's third and fourth knuckles had already begun to rot.

When he emerged from a morphine-induced cloud two weeks after surgery, doctors explained what had happened. "If I'd waited even one more day, they might have had to amputate my whole right arm," Kocur says.

And how did that make him feel?

"Well," Kocur says, "it made me realize how bad I want to play hockey."

*

When asked if he ever dreamed of being a goal scorer -- maybe a star center who glided along the ice, protected by guys like him -- Kocur won't commit. "Maybe," he says. Then he adds, "I also know what got me here and how I'm going to stay.

"I know the day I start playing a fancy hockey game without hitting anyone, without fighting, is the day I'll either get send down or released from the game," Kocur says. "It's put food in my belly. It's what has kept me in this game. And I wouldn't give up this lifestyle for anything else in the world. So I'm not about to trade in my boxing gloves for a, for a... a wand."

But what about that year in juniors, that year he scored a career-high forty goals?

"That," Kocur says with a sardonic smile, "was also the year I knocked out Holloway. Guys tend to give you a little more room."

*

On the surface, the fighting and machismo that abound in hockey may seem like an archaic ritual, the folly of men in oversize shorts. But hockey's insiders -- men like Kocur -- shake their heads and explain not only why intimidation works but why they believe that policing the ice is necessary. Their reasoning also explains why hockey's tough guys are almost as celebrated as the great goal scorers.

First remember, they will tell you, that hockey would be a violent game even without fighting. Players wear heavy padding. They carry sticks they're unafraid to use, and their skate blades are so sharp that several NHL players have nearly died from gashes suffered in pileups.

The danger is multiplied even further at the NHL level by the sheer speed of the game and the inevitability of collisions. Today's swiftest skaters hit speeds around thirty miles per hour in rinks just 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. And every hockey trainer's black bag contains a pair of forceps, just in case the impact of a collision causes a player to swallow his tongue.

In a game like this, the indecisive and the fearful cannot survive. On rinks this small, there is nowhere to hide. And perhaps it's no wonder that hockey's past is dotted with instances of players retiring because of "nerves" and goalies who suddenly begin to suffer from agoraphobia. Once the puck starts ricocheting around, says Kocur, "you have to be absolutely fearless out there. You have to think that you can't be hurt and never will."

Then, once you have that conviction, hockey also asks that you hold on to it, even when it doesn't make sense.

"Outsiders look at these guys and marvel at how they keep coming back, coming back, playing with broken noses and their jaws wired shut," Red Wings Coach Jacques Demers says. "But it's funny -- as a coach, you almost get used to it. They skate off and take stitches and sometimes they just miss one or two shifts. You look and they're back in there. They're tough."

Like no other sport, hockey celebrates its toughest players. Gone are legends like Detroit's Ted (Scarface) Lindsay and savage Eddie Shore, the Boston defenseman of the 1930s who ended his career with a total of 978 stitches. But inside the current edition of The Hockey Register, an annual compilation of NHL players' current stats, there appears below each man's name a sort of living lore, a boldface paragraph recounting calamitous injuries or noteworthy fights.

DEAN CHYNOWETH (October 27, 1988) -- Left eye injured by Rick Tocchet vs. Philadelphia and missed nearly two months.
BRUCE DRIVER (December 8, 1988) -- Broke right leg in three places when checked by Lou Franceschetti vs. Washington and had surgery to implant a plate and 10 screws.

The Register's grisly cataloguing sometimes includes fetishistic detail. Under Guy LaFleur's name it reads: "(March 24, 1981) -- Fell asleep at the wheel of his car, hit fence and a metal sign post, sliced off the top part of his right ear after the fence post went through his windshield." But there's some unintended humor, too. Take Larry Robinson's entry: "(January 1, 1987) -- Broken nose. (November 9, 1988) -- Sinus problem."

Though the NHL has taken steps, especially in the last fifteen years, to limit the bench-clearing brawls and dangerous stick-swinging incidents that fatten those boldface paragraphs in The Register, no one foresees the game's unique nightly phenomenon -- legal, bare-knuckle fistfighting -- being banned anytime soon.

Not as long as NHL President John Ziegler, like his predecessors, continues to define fighting as "the spontaneous combat which comes out of the frustrations of the game." Not while league executives are buoyed by modestly increasing attendance and a discernible statistical decline in violent incidents. And not in the absence of any serious uprising among the players.

Before the 1974-75 season, the players' union asked owners to ban fighting for one year and were flatly refused. But in a survey taken last season, players were "divided about fifty-fifty" when asked about abolishing fighting, says Sam Simpson, director of operations for the NHLPA.

