Casual hockey fans learn much from Brett Harvey's engrossing documentary Ice Guardians. Did you know many National Hockey League fights are staged between teams or pre-arranged between combatants? Me, neither!
One retired player mentions during a talking-meathead moment in the film that he convinced his regularly scheduled opponent to postpone their first-period fight to the second because his shift was nearly over. It's reminiscent of the Looney Tunes cartoon in which Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog punch into a time clock and exchange pleasantries before one spends his shift harassing sheep the other is protecting.
Point of order: Hockey's meatheads don't like being called meatheads, and they really take offense at goon. What Harvey's subjects prefer is enforcer, and every great NHL team has had at least one. Wayne Gretzky did not come to Los Angeles from Edmonton alone in 1989, but with his “bodyguard.” Ice Guardians posits that “The Great One” would not have been “The Great One” without Marty McSorley.
The birth of the goon is tracked to the 1970s, when the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, who was tired of getting beat and beat up by the brutish Boston Bruins, decided if he couldn't get the best players, then he'd get the biggest. Thus, the “Broad Street Bullies” were born.
Informational nuggets such as these permeate Ice Guardians, although you might at first question, as I did during the first 20 minutes, whether there will be enough of them to sustain the 1 hour, 44 minute running time. Compounding that initial sense is the one-note nature of Vancouver-based Harvey's previous documentaries: The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, which is about the massive economic impact of British Columbia's illegal marijuana industry, and The Culture High, which explores pot prohibition.
Fortunately, Harvey knows his shit—and not just the shit scored from friendly neighborhood dealers. The Union won the National Film Board award for Best Canadian Documentary of 2007. The Culture High, which came out seven years later, was submitted for Oscar consideration.
Harvey explores his latest subject as if it's an anthropological project, making Ice Guardians interesting even to audience members who have never stepped onto the ice, let alone sat in one of the seats ringing it.
He humanizes fellows long-portrayed as animals, including Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, Dave Semenko, Luke Gazdic, Clark Gillies, Colton Orr, Rick Tocchet, Rob “Rayzor” Ray and, the best interviewee of the bunch, Scott “The Sheriff” Parker. I'll expose my fan bias and award runner-up best interviewee honors to George Parros, whom the Kings made only the seventh NHL draftee out of Princeton and, along with his ripping mustache, later joined Anaheim, led the Ducks with 18 fighting majors in the 2006-07 regular season and went on to hoist the Stanley Cup with his teammates.
Ice Guardians also includes insights from “the protected,” most notably Brett Hull, the NHL Hall of Famer who enjoyed a 20-year career as a sniper that, he concedes, would have been much shorter had a brute not had his back.
Strongly protecting scorers and teammates often leads to gloves being tossed off for bare-knuckle fights, but the film argues this actually makes the game safer.
One vehement supporter of preserving fights in hockey is actor Jay Baruchel, who often plays nebbish characters but who co-wrote Goon, the 2011 comedy starring Seann William Scott that is based on Doug Smith's career as a minor-league enforcer.
Baruchel and other close observers of the game, as well as the physicians, psychologists and data collectors featured in the film, contend it is fast skaters who make hockey less safe because they are on the giving and receiving ends of the most violent hits. Remember the Ducks' speedy winger Paul Kariya, who suffered four concussions, post-concussion syndrome and short-term memory loss?
Yet following the 2004–05 NHL lockout, owners put a premium on speed and scoring. Fights and major penalties for fighting rapidly declined, as did roster spots for enforcers. It upsets Baruchel to no end that these players are now dinosaurs.
Candidly as all hell, Parros says at one point that he and his ripping mustache did not leave hockey; hockey left him. The Montreal Canadiens did not offer him another contract at the end of the 2014 season, and he subsequently retired because he did not want to start over in the minors.
While Ice Guardians may seem perfect for ESPN's excellent 30 for 30 sports-documentary roster, it may be a better fit for the History Channel.
Ice Guardians was directed by Brett Harvey; written by Harvey and Scott Dodds; and stars Dave Schultz, Clark Gillies and Dave Semenko. Opens Friday at AMC Orange 30 at the Outlets.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.