Third Man Out

It was billed as a Stanley Cup playoff match between the New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs. As the evening progressed, it looked more like the Ringling Bros. Circus. Late in the last period at Madison Square Garden, New York's Vic Hadfield began trading punches with Toronto's Jim Harrison. Maple Leaf Goalie Bernie Parent skated to Harrison's assistance and was intercepted by Ranger Goalie Ed Giacomin. During the four-way fray, Parent's $150 custom-made mask was snatched off the ice and thrown into the stands. Enraged when fans refused to return the mask, Parent stalked off the ice. After a 30-minute delay and an unsuccessful search of the stands, Goalie Jacques Plante replaced Parent in the Maple Leaf lineup. But no sooner had play resumed than a new melee broke out, with players from both benches spilling onto the ice and pounding on whoever was handy. Final score: Maple Leafs 18, Rangers 15 penalties.

For doughty Clarence Campbell, the image-conscious president of the National Hockey League, that free-swinging fiasco at the end of last season moved him to deliver a few stiff blows of his own. Slapping both teams with an unprecedented total of $16,550 in fines, he declared that their version of the Ice Follies "only makes us look stupid. We have considerable correspondence in our files protesting such behavior from grown men while young boys are watching on television."

Campbell pushed through new rules calling for fines and automatic ejection of the first player to leave the bench for a brawl, as well as any third player who joins a two-man fight--pointedly omitting further penalties for the first two players who start swinging. "We're not against fighting," explains Campbell, a former Rhodes scholar and N.H.L. referee. "It's part of the game. But we are not going to tolerate the senseless spectacle of disorder that tends to turn a game into a farce."

Before the current season began, players learned that Campbell meant business when two exhibition-game brawls brought fines totaling $5,000. Now, with half the season gone, there has been only one bench-clearing slugfest* compared with ten at this point last year. Major penalties have dropped by 30%, time spent in the penalty box has decreased 1,740 minutes in the first three months of the season, and the Players' Emergency Fund, which is stocked with fines levied against fighters, is down from $26,000 to $8,000.

Team Spirit. The new third-man-out rule has had its greatest effect on the league's two-fisted "policemen." At this point last season, Toronto's Jim Dorey had amassed eight major penalties and spent 101 minutes in the penalty box; so far this season he has no major penalties and has been detained only 44 minutes. The Chicago Black Hawks' Keith Magnuson, the N.H.L. bad boy who once took karate and boxing lessons in order to intimidate his rivals, likes the change because "it leaves the fighting to the guys who can and will fight. It takes out the instigators, the guys who start fights simply because they know that their teammates will be around to help out." Says Ranger Coach Emile Francis: "I don't believe in guys coming off the bench. But I'll be honest with you. If I see a couple of guys going two-to-one on my man, I'm going to send someone in to help him."

While Toronto's John McLellan still insists that there is nothing like free-for-alls to "create team spirit," he and the other N.H.L. coaches agree that their absence has speeded up the game. "All those bench-clearing things usually wound up as some shirt-pulling and some tugging," says Chicago's Bill Reay. "They weren't worth the time that was lost." The fans seem to agree. Last week the N.H.L. proudly announced that while brawls have decreased, league attendance has increased 5%.

* Not counting the episode between periods of a recent match in Philadelphia, when Coach Al Arbour of the St. Louis Blues suffered a ten-stitch gash on his head and was stripped of his coat and shirt in a wild 30-minute brawl in the stands between St. Louis players, fans and 200 policemen. Arbour and three of his players were later arrested for assault and battery and released on $500 bond each.

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