Tuesday night at the Avalon Theater I listened to Yvon Labre persuasively make the case that hockey’s once sordid past with respect to player violence had been replaced by an era of enlightenment. There is I think powerful evidence in support of that position: two- and three-hundred-penalty-minute games are long gone; roster spots for the skating and shooting challenged but the thick of fist are too coveted to toss away; ‘Slapshot’-like scenes of players invading the stands for brawls are mercifully found only in old movies, and YouTube.
Still, something profoundly disquieting on the violence front in the contemporary game remains, insomuch as a Chris Simon is allowed to remain in the league.
The NHL career of Chris Simon is as enigmatic as it is inexplicable. Just how has the slow-footed, oft-injured scorer of a middling sum of goals, and for¬†most of this decade, modest penalty minute totals — he’s failed to reach even 100 PIMs the past three seasons –¬†remained in the league since 1992?
The answer, I’d allege, is found in the NHL’s bi-polar relationship with violence.
Simon will not score a clutch goal for you — he hardly ever has in his career. He has, at best,¬†passable skills for the big league. He will no longer throw down with the game’s heavyweights¬†– shoulder surgeries prevent that bravado. He is never singled out¬†by coaches or management for iconic leadership traits.¬†Instead, he seems to offer a lone but most distinguishing trait to the league’s teams ever lining up to offer him one- and two-year pacts: international headline grabbing combustibility.
This week Simon was suspended for the eighth time in his career.¬†And it is the nature and severity of¬†his suspension trajectory in recent seasons that is what is so outlandishly intolerable about him. Earlier this week, Simon received a match penalty for attempt to injure when, in wholly premeditated fashion,¬†he attacked Pittsburgh’s Jarkko Ruutu. With his skate.
This act of savagery occurred less than 50 regular season games removed from his quasi bludgeoning of New York Ranger Ryan Hollweg in the face. For which he received another match penalty for attempt to injure. The DA on Long Island considered presecuting Simon for that. This week we know he should have.
The disciplinary regime of the NHL has¬†long been a source of illogicality to me. Dale Hunter loses his cool, in a¬†decisive playoff game, shoulder-checking Pierre Turgeon into the boards — a hit, incidentally, that Flyers’ bench boss John Stevens would have regarded as soft –¬†and he is massacred by the league. Simon, year after year,¬†skates with a chainsaw¬†on his shifts, subsequently issues an agent-drafted utterance of apology and regret, and receives a series of the same sentences. Or less. And I haven’t space enough to begin a discussion of how the league has handled the Flyers this season. ¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†
After this week’s Chris Simon mayhem, one wonders, what exactly will it take for the league to say, ‘We might be able to survive without Simon’?
So this file is partly about one man’s mysterious serial-killer-like short fuse but also an enabler culture at the very top of the league within which he is compensated.
It’s somewhat ironic to ponder that Simon’s diabolical acts have occurred in the new, free-flowing¬†NHL, when obstruction and neutral zone marauding has diminished appreciably and general managers have embraced smaller, fleeter skaters. Simon sticks out like a leisure suit at Clyde’s on New Year’s Eve.¬†But this just reinforces my theory about the league meeting grotesque violence under mistletoe: It¬†may ever be the case that in big-league hockey the bastard bully will¬†have a home. ¬†
But be a non-Flyers third-liner of no name recognition and get your stick up high on a Tuesday night in Alberta, and Colin Campbell will send you to the electric chair.  
It’s called incoherence, and credibility maiming, and it’s no wonder mainstream America can’t make sense of it.
It’s a wholly separate discussion, what must be¬†the pernicious effects this must have for hockey’s gaining a seat at the high-profile media table. But that’s less important than understanding that no business organization operating¬†in a society of some semblance of civility can tolerate a Chris¬†Simon in its employ. ¬†
Hockey as we its purists most love it has no need for the likes of Chris Simon. Who would miss him? It is possible to embrace both the wizardry of an Alexander Ovechkin and the code-honoring brutality of a Donald Brashear sharing a sheet of ice. But explain to me, please, how it is that Chris Simon has any claim to that sheet.
He profanes it.