Salaries are now the hot issue among NHL players, who see major league baseball's average climbing to $500,000 and the NBA median approaching $1 million a year. Against those numbers, the NHL average of $180,000 seems paltry.

"To be honest," says Cliff Fletcher, General Manager of the Stanley Cup champion Calgary Flames, "the only real debate going on about fighting is in a couple of magazines and a few newspapers now and then."

As a result, tough guys remain not only legal but important enough to a team that the Red Wings' Demers candidly admits, "I know we wouldn't trade Joey Kocur for a thirty-goal scorer even though Joey has never scored thirty goals."

Why not?

"Intimidation," Demers says, shrugging his shoulders. "It works."

"It works," says New York Rangers General Manager Neil Smith.

"It works," says Cliff Fletcher.

Evidently, it works.

*

Fearless hockey fighters, like fearless hockey players, are not so much born as they are made. There's a very good reason for that, too, says Demers: "No one enjoys getting punched in the head."

Though Kocur's father, Joe Senior, is a strong, sturdy man -- he's got "a handshake you remember for days," says Demers -- Kocur says his dad "never fought in his life." And that was pretty much true of Joe Senior's only boy as young Joey was growing up with two sisters on a Kelvington, Saskatchewan, farm.

Fighting on ice never occurred to Kocur back then. But once he started looking beyond his small town, Kocur also understood that hockey requires players to grow up fast. By age fifteen or sixteen, most Canadian prospects leave home and live with foster families while they play fifty- or sixty-game schedules for traveling teams. These prospects, who often don't finish high school, encounter such concepts as "career advancement" early.

Besides, once Kocur started scuffling, he discovered something unexpected: "After the first couple times I got hit, I just thought, 'This ain't so bad.'"

When he looks at his role now, Kocur says, "I guess I enjoy it. But I don't want to sound like an animal, like my sole intention is to hurt somebody permanently. I just look at it as a job that I'm paid to do. And my job is not to lose. I won't fight dirty. I won't jump someone from behind. But when I go to hit someone, I want to hit him in the face. I'm trying to hit as hard as I can. And a few times it has happened that someone got hurt."

That's partly because fighting on skates changes things. "See, hockey fighting is different from boxing," says Kocur, who once visited the training camp of Detroit's Thomas Hearns -- courtesy of Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch -- to pick up a few tips. "In hockey, fighting is pulling and punching. If you just stand there and hold a guy out and hit him, you won't faze him. But if you can pull him into you and punch at the same time, that's when you start hurting people."

How to hit hard is just one of the lessons an enforcer must learn. There's also an unwritten and often unspoken code of honor that governs who hits whom, and under what circumstances. Kocur also likes to do research of his own; knowing other fighters tendencies helps him avoid surprises. But nothing, Kocur says, supersedes the most basic fighter's rule: Never, ever lose.

"You've got to understand some things about the fighter's job," says Demers. "Tough guys in this league are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Unfortunately, many of them are untalented except for fighting, and they've gotten here the hard way. And once you're recognized as a tough guy in this league, you go from having targets to becoming one.

"As long as you're beating up somebody, the fans are cheering and shouting your name. But the first time you lose one, everyone gets down on you. You have to be fearless. I've seen guys lose just once, and pretty soon they just sort of fade away."

Though coaches and other players all say that Kocur has good all-around hockey talent and that Demers encourages him to use it, Kocur considers himself a fighter first. He believes that preserving his aura of invincibility is essential because "it pays off down the line. Maybe I'll be going into the corner to get the puck and the guy going with me will think, 'Uh-oh, it's Joe Kocur. This guy's crazy. I won't give him the elbow in the face. I'll give him that extra step and poke at the puck instead of trying to take the body.' And then maybe I can make a play, make a good pass. And maybe we'll put the puck in the net."

Or maybe, as in Brad Dalgarno's case, Kocur will go after the guy who follows him into the corner anyway.

Dalgarno has heard the explanations of why Kocur stalked him for two shifts during that game last February: that the Red Wings thought the six foot three, 215-pound Dalgarno had earlier put too aggressive a cross-check on Gilbert Delorme, that the penalty Dalgarno received wasn't enough.

"In the first place, I thought the penalty was a rather questionable call," says Dalgarno. "But sure enough, two shifts later, Kocur was out on the ice every time I came out. I was kind of, well, nervous. I knew he was tough, and the guys on my team kept skating by and telling me, 'Be careful, be careful, Brad. He's out to get you. He's a dangerous guy.' And sure enough, after two shifts, we were fighting."

