Culture
Inside a historic women’s hockey fight and why it changed PWHL rules: ‘We were battling out there’
For almost a decade, Jill Saulnier was an energy line forward for the Canadian women’s national team, winning two Olympic medals and a world championship.
Now she can add a new line to her resume: She threw the first real punches in the history of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, in a fight with Ottawa forward Tereza Vanišová.
“We were battling out there,” Saulnier told The Athletic. “She got a hold of my stick and dropped it down, and that was just kind of the green flag for me …. I said, ‘Let’s go.’”
The first legitimate fight in the #PWHL. 🥊 @PWHL_Boston’s Jill Saulnier & @PWHL_Ottawa’s Tereza Vanišová square off. #PWHL@jill_saulnier @VanisovaTereza pic.twitter.com/L6fr5biVmv
— Melissa Burgess (@_MelissaBurgess) February 21, 2025
The Feb. 20 fight during a game between the Boston Fleet and Ottawa Charge was the first-ever in the PWHL and one of the league’s most viral moments.
Fights aren’t entirely new to women’s hockey. There was a line brawl between Canada and the United States at a pre-tournament game ahead of the 2014 Olympics, and another in the now-defunct National Women’s Hockey League in 2016.
There are usually big hits and scrums after whistles at the professional and international level. But these moments — with fists flying — have been few and far between.
For the players involved in the PWHL’s first fight, it was just a natural part of the women’s game and a product of the increased physicality allowed in the league.
GO DEEPER
The art of hitting in women’s hockey: How are PWHL players adapting to a more physical game?
“It’s a heated game, it’s a physical game, and we’re all very competitive,” said Saulnier, now a forward for Boston after a January trade from the New York Sirens. “It’s just the way that the chips kind of fell in the corner.”
The build-up to the fight included a hit and at least two extra crosschecks by Saulnier against Vanišová, one of Ottawa’s top scoring forwards. When Vanišová got up, she threw Saulnier’s stick to the ground.
“I felt like the warranted next move was a hard right,” Saulnier said. “In the moment, it was physical and that fight had to happen. It was right there and it was a message from each side.”
Neither player dropped their gloves, as is customary in men’s hockey, given women’s players wear full cages that protect their face — not visors like most NHLers wear, which leave most of their face exposed. In both leagues, players are not allowed to remove their helmets to fight.
“You’d just look silly to fully drop the gloves,” Saulnier said, given they’d be punching a cage with their bare hands.
The nearly 6,000 fans at TD Place Arena in Ottawa were on their feet. So were the players on each bench. Five minutes after the fight, Ottawa defender Ronja Savolainen scored to make the game 2-1 late in the third period. When Vanišová got out of the penalty box, she scored with only three seconds left in the game to send it to overtime and register the first unofficial “Gordie Howe hat trick” in the league’s history — when a player scores a goal, assists on a goal and fights in the same game.
“I thought it was awesome, it got the fans going,” Saulnier said. “I’m sure I’ll get a couple boos next time I go in there, but please know, it was all respectful and it was a lot of fun.”
Ottawa ultimately lost 3-2 in overtime and Saulnier and Vanišová shared a moment in the postgame handshake line to say, “Nice fight.”
“You see the intensity of the game and that’s the fun part of this league,” said Ottawa coach Carla MacLeod after the game. “Neither player backed down and I suspect there will be a little bit of buzz about it, which is never bad for the game either.”
The fight made worldwide news with headlines in TMZ and the Daily Mail, outlets that don’t typically cover women’s hockey. And it went viral on social media while 16 million people across North America were watching Canada and the United States in the 4 Nations Face-Off finale.
In the last week, fans have given Saulnier bracelets that spell out “Fight Club” in beads and T-shirts that say “Jill Saulnier Fight Club,” which one of her family members wore to Boston’s game against Montreal at the Bell Centre on Saturday.
“I think more people reached out than when we won a gold medal,” said Saulnier, a member of the 2022 Canadian Olympic team. “Obviously you shouldn’t fight every game, but I think it was actually good because it got more eyes on the league.”
The PWHL, which only officially started in January 2024, will take the exposure. The fight was also a nice bit of proof that the league is full of skilled players who can play with finesse and speed, but also embrace physicality. Still, fights aren’t something they want to be the norm.
The league’s rulebook clearly states that “fighting is not part of the PWHL’s game.” And before last month’s altercation, there wasn’t a ton of clarity on what penalties referees might impose other than that players who fight shall be penalized and may be ejected from the game.
Saulnier and Vanišová were only given roughing minors for their fight, which led to some confusion over the rules. Last week, the league clarified that a fight will now be penalized with a 5-minute major penalty and a game misconduct, with a possibility of further discipline following a review and taking into consideration repeat offenders.
According to Saulnier, Boston general manager Danielle Marmer calls it “the Jill Saulnier rule.”
The new rules should deter players from frequently fighting. In a short, 30-game season, players might not be willing to sit out an extra game just to give their team a boost of energy post-fight. The equipment barrier will also continue to be a natural deterrent for fighting in women’s hockey.
Beyond that, fighting is far from common at other levels of the women’s game. Even bodychecking has never been permitted in youth girls hockey, which means those skills are not typically taught. In boys hockey, bodychecking is introduced at the under-14 level and by the time a player gets to the professional level, fighting has very much been part of the game.
Saulnier doesn’t think her fight is going to open the floodgates to more moments like that in the future. But, she said, it certainly won’t be the last time we see a fight in women’s professional hockey.
“With the level of physicality, you’ll never not see it in the PWHL,” she said.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Troy Parla / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Los Angeles, Ca5 minutes agoBallots burned, vote center vandalized in possible acts of election interference, Los Angeles County officials say
-
Detroit, MI27 minutes agoFrontier bids to expand in former Spirit space at Detroit Metro Airport
-
San Francisco, CA35 minutes agoVIDEO: Car crashes into SF Castro restaurant, driver flees scene
-
Dallas, TX42 minutes agoFree Agent Focus: Dallas Stars
-
Miami, FL45 minutes agoMiami lands commitment from Rivals300 LB Noah Glover
-
Boston, MA50 minutes agoFree June events: Pride Month, Father’s Day, and more – The Boston Globe
-
Denver, CO57 minutes agoTwo Colorado smoke shops shut down for selling restricted products to minors
-
Seattle, WA60 minutes agoWEST SEATTLE SCHOOLS: Graduation season begins Monday
