Holy Crap, It Just Won't End

Alright, before I start my first real entry I have to admit, after reading the entries by Egg and Psy, I felt a little ashamed by the lack of quality and quantity in my intro, so hopefully I can provide some more thoughtful or, at the very least, lengthy entries in the future. As I told Egg earlier, this is my first time blogging and thus I am not quite used to writing out my thoughts on any given issue in any form longer than a paragraph or two. Having said that however, I will try my best to find items that will hopefully give me enough of an opinion to write more than just a paragraph. Fortunately for me (and possibly unfortunately for anyone who decides to read this), I've already found such an issue. This is probably a slightly bigger deal to me as an Avs fan than it is to most other fans, though it still nonetheless changed the lives of two NHL players, ending one hockey career and dramatically altering another for the worse. I am, of course, talking about the Bertuzzi-Moore incident, which happened more than three years ago, yet still continues to make TSN news today.

Before I start ranting about the fact that we are still hearing about this (note: just a warning, this will probably be very long), I want to share my opinion on the incident right after it occurred, and my opinion now. When I first heard about the incident on TV, I reacted, as I'm sure most fans did, in anger and shock. I couldn't fathom what was going through Bertuzzi's mind as he punched Moore on the back of the head, and as it was slowly played out in the news I became entrenched in the same opinions that the media repeated day after day: The Vancouver Canucks were headhunting after Moore's elbow on Naslund, and Bert happened to have the best shot at him and took it. Now whether Bert had it all planned out or he just coincidentally happened to be within arm's range of Moore when he wasn't looking, I didn't know, but I was convinced that Bert had acted with clear intention to end Moore's career. Even after the lockout year and Bert was reinstated, I was still upset, and felt that the suspension was nowhere near long enough, as it was only a few regular season games and the playoffs, and everything after that was suffered by all, and not just Bert himself.

A while after that though, and having heard some more reasonable opinions from fellow hockey fans, I began to see that Bert really did suffer enough. He had lost much more than just a few games. His reputation was shattered, he was faced with media and fan criticism for the rest of his career, and he was criminally charged, resulting in his serving a year on probation. As if this wasn't enough, word of a multi-million dollar civil suit followed against Bertuzzi, Brad May, and Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment. I realized that Bert had suffered enough and, as a hockey fan, accepted that he should be welcomed back into the league to continue his career and to once again be judged by his playing abilities, and not the mistakes he had made in the past. I had in a sense forgiven him, even though he had done me no personal wrong.

Flash forward to the present, and this is where the rant comes in. I had all but forgotten about this incident, and my only thoughts of Bertuzzi were that he was being overpaid in his new contract with the Ducks. Then I noticed the article I mentioned earlier, and all these memories came back to me (note: writing the blog certainly helped, heh). It looks like the civil suit is carrying on, and Bert will once again have his mistake brought to the forefront of his attention, but hopefully, for his sake, this won't become a full-blown media circus. Even if it doesn't, I still feel that this is unnecessarily kicking at a man again who, even though he isn't down, isn't quite fully back up yet either. Does Steve Moore deserve some sort of retribution for what's been done to him? Absolutely, but that should have been settled out of court years ago. Here is a man who, with all due respect, was a grinder in the NHL without much potential to be a good, let alone great player(12 points in 69 games over three seasons at 25 years of age), and he's not only demanding nearly 20 million dollars, but also refusing to accept any personal apologies from Bertuzzi, despite many attempts by Bert to do so.

Even though I am vilifying the victim a bit here, it is very hard for me to understand how such a large amount of money is justified by Moore as anything but a cash cow after an unfortunate incident. Even if I was a complete Moore sympathizer, I couldn't justify some of the sums of money being demanded in the suit, such as $1.5 million dollars being owed to the Moore's parents because they were watching the events on TV and thus suffered "mental distress." Again, I know I am vilifying the victim, and many will disagree with me, but this just seems wrong, and they're prolonging the punishment of a man that, I feel, has already received his due, and prolonging the media attention that they have, I feel, already received enough of.