In a different life, in a different version of the NHL, the man who stands before me in the press box at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, possessed the ability to change the outcome of an entire hockey game with a single punch. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. With his standard corporate attire of suit, tie, and briefcase, this man could pass for an executive at any company in the world. The average person would have no idea that this docile, unassuming man was at one point in time a wiry 6'5" hockey enforcer who possessed a left hand that was as hard as a shovel, and when this man fought, he could dig his opponent a hole and bury an entire season or career in it, not just the body.
Dave Brown, fifty-three, is currently the head professional scout for the Phila- delphia Flyers, and he’s here to scout tonight’s game between the Minnesota Wild and the Los Angeles Kings. During his playing career, spanning more than seven hundred NHL games from 1982 to 1996, Brown gained a reputation as one of the fiercest fighters to ever play in the league. He wasn’t just a puncher, though. He was the real thing when the hockey world was full of bad men with horrible and violent reputations.
What made Brown different from the legions of tough guys in the old-time hock- ey era was the fact that after all the rumors were set aside, when all the hyperbole of a player’s goonish antics had run out of steam, after all the voluminous brag- gadocio was dialed down and it was time to go one-on-one, he was one of the few players who could stop all the theatrics dead and set things straight with a method- ical and stoic reckoning. When he went to work on a guy and fought during a hock- ey game, Brown could shed light on the limits of an opponent’s—and an entire team’s—toughness.
This, of course, was a different time in the NHL, when fighting and the on-ice tangos that came with it were ingrained in the sport. While he was a dependable and dedicated fourth-line player, Brown’s main role was to patrol the ice. When things got hairy and his teammates were threatened, it was his job to root out the trouble on the opposing bench, bring the hooligans out, and tune them up. His fights were not for glory or fame but were simply to let the opposition know that if they wanted to take liberties with one of his smaller and more skilled teammates, his left fist was waiting.
“Back in my day, the quickest way to send a message to another team was by breaking someone’s nose or jaw,” Brown says humbly, his brutal words remarkably void of any machismo.
During Brown’s career in the NHL, every team he played against had at least one designated tough guy. And he seemingly fought every one of them, often in hyped showdowns, to thunderous applause. Today this sort of predetermined bout be- tween two hockey heavyweights is a bloodstained relic of another NHL. In the new era, teams have cleaved off the roster spot that was once occupied by a player like Brown, whose sole role was to provide toughness and to intimidate, and protect his teammates by dropping the gloves. Fighting is down league-wide, and indeed is reaching record lows. All the statistics and analytics now tell team management that they are losing production by rostering a player who plays a singular role in limited minutes. Although fighting is still allowed in hockey, it is no longer an actual tactic, the blunt instrument of intimidation that was once wielded around the league.
The modern NHL now has rules designed to curb fighting, such as the insti- gator rule, which penalizes the player who starts a fight more than his opponent. But it wasn’t always this easy to brush aside the fights and intimidation. In the old days, if a team wanted to survive, they couldn’t just simply turn the other cheek or hide in their shell. Brown knows this firsthand, because he physically and mentally lived through the wars of the NHL on the front lines.
“You had to have toughness back in the day for your team to be comfortable. If you weren’t tough enough, then your best players couldn’t play the way they need- ed to play,” Brown says.
Back in the old-time hockey days, brawls and bench clears and other back-alley strategies were commonplace. That has all changed. If a team wants to goon it up, then their opponent will simply weather the storm and beat them on the power play. The last six Stanley Cup winners have done so without having to roster a player who was a designated heavyweight in a strict fighting role, and have instead relied on players who can contribute offensively and defensively while occasionally answering the bell to fight. In the modern NHL, speed, skill, and skating are now the desired trio for all players, and that means there simply isn’t any more room for players like Dave Brown.
So here stands Dave Brown, a former fighter who currently wields a briefcase full of charts. He wrecked countless faces in his previous life, and an entire city nearly burned down with vitriol toward him after he pummeled the Calgary Flames’ toughest tough guy during the historic Battle of Alberta (more on this later). But the same man today scouts teams and assiduously collects the desired analytics of the modern NHL, the minutiae of things like offensive-zone puck possession time after a face-off win.
He steps up and introduces himself to the press-box attendant, who stands at a podium.
“Dave Brown, with the Philadelphia Flyers,” he says softly.
The press-box attendant scans the night’s seating chart for his name. Her index finger slowly floats down a long list of the names of journalists, NHL staff, and var- ious media types who are attending that night’s game.
As he moves through the press box, his presence is both commanding and comfortable. Those who recognize him nod in respect, because once you’re an NHL heavyweight champ, you’re always the champ. He finds his seat in a some- what vacant section of the press row. The lights are hushed and intimate, like a law library. It’s quiet down here where Brown sits, because all the journalists (like me) and beat writers are sequestered at the opposite end of the press box, hunched over and yapping and pecking at their keyboards. He quietly unpacks his briefcase, lines up his notes, and plugs in his phone.