Before that single punch from Kocur shattered his cheekbone and eye socket, Dalgarno had always had nagging questions about the ethos of the game and prickly doubts about the coaches who kept trying, futilely, to turn him into a fighter because of his size. After Kocur's punch, that chasm grew deeper.

While recuperating at his parents' home in Hamilton, Ontario, a letter arrived. "Someone sent me a newspaper article from Detroit," Dalgarno says. "In it, Delorme was interviewed after I was hurt, and he made it look like, 'Oh, he deserved it.' And I remember I just thought, 'Wait a minute. Who deserved what?' Where's the justice, the value, in that?

"The doctors had to drill a hole in the side of my head during surgery. I could've lost my left eye, or my eye could've sunk into my orbital bone and I would've lost my vision. The nerves in the left side of my face might never have rematerialized. Fortunately they have, or I'd look like I had a stroke. I thought, 'Deserves it, deserves it? Who deserves that?'"

Knowing that hockey wasn't going to change, Dalgarno decided that he would. He says he holds no grudges toward the game and doesn't blame Kocur for triggering his dissatisfaction. Dalgarno says other players feel "trapped by the game," just as he did.

"Ninety-nine percent of the guys in the NHL have been playing since they were five and have no idea what else they would do, or could do," he says. "It's tough for intelligent men to try to put things in hockey into perspective, because you're never told the answers. Hockey doesn't have them."

And so, for Brad Dalgarno, it all came down to this: On the eve of the 1989-90 regular season, with people whispering that his game wasn't the same, Dalgarno -- age twenty-two, a former number one draft pick, a potential twenty-five-goals-a-year scorer -- officially retired.

*

There is a TV on in a Red Wing coach's office, and one shelf below it a VCR whirls and sighs. Joe Kocur, who is pushing buttons on a remote control, says he didn't see a small classified ad in The Hockey News touting "The Bruise Brothers," a two-hour bootleg tape of every fight between 1983 and 1989 involving Kocur and ex-Wing Bob Probert. Kocur can hardly believe there is such a tape. But, he says, he'd like to see it.

Five days later, courtesy of a reporter, Kocur has the tape. As he fast forwards past fights he doesn't care to see, the combatants swirl on the screen at comic, Keystone Kops pace. At one point he hits Play, and the announcer suddenly shouts, "Kocur's pulling some hair now!"

"Aw, shaaaaddup," Kocur says, scowling sheepishly, hitting Fast Forward, then Play again.

Announcer: "If Kocur's going to be a fighter in this league, he's going to have to avoid turning sideways."

"Awwww, what does he know?" Kocur says, restarting the fast-forward frenzy but hitting the Mute button to kill the voices, too. In a few seconds it becomes clear that the entire tape consists of nothing but fights spliced end to end. For $45, there are 170 fights in all, 84 of them Kocur's.

Most of the time, Kocur watches quietly, looking serious. When other Red Wings players being to straggle into the room, their faces are serious, too. Sometimes they wince.

In time, the crowd grows to nine. And suddenly Kocur pipes up and says, "Hey, did any of you guys see 'Sports Final Edition' last night on TV? They had this story about people in sports who've injured other athletes. And one of the guys was this NFL linebacker that got hurt by Freeman McNeil, this running back for the Jets who had to block him and blew out the guy's knee."

Eyes remain on the screen. But Kocur continues: The linebacker said McNeil called to apologize later, but he said he felt sorry for McNeil, too. Once he saw what he'd done, McNeil was so distraught he could no longer play effectively that day. For that, Jets Coach Joe Walton publicly criticized McNeil's sensitivity.

"In the end," Kocur says, "this linebacker says that, to him, that makes Freeman McNeil a good guy, you know? A real person."

Later, when the office has cleared and the door is shut, Kocur is asked if the linebacker's story made him think. Reluctantly, Kocur says, "Well, yeah. I thought about it."

There is a long pause. When he doesn't continue, he is asked, "Would you like to share what you thought?"

Without looking away from the TV or the silent fighting still going on, Joe Kocur says, "No."

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Joey Kocur Hands Bonus To Rangers
By GEORGE VECSEY. New York Times. April 29, 1992.

JOEY KOCUR'S right hand resembles a map of his native Saskatchewan. That bump is his boyhood town of Kelvington. That knob is nearby Nut Mountain. That long gash could very well be the Qu'Appelle River meandering its way into Mountain Lake. Those scars might be the Quill Lakes, and those over there could be Old Wives Lake. And that large bruise could certainly be the urban sprawl of Saskatoon.

