Tanner Glass and Ben Eager had a few words to say yesterday about the role of tough guys, fighting, and Derek Boogaard.
From Matthew Sekeres at the Globe & Mail, these words from Glass:
“It’s tough just to know each night that you are going to be tangling with those customers. I know he wasn’t scared of guys like that, or intimidated, but with the size of people he is fighting, any punch can be a pretty serious punch. It’s a tough job and he did better than most.
“You have to be a different kind of person to do that. It takes a type of mental toughness that every guy in the league doesn’t have. It takes a little bit of a craziness. I don’t want to say reckless, because you know what you’re doing, but it’s something.
And from Ben Eager:
“I don’t really see the point of fighting for no reason, at the start of a game. I don’t really do that. If someone comes up to you in the face-off circle and says ‘Let’s fight,’ I don’t really see the point of it. There’s no point in taking a punch in the head for no reason.
“I tend to fight when a buddy or a teammate gets taken advantage of, and it gets you fired up, and you think something has to be done. Yeah, I’ll step in there. But these pointless fights off faceoffs, I don’t get involved in them.”
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Speaking of Eager—and on a less serious note—I was recently reminded of something I wrote a couple years ago when he was successfully causing my Canucks havoc while playing for Chicago:
Every time I see him, he strangely reminds me of this sketch from a very old Saturday Night Live… Phil Hartman as Frankenstein. The sounds Frankenstein makes, I imagine that’s exactly how Eager sounds when he talks on the ice. In fact, I’m sure of it. Just oddly placed grunts while he crashes into walls.
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