Unless you're obsessed with the occasional beanbrawl on the baseball diamond, your most likely answer is hockey. (Remember, soccer's violence mostly takes place in the stands or outside the stadium.)
The news from the National Hockey League this week points to something about that league, a league which seems to be trying to clean up its image for on-ice violence.
Full disclosure: this is the observation of a non-follower of the sport. Aside from a brief period while living in Tallahassee while it had a minor-league hockey team, I've never watched or followed the sport closely, so all I really have to go on is news and reputation.
And aside from football, hockey has been the sport most directly affected by the elevated awareness of the destructive long-term effects of concussions and subconcussive head trauma. It has its own lawsuit by former players against the league. Major stars in the league, such as Eric Lindros, Sidney Crosby, and others, have missed substantial time due to the effects of concussions. A handful of high-profile former players, such as Bob Probert, Reggie Fleming, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, and Rick Martin, were found to show evidence of CTE or other degenerative brain disorders upon posthumous examination. While Probert, Fleming, Boogaard, Rypien, and Belak were known "enforcers," players whose main role on their team was to get in on-ice fights, Martin was not a fighter.
That role, the "enforcer," seems to be on the wane in the NHL, possibly in part due to these results but also because of teams' reluctance to devote a roster spot to a player with very limited skills. This makes the news of a 41-game suspension for San Jose Sharks player Raffi Torres stand out in sharper relief.
Torres's most recent suspension was issued for an illegal hit during an exhibition game Saturday night against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. In the first period of that contest, Torres delivered a blow to the head of Anaheim's Jakob Silfverberg. The hit was deemed illegal for being targeted at the head, as well as being late (after Silfverberg had given up control of the puck). Silverberg had to be removed from the game, and Torres was ejected.
You will notice the words "most recent" in that previous paragraph. In his career Torres has been suspended at least four times, with the longest being a 21-game suspension issued for a hit during the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2012. This most recent suspension means (unless successfully appealed) that Torres will miss half of the 2015 regular season.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is the largely one-sided reaction in the hockey world, in support of the suspension. (I'm sure there are plenty of troglodytes suggesting that players should wear skirts on the ice or some other such subhuman drivel, but for the most part they're not getting a lot of ink, or at least not enough to reach outside the diehard hockey world.) Fairly typical are these reactions from ESPN.com and The Hockey News, arguing (with differing degrees of sympathy for Torres) tha the long suspension was absolutely necessary. While in the former article Scott Burnside more or less hopes Torres never returns to the ice, Matt Baker suggests in the latter piece that Torres's coaches and the members of the leagues Department of Player Safety believe that Torres genuinely wants to stop delivering such illegal hits. Having played the game since youth, however, and having been taught over many years how to deliver a check, Torres (who apparently has legitimate hockey skills and is a capable goal-scorer) is facing a struggle to overcome years and years of muscle memory.
Aye, there's the rub. Unlearning, or relearning, how to play the game is a root issue, is it not? If Torres is struggling to learn how to check his opponent without drilling him in the head, how many football linemen or linebackers have faced the challenge of learning not to lead with the helmet, to "stick your head in there" to dislodge the ball or make the tackle? How many hits still end up leading with the helmet? And how many such hits go unpunished?
I also find it noteworthy that the director of that department that issued Torres's suspension is a former player, and a good one at that. Brendan Shanahan also identifies himself as someone who doesn't have to be told that hits to the head do damage, even if that puts him at odds with others in his sport.
Hockey actually seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence of popularity in recent years, with some popular stars and a series of outdoor contests that have proven highly popular and even capable of solid television ratings--always a struggle in this sport. While it is currently struggling with an ongoing investigation into assault charges against Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks, the sport overall seems to be doing better than it has in a while. If it can address these particularly damaging hits as it seems to be doing in the case of Torres, and do so without jeopardizing its resurgence, it seems that the NFL, more popular and successful by several orders of magnitude, should be able to address the on-field behaviors that are most tied to concussions and subconcussive brain trauma. The same would seem to apply for the NCAA in college football.
If this turns out not to be the case, one wonders what that says about the culture of football, or the culture of America for that matter.
Torres is, as you might suspect, the one still standing.
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