For Washington Capitals forward Matt Hendricks, fighting is all in a day’s work

Steve Downie has been a very bad boy. The Tampa Bay Lightning’s winger barreled down the “slot” in front of the Washington Capitals’ net like a crosstown bus, plowing into and over Semyon Varlamov, the Caps’ goalie. In the National Hockey League, this kind of thing just isn’t tolerated. It’s an affront, a provocation, an invitation to violence. Someone would have to reply.

Racing Downie up the ice, Matt Hendricks, the Capitals’ forward, caught him along the boards near the corner. With a hard check, he pinned Downie against the wall. Downie reciprocated with a low forearm. As the crowd at Verizon Center rose with swelling anticipation, it was on. The two men wrestled in a confusion of sticks and gloves, skates slip-sliding beneath them. Hendricks swung, landing the first and decisive blow, an uppercut that snapped Downie’s head back. Stunned but not incapacitated, Downie grabbed the nape of Hendricks’s jersey and tugged, momentarily turning his adversary into a flailing, headless turtle. Downie rained blows, but Hendricks, swinging blindly, miraculously connected with a couple of jabs. Within moments, the two angry players were in a pile on the ice, immobilized by officials. The altercation was over.

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The Washington Post Magazine: April 17, 2011

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As pro-hockey fights go, Downie vs. Hendricks in early January wasn’t especially brutal or memorable. No one had his face split open or his teeth dislodged. Nevertheless, the punch-up presented a vivid illustration of the NHL’s code of vigilante justice. Downie trespassed; his payback was swift and righteous. As Hendricks skated to the sidelines to serve an obligatory five-minute penalty for fighting, his teammates tapped their sticks on the ice and boards, offering him the game’s equivalent of a 21-gun salute.

All in a day’s work for Hendricks, a modest Minnesotan whose comportment off the ice is as mild as his scrappy, sandpaper persona on it. Hendricks played 301 games in hockey’s minor leagues, doggedly hoping to parlay skill and hustle into an NHL career. He came close to the big league several times and stuck for one long stretch last season with Denver’s team, the Colorado Avalanche. But by last summer, the Avalanche was no longer interested. Hendricks was 29 years old. His professional hockey dreams were flickering like a dying candle.

“What’s it going to take?” he wondered aloud to his former Colorado teammate, Cody McLeod, during a golf outing last summer.

Many months later, Hendricks still remembers McLeod’s answer: “Matt, you’ve got to start fighting more.”

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Hendricks came into the Capitals’ training camp last summer as a long shot. The team’s general manager, George McPhee, a scrapper himself in his playing days, offered him a 30-day tryout contract, little more than a chance. He stuck, impressing McPhee and Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau by scoring three goals in his first exhibition game. But it was Hendricks’s willingness to give and take lumps on the ice that truly suggested he was a keeper.

Through 74 games this season, Hendricks has been in 14 fights, the most on the team and 10th most in the NHL. This has helped earn him a team-leading 106 penalty minutes. During one four-day stretch in December, Hendricks fought three times, including twice in a game against the New York Rangers. He has fought at home and on the road, in preseason and even in intrasquad games. In the Avalanche’s training camp two years ago, Hendricks had six fights in 14 days, two with teammates, including one with his roommate. At the end of the Capitals’ training camp, the team signed him to a one-year contract worth $575,000.