Just waiting to fight Hockey gets another black eye with savage sticking incident

Almost as stunning as what Marty McSorley did was what he said about it afterward.

With less than three seconds left Monday night and his team down by three goals, the Boston Bruins' goon took a two-fisted baseball swing with his hockey stick and caught Vancouver tough guy Donald Brashear flush across the temple.

"It's not what I had intended to do," McSorley said. "I wanted to go fight."

Think about what he is saying. The problem, as McSorley sees it, isn't that he tried to cave in the side of Brashear's head; that was OK. It's that he used his stick instead of his fists.

Next on McSorley's list for a well-deserved beating was logic.

"I'm still kind of in shock at what I did," he said.

But no else should be. McSorley is the third most-penalized player in NHL history, trailing only noted thugs Dave "Tiger" Williams and Dale Hunter. He already has seven previous suspensions in his career, five of them for stick-related infractions.

"It was just stupid. That's not the way I want to be known as a hockey player," McSorley said. "Repercussions are the last thing I'm thinking about. I've got to reflect about what I did. I've played too many years and played too honest."

See above.

"I've got to come to terms," McSorley said finally, "with what I did."

We can save him a little time and a great deal of soul-searching. McSorley, in turn, can save the game he says he loves a great deal of pain and embarrassment. Simply put, if he isn't thinking seriously about retirement, now would be a perfect time to start.

McSorley is 36. And a marked man. He's played on eight teams and made enemies on just about all the rest. He was due in New York today to meet with the league bosses and disciplinarians. There is almost no way to punish him and make everybody happy.

If McSorley attacked Brashear at another moment just about anywhere else -- with a stick in the locker rooms, hallways or the parking lot of the rink -- chances are he's facing charges. And Vancouver police, aware of a precedent in which stick-swinging Dino Ciccarelli spend a night in the tank a dozen years ago, might yet drag McSorley before a judge.

Either way, the league is stuck between a puck and a hard place. The only way to convince authorities to stop meddling in its business is to look and act tough. On the other hand, for all the violence captured in that brief videotaped sequence, what happened between McSorley and Brashear, with a reputation of his own to protect, is a dynamic just waiting to break out a dozen times a night nearly every night of the season.

Fighting is hockey's dirty little secret. It is supposed to be just a part of every game, instead of the point of playing, and so McSorley certainly compounded his sin by admitting as much. He and Brashear tangled barely three minutes into the game, and McSorley got the worst of it. He spent the rest of the game trying to goad Brashear into a rematch and got penalized for that. Frustrated by a lack of success with words and elbows and cross-checks, McSorley finally drew back his stick and let go.

The result was a concussion that will cost Brashear close to three weeks of playing time. But the raw quality of McSorley's hunt unsettled just about everybody who saw it, even players who never before questioned the ethic.

"Something like that takes the air out of the game," said Mark Messier, who played with McSorley at several stops, but is now Brashear's teammate.

"It just blew me away," veteran Boston defenseman Ray Bourque said. "It's not a good night to be a hockey player."

The day might not go much better. Commissioner Gary Bettman and director of hockey operations Colin Campbell almost certainly have to hand McSorley the longest suspension ever -- longer than the 21 games Hunter received several years ago for a blind-side attack on Pierre Turgeon seconds after he'd scored.

The Bruins have 23 games left in the season. Their chances of making the playoffs were slim before McSorley, taking up valuable space, learned a lesson that usually comes only at great cost. There are younger and tougher enforcers out there. Holding his place, already a desperate mission, is only going to get tougher.

(Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org)