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9 Comments
I wouldn’t throw the word “serial killer” around as lightly as you do, but I must agree with most of your points. Though a great guy off the ice (when he was a Cap anyway), there seems to be something about very very wrong with Chris when he gets on the ice. I hope he can get some kinda help before he even thinks about trying to come back. It’s getting hard to feel sorry for him anymore, though.
Didn’t he start mouthing off to the Red Wings in game 3 of the ‘98 finals? IIRC, that fired them up and…I don’t want to say anymore.
Great post, I never understood what was so great about him either.
Jordan touches on something true about Simon: he’s two completely different guys. Remember several years ago when he used a racial slur in a game? Remember how he apologized publicly, on his own accord, and served his suspension quietly? (Try to find someone willing to do that these days, for any infraction, but I digress.). He also tried to apologize personally for another hit last season (on Ryan Hollwegg, I think) but Hollwegg refused to hear the apology. I think that says a lot about both players, but again, I digress.
Last October, Sports Illustrated did a profile on Simon touching on this very point: Great guy off the ice, hard player on the ice, but he seems to snap in the heat of battle and does something very, very stupid. It can’t really be explained away,and it certainly can’t be excused…I was a Simon fan when he was in Washington and I still like the guy, as long as he’s not being a stupid idiot. Sadly he’s been doing more of the stupid stuff and less of the good stuff lately, and he won’t be doing anything for the next 30 games, if he doesn’t retire.
Which is what I feel he should do. I apologize if this rambles; I’m still shaking my head ruefully and saying to myself, “Chris, Chris…how could you be so stupid!”
Video of the stomp is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hKeVb_G-PI
I feel for Simon, but at the same time I don’t. He got a slap on the wrist.
Its a privlage to play a sport professionally. Yes you get ridiculed for everything you do, but you get paid a lot of money for a ‘game’ (a very important one in my eyes, but its still a game).
Last spring, he commited the biggest sin I could think of in hockey (at least I thought it was at the time) by swinging his stick at another player. Last week, stepping on another player with your SKATE!?! I’m sorry that is intent to injure. He should have been banned for at least a year.
Hockey has a code, they allow fists to solve your anger issues. When you use your fists you’re just as vulnerable as the guy you’re fighting. What Simon did is disgusting.
Attempting to maim someone should ban you from the game you play for a long long time. 30 days is nothing.
Once again the NHL leaves us wondering what the hell is wrong with this league? 30 games for something that brutal.
Like Victor, I hope Simon takes the high road (which sounds really ironic) and just retires. He should admit that he’s got a problem and shouldn’t play the game anymore.
I believe that both Simon and Bertuzzi(yes it’s true, I haven’t gotten over that) should be banned from playing hockey at any level anywhere in North America after their vicious on ice attacks.
Mostly I just feel sad for Simon. How much pain must he have locked away inside, that forces its way out on the ice in these brutal fits of rage? He’s obviously having a real difficult time with something, probably many things.
Of course, sympathy is no reason for him to be given yet another chance to play in this league. He needs to take control of whatever it is that’s destroying him, and not be playing NHL hockey.
Didn’t he win a battle with alcoholism earlier in his career? Let’s hope he has the strength to fight through his troubles again.
The Isles and Simon both already said that he was going to take a leave of absence from the team for about the length of the suspension, so the suspension itself was really accademic. It sounds like he may be drinking again, and if so he needs to take a long break from the game to get his head back on right. I hope he does. No matter what he’s done on the ice he’s not a “bad guy” by all accounts. Alcholism is such a hard thing to beat. Heaven help him if he’s slipped into anything worse then that.
Interesting comments. You believe on the one hand that Chris Simon should be banned from the league, but on the other hand you decry the illogicality of the suspension of Dale Hunter for a hit that you suggest others would consider “soft.” Please. Draw a line and stand on one side of it. Don’t move it about to protect your pet players. It makes you more illogical than the officials you criticize. Both incidents came with play stopped, with a player in a vulnerable position, and were delivered with the intent to injure. To call that “losing one’s cool” is ridiculous.
Looks like both Greg Cimilluca and Erin Brown of CBS Sports agree: Simon is (or at least should be) donesy.
http://www.sportsline.com/nhl/story/10537303
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