Fortune-tellers say they can predict the future from the lines in the palm of a hand, but any novice can divine Kocur's past from the lines on the back of his right hand. Yet Kocur insists, "The hand has never been broken; just a couple of scrapes here and there. "

Kocur was brought to the Rangers last season for whatever remained in that hand, which according to gossip was not very much at all. A fighter who keeps his fist cocked is about as valuable as a pitcher with a torn rotator cuff.

The Rangers promptly fell apart after Kocur was obtained, which some purists saw as the hockey equivalent of living by the goon and dying by the goon. Kocur is rather pleasant these days. His value has been largely totemic this season, like the fire extinguisher you keep, but you don't really know if it will work.

But on Monday night, Kocur performed an amazing feat with the aforementioned right hand. He wrapped it around the handle of a hockey stick, controlled the puck with the blade, fought off several defenders, and skated, yes, skated, around the net and then, wonder of wonders, propelled the puck into the net. In hockey, this is known as scoring a goal.

Most great scorers craftily shoot at different sectors of the goal mouth. High right. High left. Low right. Low left. Between the goalie's legs. Kocur said he tried to keep it simple. "I shot at the 1-hole. The net."

This goal gave the Rangers a 3-0 lead they would eventually enlarge to 5-0. It turned out they needed Kocur's goal as psychological ballast before they hung on for an 8-5 victory over the Devils and a 3-2 edge in the first-round series. The teams resume tonight in New Jersey, and there is no reason to believe it will be easy for the Rangers.

"The Devils are a great hockey team and we don't think Game 6 will be easy at all," said Kocur, who is not promising any more goals of his own.

His last playoff goal before Monday was in 1987, when he played, or whatever he does, for Detroit. He doesn't remember it. It's all a blur, just like his 2,005 minutes of penalties, which is 33 games and another full 20-minute period. Another way of looking at it, Kocur has spent nearly half a season sitting in the penalty box.

Those fights and those scars and those bruises have given him a reputation as the Mount Everest of hockey players. New boys want to fight him because he is there. When Tie Domi had a brief trial with Toronto in 1989-90, he tried to goad Kocur into a brawl, just because.

"I was a kid," Domi explained yesterday. "I was just 19 and he was 25. I wanted to fight, but he had a bad hand."

As luck would have it, the two were united on the Rangers last season. Did they test each other out on the practice ice or in the clubhouse? Domi says no. "I said, 'How you doin', Joey?' and he said, 'How you doin', Tie?' We figured we'd both play. Every team needs a couple of tough guys."

Kocur has been very gracious about sharing his professional secrets. "Joey tells me how to play the role," Domi said yesterday. "When to talk. When to fight. See, a lot of guys are trying to hold on now. They don't stand back and hit. Joey's still got the big bomb. I don't come from the South Pole, like Joey does. I'm lucky. I'm ambidextrous. I look like a prima donna next to him."

With the playoffs approaching, Domi decided to play straight hockey in the final game against Pittsburgh.

"I didn't fight," he said. "Well, I did fight, actually, but the other guy slashed me. So it was a different situation."

What with the precarious state of the world, Coach Roger Neilson was wary about letting the two enforcement agents dress for the same game. Kocur had played three playoff games and Domi had played one, but on Monday Neilson pushed the button and put Kocur and Domi and Doug Weight on the same line. The two other fringe players assisted on Kocur's goal.

"We were looking at films today and three different times I saw Joey move in on somebody and they just dumped the puck," Domi said. "They definitely think about it."

When the gloves come off, the players see the scars. They don't know if Joey Kocur left his big bomb on the ice in some dim-witted melee a few years back. Who really wants to be the one to find out?

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EXAMINING JOEY KOCUR'S HAND
The New Yorker. April 24th, 1995.

Joe Kocur's disability policy, issued at Lloyd's of London, specifies a single exclusion: his right hand. Kocur is a member of the New York Rangers, who, with three weeks left before the playoffs, wish they were playing better then they are. He is six feet tall and weighs two hundred and ten pounds. His face is small, he has high cheekbones, a strong jaw, a gap between his front teeth, and a boyish and malevolent expression. Kocur grew up in Sasketchewan, on the Western Canadian praire. He is of a physical type occasionally described in hockey circles as a hay baler; that is, he has the broad backed, slope shouldered build of a farmer. On the Rangers, he occupies the position of enforcer, which obliges him to deliver the team's response when one of its stars has been handled rudely by the opposition.

