It had been almost a year since Marty McSorley skated in a professional hockey game, which can take a toll on a beaten-up, 37-year-old gladiator’s body.
It had been almost a year since he conducted a locker-room interview with a cut under one eye and another on his chin thanks to the kind of fight that kept him in the NHL for 17 years.
It had been almost a year since he rocketed to notoriety as the man who whacked another player on the side of the head with his hockey stick and was vilified in two countries and convicted in one.
So the question was, why? Why is McSorley playing these games and landing in brawls for the Grand Rapids Griffins of the International Hockey League? Why drag around this baggage that surely will be retold, if not retried, at each stop?
The answer was as plain as the business end of McSorley’s right fist.
“I’m not ready to retire,” he said in an empty Griffins dressing room long after a game this week.
But there must be more than that. Could it also be about regaining the respect he gained while winning two Stanley Cups and a reputation as an NHL enforcer? Could it be about rewriting a potentially ignominious requiem for this heavyweight?
“None whatsoever,” McSorley said. “I’m extremely comfortable with everything I’ve done over the course of my career. Non-hockey people have jumped to conclusions. Hockey people knew. Everybody knows. I read stuff all the time that I find comical. I read something that I wanted to retire with honor. I could’ve retired with honor last year and had no problem whatsoever. Absolutely.”
There is no remorse here. No repentance from McSorley for what occurred a year ago when McSorley’s Boston Bruins met Donald Brashear’s Vancouver Canucks. McSorley has said he was trying to lure fellow tough guy Brashear into another fight–Brashear had beaten him in an earlier bout, and later he’d skated by the Boston bench challenging the Bruins. McSorley believed someone needed to answer. McSorley has always been that guy. McSorley knows the code.
So as he skated out for the game’s last 20 seconds, McSorley claims he tried to get Brashear’s attention by tapping him on the shoulder pads the way players have done hundreds of times before. Only this time, he claims his stick glanced off Brashear’s shoulder pads and accidentally cracked the side of Brashear’s head, knocking him unconscious.
McSorley was suspended for the final 23 games of the season, which hockey types figured would end his career. But when he indicated he wanted to play again, the NHL lengthened his suspension to a year, easily the longest in league history. The suspension ends Wednesday, so he will be eligible to sign with any NHL team because he is a free agent.
In October, McSorley was convicted of assault with a weapon in a Vancouver court and given 18 months probation. The case will not be retried here. His defenders claim he was doing what guys have been paid to do for decades and was made a scapegoat by some ambitious reformer-types in British Columbia. His detractors say he brained a guy with his stick, it’s right there on video, and he represents all that is wrong with hockey.
“I’ve done a job that a lot of people certainly didn’t want to do–still do not want to do,” McSorley said. “A lot of people find it’s very tough and sometimes thankless. You’re put in a position on the cutting edge. You’re sent out to provoke fights. Sometimes you’re going to be provoked. You’re going to stand up for the hockey team.”
Some people will read those words and think “caveman.” Others will understand that he is what he is and always will be and consider him the ultimate team player, one willing to pay the price by using his face for collateral.
McSorley said people who don’t know him believe he has goat horns and comes with a pitchfork. When the Griffins played in Kansas City, Mo., last weekend, a banner in the stands read “Oglethorpe McSorley,” recalling Ogie Oglethorpe, the feared character from “Slap Shot” who was thought to be in jail before skating out for the film’s championship game.
McSorley laughs at the comparison. That’s the way he is, so opposite of his reputation, what with a friendly smile, engaging personality and loquacious manner.
This cannot be the man who is third in NHL history with 3,381 penalty minutes, can it? Indeed, McSorley, at 6 feet 1 inch and 235 pounds, remains the perfect example of hockey’s historic irony that the toughest guys on the ice are the nicest guys off it.
And McSorley intends to get back to the NHL. That’s why he is in Grand Rapids, working out the kinks in a game that hasn’t seen legitimate competition in a year. “You can’t think you’re going to step out for a year and step right back in,” McSorley said.
So this is about proving something to NHL teams after all? “No,” McSorley said. “They know who I am. There’s no secret out there. Do I need to go out there and hit guys in fights so they can see I can still do that? No. They know I’m capable of that.”
McSorley believes there is a pool of six to eight teams that would consider signing him. He wouldn’t name names, but he’s talking about Stanley Cup contenders who could benefit from adding a big, tough defenseman who won two titles with Edmonton in the late 1980s.
Start with the Ottawa Senators, who use Grand Rapids as their minor-league affiliate and are having depth problems on defense. It seems more likely that McSorley would be signed by a team in the Eastern Conference because Vancouver has a chance to make noise in the Western Conference and McSorley’s probation prohibits him from playing in a game against Brashear for 18 months.
And if teams can get past all that, there is the public relations issue. “I think for the most part, teams, GMs, coaches, owners, with what they’ve invested–time, money–the focus would be on winning,” McSorley said.
But of course that is not always the focus, not in an age when we seem eager to rush to judgment. And yet McSorley claims the public has treated him well.
“I’ve had people say they feel sorry for me,” he said. “No one should feel sorry for me, absolutely not. I’m absolutely comfortable with what my intent was that day and I’m comfortable with who I am now and the direction I’m going. I’m glad Donald Brashear’s healthy. Everything’s fine.”
