MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - Last month, we had a pair of incidents, a death in the amateur senior ranks, and a convulsive fit in the American Hockey League (AHL) after fights broke out, which have prompted us to yet again revisit the McSorley Rule.

Named after the OJ of the NHL, Marty McSorley, the McSorley Rule is the eleventh commandment of hockey for blueliners:

Thou shalt throw down the gloves as long as it does not result in permanent injury or off-ice criminal charges.

McSorley saw the inside of a courtroom, along with his time in the penalty box. In 2000 he was found guilty by a Vancouver, British Columbia court of assault with a weapon for attacking the Canucks' Donald Brashear with a particularly vicious shot to the head with his hockey stick during an NHL Bruins/Canucks game.

Post-strike, the NHL has done a lot to speed up the game and emphasize the sport of the sport, and distance itself from the UCF and WWE crowds looking for a little more blood sport.

Unfortunately, even if the NHL adopted a stricter no "armed" combat rule, it would be a very hard sell at the minor league level.

“Can you play without it?,” AHL president Dave Andrews asked in an interview with SZ's Dan Hickling. “Obviously. There is no way you can say fighting has to be part of hockey. There are all sorts of great hockey games that don’t have fights in them.”

Great by whose standards, though? A lot of fans, particularly at the Class AA level (ECHL, CHL), and especially rough-and-tumble oil patch towns like Odessa or Tulsa would beg to disagree with Mr. Andrews. Fighting to fans in these markets is a very big part of the sport. In fact, if there wasn't fighting, hockey might lose market share.

In places where hockey muscled in on wrestling and monster trucks, and where "sports" like Ultimate Fighting have become huge entertainments, hockey club owners have to be asking themselves if they want to curb fighting and cede a certain amount of their business over to the WWEs and the UFCs in an economy where jobs are becoming increasingly vulnerable, and budgets for entertainment dollars are thinning.

Most players, of course, when surveyed either don't care, or want fighting to continue. Why not? There are probably half a dozen blue liners who are advancing to the NHL this year more for their pugilistic than puck handling skills.

New NHL rules to increase scoring have also dramatically decreased the amount of physical punishment which blueliners are allowed to inflict, which has alienated some in the bit-of-the-old-ultraviolence crowd. Taking away fighting cleans up the game. The question is not one of ethics but dollars-and-cents. Do you offset those finding other things to watch with people coming into a cleaner version of the game?

There is historic precedent for reducing violence without disasterous consequences. Baseball, particularly from the turn of the century to the beginning of WWII was a very rough and tumble game. Spikings on the basepath by baserunners, and the occasional intentional bean ball, and the bench-clearing brawl were staples of the game ruled by guys like Ty Cobb.

The powers of baseball decided that a cleaner game, played by more idyllic and less unsavory characaters was going to be the engine of baseball's growth.

There are skirmishes in the NFL, but they are brief and very contained. Anything that approached the gloves off brawling that we see in hockey would not be tolerated. Likewise the NBA clamped down on the goon-ball that the Iversons of the world were inflicting upon the game because it was tarnishing basketball's image with more people than it was bringing into the arenas.

Cleaning up any of these games came slowly. Rules changes, including the addition of things like safety helmets and shin guards, took decades, not months.

Hockey has seen a lot of changes in recent years. The helmet rules, and the hamstringing of the blueliners may seem like net negatives to some, but overall they have been positive additions to making the sport more capable of attracting fans who want to see more scoring, and more action.

The other change, largely to the size and improved conditioning of the players, has increased the intensity of the violence to some degree. While it is unlikely that other players will be hit so hard as to drop into a seizure, pro hockey needs to set a higher bar now, rather than wait for another near miss with tragedy like the assault on Brashear, or the mid-brawl seizure of the Philadelphia Phantoms' Garrett Klotz.

Are fights somewhat inevitable in a keyed up fish tank like a ballfield or a court or a rink? Absolutely. The difference is that in every other pro sport they are still largely the exception, not the rule. You don't see a "Guaranteed Fight Night" advertised by the D-League or MiLB.

The days of that kind of promotion should be over.

To light the lamp for a goal of increased safety and increased profitability can go hand-in-hand. There has to be an offset of the loss of drama brought about by the banning of the slugfest with the increased action that a higher scoring game yields.

When NHL commissioner Bettman, AHL commish Dave Andrews, and the others meet this summer to decide whether the days of open fighting are over, the answer will probably make neither side happy. There are going to be changes, but they will be slow in coming, more than likely.

The McSorley rule needs retirement, slowly. I just hope that nobody throws down at the press conference if they don't like whatever the announcement ends up being.