Kocur's right hand has the appearance of a homemade tool. His friend and actor Jeff Daniels describes it as "a blunt object with fingernails." Eleven seasons of hockey fights have built up sufficient scar tissue between the wrist and the knuckles that the skin there is taut and shiny and smooth. It feels like linoleum. Because of how tightly the skin is stretched, it can no longer be gathered and stitched. Here and there on his fingers and around his knuckles are dozens of small white scars, like the marbling in a piece of meat. Between the first and second knuckles is a long, thin surgical scar that was left after a tendon that had split down the middle was repaired. A crude, winding, trenchlike scar begins between the two other knuckles and runs nearly to the wrist, the result of emergency surgury to control a staph infection. Kocur had cut his hand on another players teeth, and the doctor had stitched the wound without cleansing it thoroughly. "A day latter, I woke up with my arm swelled to nearly the size of my leg," Kocur says. During hockey season Kocur nearly always has several cuts on his hand, and when he fights they bleed. His hand is so sensitive that he protects if from almost all contact off the ice. When he is on the ice, he says, he is so absorbed in what he is doing that he doesn't feel any pain.

Every team has at least one enforcer and a few have several, but Kocur's hand is an anomaly among them. Its condition is the result of his incautious and idiosyncratic style. Most hockey fighters stand close to their opponents and wrestle with them, or grab their sweaters and trade short, quick punches. Because the punches are delivered at such close range, they are not notably powerful, and the enforcers' hands look no different from the hands of the other players on the team. All that Kocur desires, however, is the change to land one punch. He grabs an oppenent with his left hand and tries to pull him nearer at the same time that he launches his right from somewhere down by his hip or behind his back. It is unusual for a player to be injured in a hockey fight, but it is not unusual for a player to be injured fighting Kocur. It is sometimes said of him, "When Joey hits people, they stay hit."

Mike Richter, the Ranger' goalie, says that he noticed the condition of Kocur's right hand almost immediately after Kocur arrived in New York in 1991, in a trade with the Detroit Red Wings. Kocur and Richter were in the locker room at Madison Square Garden after a game in which Kocur had reproved a visiting player for behaving thoughtlessly toward one of his new team-mates. Kocur's hand was bleeding. That was in March. Richter asked, "When will that heal?" and Kocur said, "July."

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The Theory and Practice of the Hockey Fight
Alec Wilkinson. Rolling Stone. New York: Jun 11, 1998

Your'e at a hockey game, watching a hockey fight, and you're no one - Mr. No One, Senor No One, account vice president at the Nada Advertising Agency, I billion Madison Avenue, New York. Bob No One selling cereal in a suit of a cunning Italian weave. You have shoes made from the skin of a reptile, an apartment with a view of one of the picturesque but filthy rivers that flow past the city, a Land Rover and a special way of wearing a fedora with the brim rolled as if it were the brim of a cowboy hat. You like wine. You're in agency seats with some cereal guys from Battle Creek, Michigan, and, to demonstrate the fineness of your feelings, you're shaking your head and saying that such displays of brutality are juvenile and coarse and the reason hockey will never amount to a majorleague attraction in America, word up, memo to the commissioner, signed, Robert No One.

But forget you, Bob. Most people whose interest in hockey is peripheral believe that the fighting is deplorable. They regard it as undignified, unsuitable as an example to children and lowering to the image of Sport. A blight, a sideshow, a carnival event. Moreover, they view it as thuggish, discreditable, boorish, indefensible, crude, degrading and superfluous. Perhaps - except superfluous.

A hockey fight is not a dispute between two soreheads settling a grievance that has festered between them. Hockey fights are impersonal. They are not conducted bv athletes who dislike each other. Two teams may dislike each other, and a fight may break out among some of their players, but not unless one of them provokes it. Fighters rarely confront each other more than once in a game. They have been called on to resolve a dispute and are no more likely to revisit the matter than lawyers are to open a settlement. They may participate in other disputes, but these will involve new complaints.

What accounts partly for the disengagement is the regard that fighters have for any player who will fight.

Hockey is a roughneck prairie pastime imported from the Canadian frontier. Its code of behavior insists that a player be responsible for his conduct. If he torments other players with his stick, he is certain to be reproved. The reproof will come in the form of an assault by a player of threatening stature. If the offender is a player of commonplace ability who declines to defend himself - if he falls to the ice, say, and puts his hands over.his head, what is called turtling - he might be harassed until he quits the sport. If he is a gifted player, someone will defend him. If he has honor but is overmatched, he will grab his opponent's arms and press his forehead against the other player's chest; such a defense is difficult to penetrate - he ties. If he can defend himself, he will be given some degree of respect, although he will probably learn to modify his behavior so that he doesn't have to defend himself to the point of distraction. If, however, his only hope of making his living playing hockey is to be irritating, he will persevere. All sports feel congenial toward athletes who are tough and mean-spirited and will never quit or back down. Even chess.

