Ready to rumble on the wild ice

The old gag about going to watch a fight and seeing an ice hockey game break out has never been more resonant. On 21 February, the Boston Bruins defenseman, Marty McSorley, clubbed a Canadian, Donald Brashear of the Vancouver Canucks, round the head. Perhaps McSorley took too literally his coach's instructions to give the opposition some stick. He has certainly paid a heavy price for his aggression. The National Hockey League has banned him for 23 games, and Vancouver police have charged him with assault with a dangerous weapon. If convicted, he faces 18 months in jail.

There is nothing new about this. Allan Loney was charged with murder after killing Alcide Laurin by belting him with his stick during an amateur game in Ontario. That was in 1905. More recently, in 1988, Dino Ciccarelli of Minnesota was jailed for a day after hitting Toronto's Luke Richardson over the head. It is a sport in which emotions have always run high.

All the same, you would think that, with the McSorley trial pending, NHL players would be trying to avoid trouble. But you would be wrong. At Madison Square Garden last Wednesday evening I watched three serious brawls develop during a 4-4 draw between the New York Raiders and Tampa Bay Lightning. If a Premiership football match were played in the same spirit, David Elleray would have to change his red card at half-time for one a little less dog-eared.

I was at the Raiders game by default, having arrived in New York the day before and hot-footed it straight to the Garden to get a ticket for that night's basketball game between the New York Knicks and Houston. But, as devotees of the sitcom Friends will know, Knicks tickets are a hot commodity in New York. Indeed, while idly perusing (as opposed to eagerly studying) the Women Seeking Men lonely hearts column of a Manhattan listings magazine, I found "a pretty brunette, mid-30s, non-smoker, seeking emotionally and financially secure guy with Knicks tickets". The trouble is that buying Knicks tickets can make a guy rather less financially secure. When I got to Madison Square Garden there were only two seats left, priced at $253 (£158) and $188 (£117). And these were by no means the best seats - a single over-the-counter Knicks ticket can set you back $1,500 (£937). It's enough to make an afternoon at Stamford Bridge look like a bargain.

Rangers seats are cheaper, rising to a mere $700 (£437). I bought a $68 (£37) ticket and, not knowing much about ice hockey, invited the guy in the next seat, who introduced himself as Anthony Galioto of New Jersey, to explain the proceedings to me. He very obligingly did so, sotto voce, although he got over-excited once or twice and screamed "SHOOT THE PUCK!" into my left ear. Anthony has been watching the Raiders for 30 years and considers hockey (in America the "ice" is redundant, it is "field" hockey that needs the descriptive noun) to be the supreme sport. "To do what they do, on a foreign substance, is amazing," he said. And as the game unfolded I had to agree with him.

It was, by all accounts, a pretty lacklustre encounter, yet I found it enthralling. This was an almost exact reversal of a situation in 1982, when I took an American girlfriend to a cricket match. We had met while backpacking round Europe, had fallen madly in love, and as soon as we got to England I took her to see Lancashire v Warwickshire - a romantic gesture which, with hindsight, might explain why the relationship did not survive the summer. Frustratingly, she did not seem to grasp the significance of what she was seeing, for it was an extraordinary day's cricket, Warwickshire's Alvin Kallicharran and Geoff Humpage both scoring double centuries in a record fifth-wicket stand.

Last week, by stark contrast, my new friend Anthony kept telling me that I was watching a pretty feeble Rangers performance, with which they more or less blew their chances of reaching the play-offs. Nevertheless, I loved every second and have become a committed Rangers fan - at any rate as committed as you can be from 3,000 miles. My favourite player is Brian Leetch, the Richard Gough of the Rangers defence, yet more of a Danny Cadamarteri coming forward. He scored a cracking last-period goal to make it 4-4, belting the puck past the Tampa Bay goalie - whose name, I kid you not, is Rich Parent.

Despite Leetch's late equaliser, Rangers' fans trailed away disconsolately. All except one, for whom the whole experience had been exhilarating. Not least because the bars stayed open throughout, yet everyone remained good-natured and not a single obscenity was shouted. As daft as it sounds considering the shenanigans on the playing surface, NHL hockey can teach Premiership football a thing or two.