KNOW YOUR ROLE
“My role is to protect the skilled players and make sure no opposing players take a run at them to hurt them. When you go up four or five goals in
a game in the third period, you know someone is going to take a run at
one of your guys. I know because when my team gets down, it’s my
job to scrap with someone or lay a
big hit on somebody to spark the team a little bit.”
CHECK THE SCHEDULE
“There are a couple guys in the league I fight almost every game. If we’re playing Buffalo, I’m against Andrew Peters almost every time we face off.
I know I’m probably going to fight him in the first 15 minutes of the game. Philadelphia had Donald Brashear last year and the New York Rangers have Colton Orr. Those guys like to fight,
so I’m going to be ready.”
GET YOUR REST
“A five-minute fighting penalty makes for a good rest. Sometimes you
fight for two minutes straight. When I get to the penalty box, I can barely hold my shoulders up. It takes a good three minutes to regroup. Before you know it, you’re ready to come out of the penalty box again.”
FIGHT BY THE RULES
“You’re not going to bite a guy or any-thing like that. But pretty much anything else goes. When a guy gets knocked down to his knees, there’s
no sense to keep going. That’s kind
of when I stop. I usually don’t do anything to a guy that I wouldn’t want done to me. I don’t mind getting hit. I kind of like it. It wakes me up. But it’s not the easiest job. It might be the hardest job in sports. Sometimes
it’s not fun going out there at the
end of a long road trip. You’re tired and you’ve got to fight a guy who is
6-foot-6, 250 pounds.”
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