The other explanation for the disengagement is that the disputes that fighters are called on to settle don't usually begin with them. A hockey fight is proof that the players' confidence in the structure of discipline intended to ensure an orderly unfolding of a game has collapsed. The event that brought about the fight was not the one that caused the players to drop their gloves and dance. It happened earlier. Perhaps a player of questionable skill roughed up the other team's star. The offense may have been observed by everyone watching the game, or it may have been taken in only by the players and the referees and linesmen, or only by the players. In any case, the infraction was overlooked by the referees or else was insufficiently addressed. The players have excused it - perhaps what was intended as a permissible check turned into a knee-onknee collision because the star shifted direction suddenly and the slower player couldn't get out of the way.

On any hockey team, only a few players fight. Some are too small for it, some have no inclination toward it, and some are too talented, too important to their teams and too rich to expose themselves to gratuitous roughhousing. The players who fight often excel at no other component of the sport. Of a game's sixty minutes, such players are likely to take part in only five or six. After noting a second or third infraction, a coach may tap the shoulder of his assassin, meaning, simply, your turn on the ice. The assassin does not need to be told to rebuke the offender - he has seen the offense. He will seek out the troublemaker, or someone of his stature if the troublemaker is not on the ice. He will not seek out a player who does not fight. That would be unsporting.

Incivility toward another team's star is not the only cause of hockey fights. Other reasons (briefly): Two teams are playing a game following one in which the winner assumed the lead easily and then handled the loser roughly; early in the new game, the losing team's sergeant-at-arms might start a fight to encourage the other team to behave more considerately. A fight might also break out at the end of a onesided game if the losing team wants the winner to know that, despite the score, it will not tolerate liberties being taken against it. To establish himself, a physical player new to the league will taunt a player whose reputation for fighting is acknowledged. If the new player wins, he advances himself. If he loses, he demonstrates that he had the courage to challenge a fearsome player. If he loses decisively, he will have to try again. Some players are signature players for their teams - your captain, perhaps, or your best player. Treating them rudely, especially on their home ice, is cause for a dust-up. A fighter protecting the well-being of his smaller and more skillful teammates is serving as a kind of insurance, a way of doing what a team can to allow its best players to take part in a game without fear of a knucklehead's hurting them or causing them to play with the self-conscious distraction of caution.

In addition to the severity of the provocation, whether or not a fight occurs has something to do with the score. In a close game, insults are not necessarily addressed. Players have memories. They can wait for another occasion. Also, certain fighters are sufficiently feared that simply having them take the ice can pacify an opponent. Hockey is a game of intimidation, and fighting is a means of answering a threat. A straightforward way to win a hockey game is to make your opponent lose heart. A team of big players, especially big, fast players, will force another team's most talented defenseman to handle the puck a lot. When that defenseman is on the ice, the bigger team will carry the puck to the middle of the rink and shoot it into the corner on the side of the ice that the defenseman patrols. A race for the puck begins, with the defenseman aware that a bruiser is bearing down on him. The defenseman gets leveled a few times. It occurs to him to let the bruiser get the puck first. "I'll get it next time," he thinks.

I admire the courage of hockey fighters. I dislike hearing them referred to as "goons." Such a term is inaccurate and disrespectful. Claiming a place on the roster of a National Hockey League team is, to me, a singular and impressive accomplishment. I admire the willingness of these players to accept sore hands and black eyes and split lips and cuts to their cheeks and foreheads and concussions and injuries to their shoulders in return for paychecks substantially inferior to the ones converted into Mercedes and Bentleys and restaurants by the players whose honor and well-being they defend.

