At 37 years of age and after 13 years in the National Hockey League, you'd have thought Peter Stastny would have been the last person to start a fight when his team was comfortably ahead. But there was Stastny - a family man, a father of four - slashing Craig Johnson hard enough with his stick to remove two of Johnson's teeth, and then throwing a punch at Johnson's teammate, Ted Crowley, when Crowley said something about it.
This wasn't hockey from the head. This was hockey from the heart. Olympic hockey, as it were.People wonder why there have been so many miracles on ice in Olympic hockey history, well, this is why. Get enough Stastny's on your team and just pray they keep at least some semblance of control.
Stastny is the marquee name of the Slovakia national hockey team competing in these Lillehammer Games. He retired from the NHL this year because the NHL's schedule conflicted with the Olympic tournament. Even if the pay would be a lot less - subtract whatever the New Jersey Devils were paying him and add two weeks' expense money in Norway and you have his current "salary" - Stastny wasn't going to miss this for the world. He knew when fate was smiling on him, and this was when. Who would have thought that the Olympics would open the gate for professionals and the Soviet Union would open the gate for Slovak independence - and the two events would happen simultaneously in his lifetime.
"That's why I left the NHL. That's why I'm here," said Stastny, looking and sounding a lot like Charles Barkley two years ago in Barcelona. "To compete for my country."
Technically, this isn't the first time. Stastny competed in the Olympics once before, when he was 23 and the Games were in Lake Placid in 1980. But that was for Czechoslovakia, a hybrid country of Czechs and Slovaks created and controlled by the Soviets.
"I was Slovak then and I'm Slovak now," said Stastny. "I didn't feel so much a part of that team as I do this team."
He shows no trace of love lost for the Czech republic that wouldn't let him come home for more than a decade when he left the national team and played first for the Quebec Nordiques and then the New Jersey Devils of the NHL.
Two years ago, when the Iron Curtain came down and the Czechs and Slovaks went about their mostly peaceful business of re-establishing their ethnic border, Stastny knew what he wanted to do when he retired.
"At Lake Placid I was young and didn't care much," he said.
Now he's older and he might care too much.
Certainly no one who witnessed his rampage through Johnson and Crowley in Tuesday's match between the Slovaks and United States would disagree that Stastny's passion got the best of him.
Slovakia led 3-1 at the time. Stastny had scored one of the goals himself - the go-ahead goal in the second period that came via a pass from Zigmund Palffy, the 21-year-old Slovak leftwinger on loan from the Salt Lake Golden Eagles. Less than nine minutes remained in a game that had been thoroughly dominated by the Slovaks.
But then came a pair of penalties on Jozef Dano of the Slovaks, one for roughing and another for yelling at the referee, and that got Stastny worked up. Before he knew it he was doing his Schwarzenegger routine, picking first on Johnson and then on Crowley, two guys whose ages (21 and 23) added together barely exceed his, and whose NHL experience is exactly 13 seasons less than Stastny's.
When the referee was through adding up all of Stastny's wrongs, it worked out to seven minutes in the penalty box. It meant the U.S. would have a five-on-three power play advantage for the next two minutes and four seconds - as Stastny and Dano played cellmates - and a four-on-three advantage for five minutes after that.
It was the break the Americans needed. Peter Ciavaglia, 23, scored first, and John Lilley, 21, scored next. By the time Stastny got back on the ice - for the game's final two minutes - there was too much for the Slovakians to do, and too little time. The U.S. had salvaged a 3-3 tie on a night when their skates had little magic.
Afterward, a relieved U.S. coach Tim Taylor said, "I'm proud we came back from a two-goal deficit. It shows we have heart."
He could have said the same, of course, for the Slovakians and for Peter Stastny, although on this night that was precisely their problem.