If you want to know why hockey has a hard time penetrating US markets, the CBC’s report of an organized Goon Show may lend a clue:

A group of past and present pro hockey players plan to battle it out on the ice at an event in Prince George in August, but without the stick and pucks.

The players, all better known for their fighting than their goal-scoring, will square off in series of one-minute fights – for cash.

Events like Prince George’s upcoming Goon’s Show further alienate potential fans from the game itself. It’s not that Americans dislike hockey’s violence—in fact, it may be one of the few aspects of the game which most of them understand. However, the spectacle of the hockey fight tends to trivialize the rest of the game and prevent the sport from becoming anything more than a novelty to our southern consumers.

The Goon Show helps point out one of the NHL’s worst marketing asumptions: fighting brings interest to the game. What better way to kill a potential viewer than to have him primarily exposed to the violence of the game? Sure it’s a tittilating aspect of the game, but it’s also gets tiresome very quickly and leaves the viewer—who has probably now determined hockey to be a game about goons on skates—hungry for something of more substance.

There is a time and place for fighting in hockey. But when it is presented out of context—or worse, generated artificially as in the Prince George case—it justifiably turns the sport into a late night ESPN 2 oddity. Fighting does bring interest to the game, unfortunatly, it tends to be of the Jerry Springer variety of interest.