Fighters menacing enough to intimidate other fighters are as uncommon as goal scorers are. Stu Grimson of the Carolina Hurricanes, Sandy McCarthy of the Calgary Flames, Donald Brashear of the Vancouver Canucks and Chris Simon of the Washington Capitals win most of their fights. The most punishing fighter in the National Hockey League is generally conceded to be Tony Twist, who plays for the St. Louis Blues. Twist is six feet one inch tall and weighs 245 pounds. His shoulders are so broad that his name on the back of his jersey looks like an abbreviation. A fighter who is held in some regard by other fighters might fight twenty or thirty times in a season; Twist fights about fifteen times. One reason he fights only occasionally is that he doesn't get on the ice that often. He is not a swift or shifty skater. Understand, if he were to take the ice at your rink, he would be the greatest skater you had ever seen at close hand, but compared with the most accomplished players in the world, he is cumbersome. This means that his usefulness is limited to circumstances where his difficulty in catching other players, traveling with the pace of the action and taking part in the context of the game is not a liability. If he skated faster and with greater coordination, he would be rich. After the stars, the most significant players on a hockey team are those who have the size, speed and strength to pursue and claim the puck, or those who can punish the other team for having it. Hockey is not yet the employer of glandular freaks that football and basketball are; but it is eager to be. The only example of a skillful player as big as Twist is Eric Lindros, a forward on the Philadelphia Flyers. Lindros is six feet four and weighs 236 pounds. Players say that Lindros is so big and skates with such speed and determination that the blades of his skates make a sound against the ice that is different from the sound made by any other player. When your back is turned and you are headed into a corner to retrieve the puck, you can hear him bearing down on you. Players able to control the puck deftly are said to have soft hands. "Hands of stone" is the epithet most often applied to players whose hands are clumsy. Having hands of stone means Twist does not, as he says, "take the ice to score a goal or tie the game up."

The other explanation for why Twist fights infrequently is that players visiting his arena in St. Louis, or welcoming his team into their own, often realize that hockey needn't be played antagonistically. You can have just as much fun being polite. No fighter in the league is susceptible to fear, but none of them fights Twist without anxiety. Twist is bigger and probably stronger than any other fighter in the league. He punches harder than anyone else. He is ill-tempered. Some coaches tell their players not to fight him. He might hurt you; he might beat you severely. You are unlikely to defeat him.

If you are standing on the ice in hockey skates and you throw a punch as hard as you can at someone and you miss him, you will fall down. That is why hockey fights begin with the players grabbing each other's jerseys. Balance, to a large extent, determines how forcefully a player punches. If you have no balance, the force of your punch derives from the strength in your arm. Balanced fighters throw with the force of their bodies moving forward. Twist has terrific balance. Many fights, though, become wrestling matches. The most accomplished fighters are trying to maneuver their opponent into the line of their fists. Some players try to rock their opponent back and forth, so that they can hit him while he's moving toward them. Some players just try to grab their opponent's stronger arm and hold on. They will try to prevent him from throwing punches and either attempt to upend him, which is difficult to do against Twist (weight, balance), or press him against the boards or in some manner subdue him so that the linesmen can step in and separate them. To prevent being neutralized in this way, some fighters wear jerseys several sizes too large. When their opponents grab the jerseys, they get fabric.

Twist's attitude toward fighting is efficient and remorseless. "I'm not a grabber," he says. "I'm out there to throw. If I get in a fight, I want to hurt you. You can hit me, but I'm going to hit you harder. That's the scenario. I want you next time to see me coming and think, `It's probably not worth it.' When people grab me, I think, `What have we accomplished here?' "

The fighter I have most enjoyed watching is Joe Kocur, who plays for the Detroit Red Wings. Injuries in hockey fights are uncommon. Most of a fighter's body is protected by equipment. The part of a player's face that is exposed is approximately the size of a slice of bread. Fighters in the NHL have been practicing fighting for years. They know how to tuck their chins or turn their heads or lean back in order to avoid being hit anywhere but on the helmet. While it is unusual for a fighter to be hurt in a hockey fight, it has not been unusual to be hurt fighting Kocur.

Kocur is thirty-three. He is six feet tall and weighs 205 pounds. He has a small, round face, high cheekbones, a gap between his two front teeth, and a mischievous and obscurely defiant expression. Kocur was raised on a grain farm in Saskatchewan. He is of a physical type described in hockey circles as a hay baler - that is, he has the rounded, sloping shoulders of a farmer. He is exceptionally strong. Between 1991 and 1996, Kocur played for the New York Rangers. Colin Campbell, a former coach of the Rangers, says that when he once asked Kocur what his strength derived from, Kocur said, "Slews." Slews are small, shallow ponds among the fields of a farm. To avoid driving through the fields and packing down the soil, tractors and trucks drive along the edges of the fields on bands of uncultivated land called headlands. The headlands are usually bordered by irrigation ditches. As a boy, Kocur would be assigned by his father to clear the headlands of rocks, which meant picking them up and tossing them into the slews and ditches. Kocur was a teenage player of modest promise when he got into one of his first fights. Everyone in the arena noted that when Kocur hit the other player, the player fell down.

