Advertisement

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

Share

What: “Drop the Gloves!

The NHL Fighting Page” website.

Address:

ernie.bgsu.edu/~rchadwi/fighters/fighters.html

Not Gary Bettman’s favorite website, suffice it to say.

Goons, thugs, enforcers and all those broken-nosed scarfaces who administer “rink justice” are celebrated here, with their fistic achievements captured in still photographs, full-color video clips and teeth-rattling audio.

A snippet of hockey philosophy from Conn Smythe welcomes you to the penalty box:

“If you can’t beat ‘em in an alley, you can’t beat ‘em on the ice.”

An unabashed Bob Probert/Detroit Red Wing fan named Randy Chadwick is credited with creating and maintaining the site. In a never-ending search to provide fellow blood-lusters with the newest and finest in photographic ice mayhem, Chadwick includes a mailing address: Bowling Green University, Dept. of Psychology.

Chadwick names his own “heavyweight champion” of ice brawling--Probert, of course--and writes “that won’t change until someone else impresses me for over 10 years as Probie has done.”

Advertisement

Dedicated to “the politically incorrect but fan-favorite hockey fighters,” “Drop The Gloves!” wears its obsessiveness on its sleeve. Brawling techniques are critiqued, and personal thanks are extended to anyone pictured giving “Ulf Samuelson a taste of rink justice.”

Bettman, who helped institute the NHL’s brawl-deterring instigator rule, is another villain here. An NHL devoid of instigators? At “Drop the Gloves!” those are fighting words.

Advertisement