Vicki Price wrote:
 
> Hockey certainly didn't start out as the more physically violent game it is
> today. It evolved into it. As all sports have evolved, they've become more
> physically reckless-- often exemplifying a violent game environment with
> (pervasive combative behavior) physically reckless behavior. It's a national
> epidemic. Can anyone dispute that?
 
Yeah, I can.  This paragraph simply isn't true.  I'm not familiar enough with
hockey's history to comment on it, but both baseball and, hard as it is to
imagine, football were much, much more violent around the last turn of the
century.  After all, Teddy Roosevelt pushed the formation of the NCAA primarily
to produce rules that would end what had become an epidemic of *deaths* in the
play of college football.  In baseball, both the use of spikes when running the
bases and the beanball were routine.  Ray Chapman, the only person ever to killed
in a major league baseball game, was hit in the head in 1920.
 
The prevalence of beanballs during that helmetless era, by the way, is one of the
historical moments that makes it hard for me to believe that removing the face
mask will cause hockey players to be so much more careful with their sticks and
elbows that it will improve safety.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
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