The data sample of this analysis was the top 15 comments of 24 Youtube videos of hockey fights from the channel Hockeyfights.com. The videos were selected based on the year of the fights, choosing 4 from the last 6 decades, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, 10’s and 20’s. Additionally when picking fights from each decade I selected the fights with the most exposure, the 4 most viewed fights from each decade. Within this I made sure that there were no players featured more than once in the sample and that each decade also incorporated one fight that involved more than 2 players (line brawl or bench clear). The comments selected were the top 15 that appeared on the Youtube page, excluding comments that were fewer than three words or in a language other than english.
Sampled Fights:
70’s
- Dave Schultz vs Terry O’Reilly Jan 25, 1976
- Pierre Bouchard vs Stan Jonathan May 21, 1978
- Flyers at Islanders bench clearing brawl Jan 6, 1979
- Nick Fotiu vs Behn Wilson Apr 1, 1979
80’s
- Bob Kelly vs Bob Nystrom May 24, 1980
- Nordiques vs Canadiens Apr 20, 1984
- Chris Nilan vs Jay Miller Dec 5, 1985
- Craig Coxe vs Bob Probert Nov 19, 1987
90’s
- John Kordic vs Dave Brown Oct 17, 1991
- Marty McSorley vs Eric Lindros Nov 21, 1995
- Tie Domi vs Stu Grimson Feb 22, 1996
- Patrick Roy vs Mike Vernon Mar 26, 1997
00’s
- Senators vs Sabres Feb 22, 2007
- Koci vs Chara Oct 25, 2007
- Michael Komisarek vs Milan Lucic Nov 13, 2008
- Derek Boogaard vs Brian McGrattan Dec 11, 2009
10’s
- John Scott vs Kevin Westgarth Nov 27, 2010
- Jay Beagle vs Arron Asham Oct 13, 2011
- Devils vs Rangers start of game line brawl Mar 19, 2012
- Adam Lowry vs Ryan Reaves Nov 2, 2019
20’s
- Jamie Benn vs Matt Calvert Jan 14, 2020
- Zack Kassian vs Arber Xhekaj Oct 20, 2022
- Evander Kane vs Brady Tkachuk Feb 11, 2023
- Tom Wilson vs Michael Pezzetta Apr 6, 2023
Initially when collecting the data I developed forms of discourse I saw and expected to see throughout the sample. Those being masculinizing discourse, discourse of emotion, discourse of violence, and discourse of era. With further inspection into the sample I began to identify themes and values within these forms of discourse. The most important sort of discourse to my research question was masculinizing discourse, the most relevant themes within this were toughness, dominance and zoomorphism. Using interpretive analysis during qualitative coding I assigned parts of comments to respective themes, in doing this it provided quantitative info with frequencies of themes and discourse. On top of coding the comments I coded the videos of the fights as well, addressing things like length of fight, the brutality, and the commentation. This was done in order to provide greater context for the comments on the fights.