Regular Show Fist Punch Download
Ashlie Mealey
Cochrane shakes his head, lips pursed in budding disgust. Mind-blowing, he says. A ripple in the fabric of the universe. Yet here from his perch in the dull-blue concourse seats of the Onondaga County War Memorial Arena, Cochrane has a theory, a way to make sense of the appalling nonviolence taking place below:
That's right. Me. Forget that I've never even laced up a pair of skates. Never mind that my firsthand hockey fighting experience begins and ends with using the video game version of Bob Probert to make people's heads bleed on Sega Genesis. Somehow, I'm to blame. Who knows? Maybe Cochrane is right. Maybe I'm screwing the deck, and maybe I just can't see it.
Cochrane crosses his arms, his thin blond hair topping narrow, aquamarine eyes. He is 38, a landscaper-turned-day-trader from Mahwah, N.J., a man who thinks nothing of driving seven hours through a snowstorm to videotape a training camp fracas between two semipro goons he has seen only on YouTube. "You gotta pay your dues," he explains, and before I can ask the obvious follow-up question -- como? -- he launches into an unprompted soliloquy on the nature of his hobby:
It's a frigid March evening in upstate New York. Like everyone else in the building, Cochrane is here to watch hockey; like almost everyone else -- the guy with the mohawk and the girls in the "Mirasty 41" T-shirts and the kid with the sign reading "The climate in our arena is always nasty" -- he's also here to see a fistfight.
As am I. For months, I've been immersing myself in the world of hard-core hockey fight fans, the Cult of the Goon. (Quick taxonomy: A hockey fan watches a fight and cheers, and maybe gets another beer. A hockey fight fan watches 50 fights in a row on DVD, then goes online to argue about them.) I've traveled from New York to Saskatchewan, watched dozens of knockouts on tape (yes: actual Paleolithic VHS tape; more on that later), had one enforcer show me his sparring routine and another give a hands-on, on-ice demonstration of just how badly he would break my face (conclusion: Jacko glue-on nose territory). I've even signed up for a goon fantasy league. Problem is, my fantasy team sucks, I still don't understand what goon lovers see in a bloody mouthful of missing teeth and, worst of all, I haven't even seen a hockey brawl in person.
Right. The message boards. Specifically, those on Fried Chicken's Hockey Fight Site, the oldest of its kind on the Internet. A place to bemoan the ongoing sissification of the NHL, judge hockey scraps like Olympic boxing matches, track down 1993-94 Tacoma Rockets fight tapes and debate the maddening question: Who was a badder, er, badass, Probert or Behn Wilson? A virtual church for the faithful. It's where I first met Cochrane -- which, by the way, isn't even his real name. His given name is Steve. Cochrane is his online handle, chosen to honor Glen Cochrane, a former Philadelphia Flyers enforcer best known for (take your pick): (a) terrorizing the New York Rangers; (b) fighting with reckless, g'head-and-punch-my-nose abandon; (c) sporting a memorable mustache and a chin to shame the Geico cavemen.
Cochrane has a point. Look around: The arena's outer walls bear inscriptions such as "Algiers" and "Coral Sea." A banner hanging below the press box reads "Welcome to the House of Pain." Syracuse has won 11 of its previous 13 contests on the strength of what owner Howard Dolgon calls "old-school hockey," and what the ancient Romans might call Visigothic. The Crunch like to fight. A lot. And no one likes glove-dropping more than Mirasty, whose rock 'em, sock 'em bouts have made him a YouTube legend, the Tila Tequila of the goon-loving set. Blessed with a cinder-block head, sporting a goofy, charming mohawk, Mirasty has been taunting the River Rats since pregame warm-ups, all but begging for a tussle.
No one takes the bait. Not Gillies, a former NHLer who missed 20 games of the current AHL season after breaking his hand against Mirasty's skull. Not Joel Rechlicz, an up-and-coming enforcer Mirasty pummeled the last time they tangled. In fact, Rechlicz won't even look at Mirasty, and when he finally sneaks a peek through the Plexiglas separating the Syracuse and Albany benches, the result is swift and strange: River Rats coach Tom Rowe grabs Rechlicz's helmet with both hands, then points his head toward the ice.
The whole scene is wrong. Gillies owes Mirasty a fight. Rechlicz owes Mirasty a fight. That's the code, the unwritten order that has governed hockey fighting since just about forever. They know. Everyone knows.
There should be blood. Only there isn't. So Cochrane smells a rat. Namely, me. His theory goes like this: Another fight fan, Peatycap, knew I would be in Syracuse to see Mirasty fight. Peatycap got excited and posted a note on the message boards. Cochrane told him to take it down. Too late. Somebody associated with Albany saw the note and told Rowe, who in turn has ordered his players not to fight ... out of sheer spite.
