McSorley Attack Rekindles All Kinds of Ugly Memories

There was at least one attack in sports history that was more brutal than Marty McSorley’s on Donald Brashear Monday night at Vancouver. In 1965 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, Giant pitcher Juan Marichal assaulted John Roseboro with a baseball bat.

Upset because he believed Roseboro was purposely zipping the ball close to his ear in returning it to pitcher Sandy Koufax, Marichal stepped out of the batter’s box and, like a man driving a spike into a railroad, slammed the Dodger catcher over the head.

Marichal connected two more times before the bat was wrestled from him, leaving Roseboro bleeding from a two-inch gash on his head.

“I thought it had knocked Roseboro’s eye out,” Walter Alston said. “There was nothing but blood where his left eye should have been.”

“He’s a damn nut,” Dodger coach Danny Ozark said of Marichal.

The force of National League law came down on Marichal like a leaf from a tall tree. Warren Giles, the then-NL president, was so gutless that he fined Marichal $1,750 and suspended him for eight days, which cost him two starts.

You might also recall Laker forward Kermit Washington’s devastating punch of Houston Rocket forward Rudy Tomjanovich during a game in 1977.

The blow was more destructive than the ones to either Brashear or Roseboro. Tomjanovich said afterward that he felt as if the scoreboard suspended from the Forum ceiling had fallen on him. It took three operations to remake his face. He sat out the rest of the season.

But, unlike McSorley and Marichal, Washington’s intent was not to injure. I’ve always believed his story that he heard Tomjanovich, who was acting as a peacemaker during a fight between the two teams, approaching rapidly from behind, wheeled and swung in self defense.

Still, Larry O’Brien, the-then NBA commissioner, acted forcefully, and appropriately, fining Washington $10,000 and suspending him for 60 games. Eighteen days later, the Lakers traded him.

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Now it’s time to see whether NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman will do the right thing.

It seems as if his league can’t win for losing.

Only two weeks ago, raves rang out for the NHL All-Star game, not because of the typically defenseless and meaningless game itself but because of the presentation of the sport by the league’s new network.

Included was a poignant display of the passing of the torch from former stars Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Gordie Howe to new stars Jaromir Jagr, Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya and Pavel Bure.

Today, the sports world is not discussing Jagr, Lindros, Kariya and Bure. Or Teemu Selanne, Peter Forsberg, Mike Modano and Steve Yzerman.

It is discussing Boston’s McSorley, an artless thug who, even in his bygone best years, was considered nothing more than Gretzky’s bodyguard.

Not that Vancouver’s Brashear is a saint. As has often been pointed out, it’s appropriate that “brash” is part of his name.

If it could be determined that he purposely ran into Bruin goalie Byron Dafoe near the end of the first period, which presumably was the reason McSorley believed he had to retaliate, combined perhaps with the fact that Brashear beat the tar out of McSorley during a fight earlier in the first period, Brashear deserves punishment.

But no one, no matter how much a Canucklehead, deserves a blow to the temple like he received from the stick-wielding McSorley in the closing seconds of the Canucks’ 5-2 victory over the Bruins in Vancouver.

Vancouver police have assigned three officers to the case, although Canuck General Manager Brian Burke believes they should stay out of it.

“Leave this stuff on the ice; leave it to the National Hockey League,” Burke told Vancouver radio station CKNW. “We don’t need the Vancouver police department or the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] involved in this.”

I disagree. All anyone has to do is look at the film to see that McSorley should be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. It is not exaggerating to suggest that Brashear could have been killed.

But even if Burke’s thinking prevails, Bettman has to send a message that such behavior will not be tolerated. The NHL, which has suspended McSorley indefinitely, should definitely suspend him for life.

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Officials from the players’ association no doubt will rush to McSorley’s defense because it is their responsibility to represent him. But a victory for them will not be a victory for the players.

The union also has a responsibility to every other NHL player. None can feel safe if acts like McSorley’s aren’t punished to the full extent of the league’s power. This was not, as some might suggest, just another hockey fight. This was a maiming.

McSorley is a nice enough guy off the ice. I’m sure he was, as he said Tuesday, immediately remorseful. I’m almost as sure he would never again be the instigator in such a brutal attack, although I would have said before Monday night that he wouldn’t have been so gutless as to sneak up on a player and blindside him with a stick.

It was the act of a damn nut. If his McSorry self is never on the ice again, it will be too soon.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com