• . Richard Martin lay convulsed on the ice, his right arm twitching against his side. Hockey players from both teams gathered around the unconscious Buffalo Sabers forward as a doctor rushed across the ice and retrieved Martin’s tongue to prevent him from swallowing it.
Martin was standing near the New York Rangers net when Dave Parrish turned him over. With no chance of breaking the fall, Martin hit his head on the ice. He was not wearing a helmet.
The helmet, which constitutes mandatory safety equipment in the three junior leagues in Canada and in Europe, remains optional equipment in the North American professional leagues. Two weeks ago, in the span of four days, Martin and two other National Hockey League players suffered serious concussions from accidents, not malicious violence.
Jerry Butler of the Toronto Maple Leafs was also playing bareheaded when he threw a shot at Phil Myre of the St. Louis Blues. Butler tripped over the goalie’s leg and hit the side of his head on the ice.
Wayne Merrick was wearing a helmet when he impaled himself on his stick during a New York Islanders game and hit his head on the ice, causing convulsions and gnashing of teeth that cut his tongue .
Butler and Merrick skate again while Martin remains sidelined with headaches that last all day. A brain scan and electroencephalogram revealed no brain damage, but Martin said he would wear a helmet for the rest of his hockey career. And Jocelyn Guèvremont and Gil Perreault, his teammates, suddenly put on helmets so that now only four Sabers play bareheaded.
Why does the NHL allow its players to compete without helmets? “The league’s position has been and continues to be that helmet use depends on the individual,” said John Ziegler, president of the NHL. “They are now compulsory for amateurs and players wear them from the moment they start playing up to junior level. So, during the process of evolution, more and more people will use them.
The Canadian Amateur Hockey Association made helmets mandatory in all amateur games beginning with the 1970-71 season. Since then, many players have graduated from the junior ranks and have chosen to keep their helmets, but until then, helmet use was sporadic in the NHL. As early as the early 1940s, however, Johnny Crawford of the Boston Bruins wore a helmet…to hide his baldness, some say.
Yet many of this season’s rookies tossed aside the helmets they had worn throughout their 10-year amateur careers. Gamers say the headsets can be hot and heavy and impair their peripheral vision. There are other, less practical reasons. “It’s probably vanity as well,” Rangers forward Steve Vickers said. “You want people to see what you look like.”
Hockey players also view their helmets as a sort of superstition, and sometimes a player in bad shape will try to play bareheaded to change their luck. The most famous example of this practice is Guy Lafleur, Montreal’s talented right winger, who ditched his helmet after three relatively mediocre seasons and went on to score 53 goals the following season.
Billy Harris, an otherwise conservative Islanders player, took off his helmet for a brief period during the 1974–75 season, when he was in the midst of a 22-game scoreless stretch. The crisis continued, but eventually an elephant hair bracelet worn under his glove brought him luck.
Helmets are popular among the Islanders: 13 of 19 skaters wear them. But on the Rangers, only nine out of 20 players wear helmets, and Dave Maloney and Don Awrey only recently put them on. Maloney began wearing a helmet after suffering a mild concussion in a collision with Mike Marson of the Washington Capitals. Awrey followed suit, using a helmet for the first time in his 15-year professional career.
“It’s hard to put it on when you’ve never worn one,” Awrey said, “It’s really uncomfortable and you sweat a lot. But I got hit – I don’t remember what game – and a defender carried me to the boards and I ended up with a headache. I touched it a week and a half later and it was still sore.
“I thought if I could have worn a helmet this would never have happened. But it’s like closing the gate after the horse leaves and putting it back in place afterwards. you’re hurt.
As a junior player, Martin wore a helmet, but then took it off seven years ago when he joined the Sabres. “I guess it’s mostly because no one else was wearing them,” he said. “A lot of us have played with it in training, but you keep putting it off. I hope everyone starts wearing them. The game is very fast and quite violent. I didn’t expect something like this to happen to me.
“I saw the Boston-Toronto game on TV the other night,” Martin continued, “and Rick Middleton rushed on a breakaway. Mike Palmateer (the goalkeeper) rushed and Middleton passed him. His header missed the post by a few centimeters. I thought if he hit his head on the post, they. it would have been necessary to pick it up in pieces. I tell you, I shuddered.
