Payback.
There was just one problem, Stuart recalled of the Dec. 28, 2007, play at Carolina's RBC Center. The puck skittered into the Carolina zone and Commodore, having jumped into the play to unload on Axelsson, was in full retreat to fill his vacated space. So the man whose face Stuart wanted to pound was looking in the wrong direction.
Instead of jumping Commodore from behind and delivering Wild West justice, Stuart wheeled in front of him so they were face to face, and demanded he stand up for his actions. Commodore agreed, they shed their gloves and fought.
"You don't want to just grab a guy from behind," Stuart said. "I made sure I got his attention before I dropped the gloves."
Stuart's action is just another layer of the complex onion that is the NHL fight game. In contrast to other sports, where umpires and referees rush in at the first sign of flare-ups, NHL linesmen stand on the perimeter and let 'em swing, jumping in only when the fighters fall to the ice or when a scrap has clearly ended. Although casual observers view fighting as the league's knuckle-dragging dark side, the scrappers that adhere to The Code give the sport's most brutal facet a touch of jarring and contradictory refinement.
"This goes back generations," said Bruins vice president Cam Neely, someone who didn't mind an occasional throwdown. "That was just the way it was done and the way it should be done. It's one of those things that when you talk about unwritten rules, that's one of them. It's the show of respect for each other."
The civility of fighting traces its DNA to hockey's roots: hardscrabble Canadian farm boys who would try everything to beat - and beat up - their friends and brothers, but do so with a sense of honor. As fighting has evolved amid its detractors' insistence that it remains hockey's Neanderthal corner, The Code has stood true to offer its puffy-knuckled brawlers some structure: Fight for yourself. Fight for your teammates. Fight to spark emotion.
Above all, fight the right people in the right way.