He looks down pensively at the ice before tonight’s game between the Wild and Kings. The players are warming up, circling their end of the ice like deranged ants.
“When I played, if the other team knew you could handle them, then you had a little bit of advantage,” Brown says. “If you could be a little bit tougher than the other team, I think that would give your team a mental edge.”
The mental edge that Dave Brown provided as a player came down like a guil- lotine. But to understand how fighting and players like Dave Brown used to shape the game of hockey, you first have to understand the dark corners where it used to be played.
FROM THE INCEPTION OF the sport to the early 1990s, professional hockey leagues were filled with fighters, roguish men who would not have been out of place in the Star Wars bar. These scarred and ill-tempered players with twisted noses, missing teeth, hammer hands, and colorful nicknames like “KO Kocur” and “Battleship Bob” didn’t back down from anyone. They had reputations, valid or not, built on their history of on-ice violence. Fighting and on-ice thuggery had been
used as an actual strategy since the start, because the general theory was that if you couldn’t beat a team in the alley, then you couldn’t beat them on the ice.
In this old-time hockey era, the games were often played at a constant simmer, a low heat that was applied through hard hits, scrums, stick work, and the occasional cheap shot. Depending on the severity of the actions, the intensity of the rivalry, and certainly the wiring of the players involved, a hockey game could boil over quickly. Because of this smoldering violence, every North American professional hockey team needed an enforcer, a man stout of heart and hands, a player who was hockey strong in immeasurable ways, to put out those fires and keep things in order. Fighting and the threat of fighting were, ironically, used to maintain peace on the ice. A player like Dave Brown was primarily employed as a deterrent: step out of line and see what happens.
Hockey is unique in the sense that the players policed their own game for decades with an unwritten honor system of what was considered to be acceptable behavior and what was over the line. If a player stepped outside this ancient honor system, the opposition could legally settle things and answer the infraction right there on the field of play.
For example, if an opponent slashed your star player or bumped your goalie, or if a tough guy on the other team took a cheap shot at a smaller and more skilled player, then that tough guy violated hockey’s honor system and had to answer for his behavior. That retaliation usually came in the form of dropping the gloves and fighting. Teams that never answered the bell or never stood up to on-ice challenges were thought to be soft in the belly and, more important, in the hockey heart ,and were often trampled into submission.
Hockey has always had fighters and heated regional and divisional rivalries with spurts of berserker mayhem. But the crunch of fist-to-face gamesmanship became a permanent part of the NHL when the Philadelphia Flyers won back-to-back Stan- ley Cups in the 1970s with a team nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies, which was basically a Mad Max biker gang on skates. Because of the Flyers’ success, which was largely engineered through their unrelenting on-ice pugilism—they were
known for line brawls and bench clears and stick maiming and eye gouging—every team soon needed to protect itself. Hockey teams everywhere had to roster a few tough guys who were there to provide a stiff backbone, to not back down, to fight, and to intimidate.
This was the hockey world Dave Brown came up in. In 1981 he was just a teenag- er from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and admittedly not the best skater or stick han- dler. But he was hockey strong and a fearless kid in a big man’s game, and, most important, he possessed that devastatingly long reach that could deliver the straight truth.
From an early age, Brown’s left hand grabbed the attention of the hockey world. In traditional hockey fights where both combatants are right-handed, the fighters grab their opponent’s jersey with their left hand and throw punches with their right. Since Dave Brown was left-handed, it threw everything off. His opponents had a hard time tying down his left fist, because the second the fight started he was al- ready at work digging the hole he was going to put them in with a series of punches they couldn’t stop. Worse still, he hit just as hard as Joe Kocur, the one- punch-knockout king in Detroit. By throwing left-handed, Brown could often tag men without impediment. In doing this, though, it exposed him to his opponent’s right fist. But Brown stood in there and took punches as good as anyone in the league.
During the 1981–82 season with the Saskatoon Blades of the Western Hockey League (WHL), Brown was a mere nineteen years old and had 344 penalty minutes in just 62 games. During the next season, Brown eclipsed that with a staggering and record-breaking 418 penalty minutes in 71 games with the Maine Mariners of the AHL. The Mariners made the playoffs that year, too, and Brown tacked on an additional 107 penalty minutes. Plus, he got called up to the NHL that same year with the Philadelphia Flyers (in his first game in the NHL, Brown fought Boston Bruins tough guy Gord Kluzak and sent him to the hospital with a broken face) and added a few more penalty minutes, for a whopping grand total of 530 penalty min- utes in a single season.
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