Cochrane nods. He's convinced. I'm confused. Two hours ago, I didn't know who Rowe was. Now, apparently, we have some sort of Death Row-Bad Boy records feud going. When I bring this up -- specifically, when I mention how ridiculous this sounds -- Cochrane looks at me with pity, as if I just asked him for subway fare.
To recap: I'm here to see a hockey fight to better grasp what people like Cochrane see in hockey fights, only no one will fight because I'm watching, and I have no idea why this is the case. Nevertheless, I'm supposed to write a story that explains the whole thing or, barring that, at least help you win your goon fantasy league.
A full-time obsession"You should have seen my old house. It was NASA." Nicky V. grins at the memory. Four televisions. A $4,000 satellite dish on the roof. Four Sony SLV-1000 video cassette editors, each of them worth a grand. Twenty-eight cassette copying machines. A bushel of remotes and one very important piece of plywood he installed in the middle of the basement to keep them from interfering with each other. Everything devoted to Nicky V.'s part-time hobby -- or more accurately, his full-time obsession: recording and collecting hockey fights.
Nicky V. pulls a VHS tape off a nearby shelf. (Correction, he says, "a $6 Super VHS tape." There's a difference.) The label reads "NHL PRE-REG 1993-94, VIII." "This is my master," he says. "Big-dish quality. No degradation due to copying. Prior to DVD, as good as this gets."
Nicky V. pops the tape into a black VCR, one of the Sony SLV-1000s, tucked below a DVD player and above a big-screen television. Pixels flicker to life. "Now, nobody cares. But 10 years ago, if I had told a hockey-fight collector, 'You can have my master for a season,' they would have flown out here to get it."
Before YouTube, before the message boards and the Internet and all things digital and easy, there were guys like Nicky V. The pioneers. The old-school fight fans who devoted countless hours to recording and trading and compiling footage, going from icebox-sized VCRs in the 1970s to standing on the roof in the middle of 1990s ice storms, aiming dishes by hand. The guys who racked up $300 phone bills calling to Canada at 25 cents a minute, who scoured old Hockey News box scores for penalties, who developed sore thumbs from hitting RWD and FFWD over and over again. The guys -- and let's be honest, they're all guys -- who spent three months waiting for fight tapes from Philly, then tore open the UPS packages like snakebite victims fumbling for anti-venom.
"We were like drug addicts," Nicky V. says. "With games that weren't televised, local news stations used to put up feeds. I'd record six hours of news on a Montreal channel, just to see if there were fights, spend the next day fast-forwarding through. It was a full-time job."
Nicky V. rests his feet on a brown plastic cooler, a remote control in one hand, a Philadelphia Flyers coffee mug in the other. (He drinks two pots of Starbucks a day.) We're sitting in the storage room of his home-remodeling construction company in Stamford, Conn., which doubles as his office. Plastic trash bins are stacked by the half dozen against the wall. A metal shelf teems with tubs of Sheetrock joint compound. Nicky V. just turned 40, is married and has a 2-year-old son whose pictures surround a Flyers clock that hangs above his desk. He doesn't collect and trade fight footage like he used to. But he remains one of the most knowledgeable fans in the hobby, a walking database of who punched whom in the jaw, and why.
On the screen is a brawl. A bench-clearer, the kind hockey doesn't make anymore. Rangers versus Flyers, late 1970s. Frank Beaton and Mel Bridgman go toe-to-toe. "Great stuff," Nicky V. says. "If these guys took their pants off, their balls would fall to the floor." The camera cuts to center ice. Some two dozen gloves and half as many sticks are scattered like dead cockroaches. The officials separate the teams. Nick Fotiu jumps out of the penalty box to fight Jim Cunningham for the second time. The Flyers gang up on Fotiu. A new scrum erupts. Ron Duguay is bleeding. "This," says a broadcaster, "is the kind of thing that sets a team back 50 years!"
"As a fan, this is almost like reliving my youth," Nicky V. says. "Watching the same fights I watched as a kid. They pan the crowd, you see the hairstyles, the big plaid shirts. I just like this era."
Melrose LineDoes fighting still have a place in the NHL? Why is it so popular with fans? Do NHL players watch fight tapes in their free time? ESPN hockey analyst Barry Melrose shares his thoughts. The Melrose Line
Nicky V. taped his first fight in 1984, but he didn't get serious until after college. His early tapes were terrible -- 20 seconds of players skating around, fights joined halfway through. But they quickly improved. Nicky V. bought blank Super VHS tapes by the carton and mailed them to his contacts in other cities, fight fans and team video guys, anyone who could supply footage. He developed proteges in New York and Arizona, teaching them to do the same. He wouldn't just find one contact for footage in St. Louis -- he'd find three, "so no one could f--- up a fight." He scribbled fight logs on index cards, cataloged his growing collection on a computer, produced tapes on request for NHL players.
93ddb68554