Kocur's manner of fighting is distinct. Whereas most fighters try to throw as many punches as they can, Kocur wants to throw only one. He tolerates being hit while waiting for the opportunity to launch his right hand, which comes from somewhere down by his hip or from behind his shoulder, As a junior-league player, Kocur once hit an opponent so hard that the player was knocked unconscious. He remained standing because Kocur had him by the jersey. As a professional, Kocur broke an opponent's cheekbone with a punch; the player retired for a year. Kocur broke another player's jaw. According to Campbell, the helmets that players wear are "built to stop .44 Magnums. Hitting one with your fist is like hitting a concrete wall." In collecting material for this piece, I came across a player's awed description of a punch that Tony Twist threw with such force that it dented a player's helmet. Campbell says that he once saw Kocur hit a player with such power that he cracked the player's helmet and gave him a concussion. Kocur developed a reputation in the NHL as the only player capable of knocking someone out with one punch. People used to say about Kocur, "When Joey hits people, they stay hit."

Between 1985 and 1991, the year Kocur was traded to the Rangers, he played in Detroit with a guy named Bob Probert. Probert is now a member of the Chicago Blackhawks, but, having had surgery on his shoulder, sat out most of the season. In any case, he was regarded for more than a decade as the most successful fighter in the NHL. Any young player wishing to prove himself as a fighter had to measure himself against Probert. Even more so than Kocur, Probert is a legitimately skilled player - one year he played in the all-star game. Probert and Kocur's most gifted teammate on the Red Wings was Steve Yzerman, who is still the team's captain. Kocur described his responsibility to the Red Wings as "keeping flies off Stevie." Probert and Kocur were intimidating partly because they seemed only halfway under the control of their coach and partly because they had the habit - perhaps Kocur more than Probert - of picking fights with players the other had fought earlier in the game. Sportswriters referred to Probert and Kocur as the Bruise Brothers. Probert's fights were often long and rancorous. In the Hockey Scouting Report covering the 1990-91 season, Michael A. Berger wrote, "Unlike teammate Joe Kocur, who remains relatively calm during a fight, Probert loses control." Kocur's fights were shorter. Often he hit someone and they fell down. In Bad Boys, Stan Fischler's book about hockey fighters, a player answers a question about how he had done fighting Kocur by saying, "It was OK. I came out of it alive."

Opponents who wanted no part of Kocur's right hand would grab his arm and duck and try to hold on. Kocur would try to free his arm. The patter of the television announcers describing these fights would consist of remarks such as, "Davis has got ahold of Kocur's right arm, and he's not going to let go. Kocur's trying to get his arm free - Joey's a big-time heavyweight in this league, and if he gets that right hand - Jesus and Mary, look out, he's got that arm free - Mayday.... Well, Davis'll know better next time."

The consequence to Kocur of such an incautious style has been a right hand that has been described as looking like a homemade tool. The actor Jeff Daniels, a friend of Kocur's, says that Kocur's hand is a "blunt object with fingernails." Kocur's hand has been cut and stitched so many times that the skin on the back of it can no longer be gathered. It's as shiny and smooth as a piece of linoleum. Some of the scars are small and white, like the marbling in a piece of meat, and some wind back from his knuckles like trenches. One of the longer scars is the result of incisions made to repair a tendon that had split, and another is the result of surgery to control a staph infection - Kocur had cut his hand on an opponent's teeth, and the doctor sewed the cut without cleansing it thoroughly. The infection became so virulent that doctors considered amputating his arm from the elbow. Kocur's hands are always cut, and they always hurt. When he fights, he becomes so involved that he isn't aware of the pain, but afterward he is.

In 1996, Kocur felt he had become incidental to the fortunes of the Rangers and asked to be traded. He was exchanged for a player on the Vancouver Canucks. Kocur played eight games, and during the summer the Canucks let him go. He joined a minor-league team in San Antonio, played five games and left. He ended up playing in an amateur league in Detroit. Halfway through the season, the Red Wings gave him a contract. He played the rest of the season and figured in the Red Wings' winning the Stanley Cup. He fights rarely now. "I'm not supposed to go looking for trouble anymore," he says. "I'm just here if things get out of hand."

Kocur is far from the most graceful skater in the league - he has the agility of a file cabinet - but he is better than many and is so strong that he is valuable to the Red Wings as a player who can slow down the other teams' belligerent and talented players. I asked Campbell whether he thought that Kocur was still as highly regarded for his ferocity. "Everyone's sure Joey's got one more punch," Campbell said, "and no one wants to be that last punch."