Take the fight out of their game

You could show the video to 100 reasonable people and receive the same short review: It was disgusting.

Only Todd Bertuzzi knows if he truly wanted his payback attempt to go so far Monday night. The Vancouver Canucks forward punched Colorado's Steve Moore in the face when Moore wasn't looking. Moore, with the 245-pound Bertuzzi on his back, had his head shoved into the ice. He lay there unconscious, with a broken neck, as Bertuzzi continued to punch him.

Disgusting. The video has been shown dozens of times since Monday, and it's still sickening even when you know what's coming.

Fortunately, the NHL sided with reason yesterday morning. Bertuzzi was suspended for the rest of the regular season and the playoffs. He's going to lose more than $500,000 in salary and he'll have to apply for reinstatement in 2004-05.

Now that Bertuzzi has the suspension he deserves and his team has been fined, it's supposed to be safe to go back on the ice. But it's not. We're just at the beginning of this story, and it's much bigger than Bertuzzi's assault of Moore. Once again, it's time for Gary Bettman and Colin Campbell to look at the clear evidence and come up with a reasonable decision.

Why not ban fighting?

Some of the sport's Original Six purists will accuse the league of going soft, but who cares? As it stands, the NHL is on the brink of irrelevancy and the league has foolishly bought into the cliche that its players "can police themselves." Nonsense. If aggrieved players were skilled at appropriately policing themselves, the real police would not be considering -- for the second time in four years -- assault charges for something that happened on the ice. Anyway, anyone who has ever been wronged should understand how vigilante justice works: You often wind up delivering a punishment that far exceeds the original crime.

For Bertuzzi, that "crime" was Moore's shoulder-check to teammate Markus Naslund's head Feb. 16. Moore wasn't penalized for the February hit, but you could make a case that he should have been. That hit led to a Naslund concussion. That hit also went into the Payback Register, an unofficial encyclopedia of grievances that exists in Vancouver, Denver, Boston, and every other city in the league.

Bertuzzi obviously is not a fair cop, judge, or jury. That was apparent Monday when he chose to exact his revenge in a game his team was trailing, 9-2. While most athletes don't want to do anything stupid in a close game, how pathetic is it to do something cheap when everyone in the building is thinking about going home?

Campbell, the league's vice president, was critical of Bertuzzi yesterday. He could have gone even further. He barely grazed the issue of a bounty on Moore when he spoke of Vancouver's $250,000 fine. "While we are satisfied that the Vancouver organization did nothing to affirmatively encourage Mr. Bertuzzi's actions, and that it in no way condones what transpired, it must nonetheless accept some responsibility for what took place."

Come on, Colin. Vancouver did nothing to encourage Bertuzzi's actions? Of course the organization did. And so did the NHL.

If the league sends in a decent investigator or even an investigative reporter, it will likely find there was a plan to take Moore out. I'd make Bertuzzi share all the details about that before I ever let him draw another paycheck. Did head coach Marc Crawford outright tell the team that Moore should be targeted? Was Bertuzzi assigned to do the damage, or was it agreed that any player should take the opportunity to give him a hard lick that would somehow balance out the hit on Naslund?

Frankly, a Bertuzzi report from the inside would be much more helpful and believable than his tearful, scripted, half apology Wednesday night. His words would be the beginning of a campaign to reclaim a game that is on shaky demographic ground.

With its zones and traps, the NHL is boring much of its hardcore fan base. Last year, I heard from several hockey lovers who said they had no interest in the Stanley Cup finals. Now combine the league's uninspiring play with its inability to market itself, and it seems to be a lifetime away from the mainstream fan.

On top of all that, this is a league that endorses fighting. As indefensible as Bertuzzi's actions are, look at the culture that he is a part of. If he and Moore had been in a face-to-face fight, that would have been OK and this story wouldn't be on CNN. If he and Moore had traded punches and he had broken Moore's jaw -- isn't that assault as well? -- that would have been all right with the league and British Columbia's Finest.

There is no question Bertuzzi crossed the line. But look at that line. It's blurry, conditional, and forever shifting. We know it's not in the spirit of the game to sucker punch an opponent. What about the other stuff? Eventually, the participants in a fight are going to create their own rules. Eventually, the span between Dale Hunter, Marty McSorley, and Todd Bertuzzi incidents will become shorter and shorter.

It's time to take fighting out of the NHL. A lot of fans like Olympic hockey, and fighting is not tolerated there. The same should be true of the best professional league in the world.

I refuse to believe that any beautiful game -- outside of boxing -- needs fighting to be good. There needs to be a zero-tolerance stance on fighting to save the game, attract new fans, and protect players like Steve Moore.

It's the reasonable thing to do.

Michael Holley is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is holley@globe.com.