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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. Specifically, those on Fried Chicken's Hockey Fight Site, the oldest of its kind on the Internet. "If Gillies doesn't go," he tells me, "I'm going to rip the hell out of him on the message boards."
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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. I've even signed up for a goon fantasy league. 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). (Quick taxonomy: A hockey fan watches a fight and cheers, and maybe gets another beer. For months, I've been immersing myself in the world of hard-core hockey fight fans, the Cult of the Goon. 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.Īs am I. It's a frigid March evening in upstate New York. Which, when taken as a whole, makes him sound like a Saturday-morning sensei on "Kung Fu Theater." Not to mention a bit nuts. If you're a cook, you get greasy if you're a landscaper, you get dirty if you're a fighter, you're going to get banged up. Two men going to war is a unique, intimate situation. "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:ĭropping the gloves is the ultimate commitment. 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. "C'mon, Jon! Run somebody!"Ĭochrane crosses his arms, his thin blond hair topping narrow, aquamarine eyes. "So disappointing," he says, surveying the ice. Maybe I'm screwing the deck, and maybe I just can't see it. 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. Forget that I've never even laced up a pair of skates. Rob Tringali for As his nickname indicates, Jon "Nasty" Mirasty has one primary purpose on the ice. 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: Why won't they just go?Ĭochrane shakes his head, lips pursed in budding disgust. And what about Trevor Gillies? Dude has a longer fight card than Evander Holyfield. Seriously, that's Jon "Nasty" Mirasty down there, circling the ice like a suicide gunboat. That the Syracuse Crunch and Albany River Rats can play nearly two periods of minor league hockey without somebody punching someone else in the face strikes him as absurd.