Weird connection, but hey with a lot of "kids" gone for vacation, us
oldsters need some stuff to talk about, no?
 
.  This talk about fighting in
hockey reminds me of a situation in lacrosse.  I am also a college
lacrosse fan (yes, the snobs at RPI used to play pretty good Div I hockey,
Syracuse with All-amer Jim Brown, John Hopkins, etc but are now Div
III)... and I even used to play a bit, and it is a rough sport obviously,
but fights seemed to me to be less, I always thought it was lack of boards
to be smashed against.... and the physical-ness (a word?) seemed to be
really connected to the fantastic skill level of some of these great
players.
 
If you've never tried to catch, throw or run with a lacrosse
ball while getting whacked from the side, you've got a thrill.  At any
rate, decades later, lacrosse is slowly building out here on the west
coast, even at my own Cal Poly SLO campus, but boy is it ugly.  Here they
are real macho and think that fighting, slashing,tripping, murder, etc, is
the game of lacrosse.  My feeling is any of the "finess" teams from the
east would KILL the top teams out here, like 40-2, not because they were
whimpy and weren't physical, but because the west coast teams have no
skill, all brawl and are slow to boot.  My point?  Not sure, but I think
that physical hockey and finess hockey are not mutually exclusive, that a
team with some size and finess will generally fare well against a
"fighting" team, to wit, the Russians success against the Canadians....I
would hate to see college hockey legitimize fighting.  In fact, in
general, I think college hockey can stand on its own, we should not
apologize because the game doesn't look like the NHL's.  Who cares?  Look
at college basketball, it is certainly a whole different game from the
NBA, but it certainly has a following.  College hockey should take a note,
and the fans too, the NHL brand is not the only way to play, and not the
only exciting type of hockey!!
 
Just some thoughts from sun-drenched central California, on my way to the
tennis courts!
 
Tony Buffa
RPI '64
 
Go Engineers!  (or is it physicists?)