Eavesdropping on a conversation among the big brains of ice hockey is a little like a day trip to prehistoric times to hang with the troglodytes.

In our latest visit, we find the trogs in a bit of an uproar. One of their own has suggested they might want to consider banning fighting from the game.

This is different from an outsider or one of the time travelers in your party making the same suggestion. In that case, the trogs merely grunt and go back to their recreational eye gouging.

In this case, the trogs seemed taken aback that the suggestion came from one of their own, NHL executive vice president and director of hockey operations Colin Campbell.

"Campbell is no namby-pamby," Canadian Press noted approvingly. "He used to drop the gloves in his days as an NHL player."

Without that qualification, Campbell's suggestion would have carried no weight. Only Nixon could go to China. Only a caveman can talk about banning fighting.

It must be something in the air in those caves. Even if they hire a New York lawyer to lead them, he will soon enough be a trog himself, gnawing on bones and saying things like this:

"Fighting has always gotten to its own level as the game dictates it. In fact, fighting's down almost 40 percent compared to two years ago, and some people have complained about that. But the bigger issue is if the players have gotten bigger and stronger, are there injuries we need to be anticipating that come from fighting; and, if so, what do we need to do about it?"

Thank you, Gary Bettman. Now, that's leadership. From here, blithering is two levels up.

Fighting finds its own level? What does that mean? Is he confusing it with water?

Fighting would find its own level in every sport - and on the streets, too - if we let it. Of the major sports, hockey is the only one that permits it, which may or may not be related to the fact that in many places hockey is no longer a major sport.

Players argue that without fighting as a deterrent, there would be more cheap shots. As if you could not make exactly the same argument in football or basketball.

Somehow, college hockey and Olympic hockey get along without it.

Fighting appeals to a certain slice of the sporting audience, but it's worth noting that boxing has been reduced to a fringe sport. The exorbitant pay-per-view charges suggest it is akin to pornography: The audience may be limited, but it is willing to pay up for its guilty pleasure.

The hypocrisy of the media can't be ignored here. When NBA players fight, we warn of thugs destroying the game. When NHL players do exactly the same thing, we let trogs like Don Cherry tell us it's "part of the game."

You have to nearly kill someone to be called a thug in hockey. So Todd Bertuzzi qualifies because he nearly killed Steve Moore, but the rest of the goons are "enforcers," not thugs.

The end of Moore's NHL career just as it was beginning was not enough to get any of the trogs to make the radical suggestion Campbell made last week. At the time, the trogs said what Bertuzzi did "was not part of hockey."

But when the Flyers' Todd Fedoruk was carried off the ice on a stretcher after a fight with the Rangers' Colton Orr, the entire orchestrated affair was so clearly a part of hockey only a caveman - or a New York lawyer - could miss the message.

"This year, we've had two players carried out on stretchers because of fair, consenting fights that had taken place," Campbell told Canadian Press. "It scares you."

In short, the impetus now is the increasing size and strength of hockey players and their potential to do more serious damage than the smaller players of the past.

Evidently, nobody noticed that Bertuzzi was 6-foot-3, 245 pounds when he beat down Moore three years ago.

At least the players are honest about it. Many of them worry that banning fighting would hurt ticket sales. The suits won't say that because it's unseemly, but it's the only explanation for the rhetorical gymnastics they use to justify it.

Fighting has a place in the middle of a hockey game in the same way ballroom dancing has a place in the middle of a baseball game. The trogs hide behind "hockey tradition" because they think it makes them money.

What they are unwilling to do is turn that corner and rely entirely on the speed and beauty of their sport. As Bettman noted, when the post-lockout game turned faster and left less of a role for goons, some fans complained. They wanted their blood back.

And the trogs retreated in fear, only too eager to give it to them.

All but one, anyway. I suggest he sleep with his back to the cave wall.

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

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