a fight.” That’s right. He said ask for a fight. That’s part of that code he was talking about. You hit the skill guys clean and heavyweights fight heavyweights. But what happens if the other guy doesn’t accept? “Well, at that point you’re having a nice, polite conversation saying, ‘Well, I’m supposed to ask you,’” he says. “Then, I just tell them ‘Fine — but just so you know, I’m going to run around and hit your best players.’” That’s just one of several scenarios for a fight. If you go to the Trevor Gillies page on hockeyfights.com, you can see some others, like the time he fought Jered Boll. “I just happened to be getting on the ice and I see him crush one of our guys,” he says. “I know he’s probably not going to fight me if I ask him, but he took out our best guy, so I just go over and get it going with him.” He says this all very casually and watches the video of the very fight he’s talking about with cool detachment. “You never fight for yourself,” he
says, watching himself land a series of jersey jabs followed by some devastatingly solid blows to the face. “When you’re in the lower leagues, you might try to fight just to get noticed and get out of those leagues, but when you’re at this level, you have to fight at the right time, because if you fight at the wrong time, you could hurt your team. You need to know when and where to do it because of the penalty minutes that will follow...” Last year he spent 165 minutes in the penalty box, which means the Islanders spent that many minutes skating one player down. But when it’s done smart, leveling the seas is worth it. The small fraternity of enforcers is a violent but accessible bunch. “If the guy wants to come talk to me after the game — after he beat me up or I beat him up — I’m going to talk to him because that’s part of my job. I fought six of the eight guys in my wedding.” As much as he talks about the dispassion that comes with fighting, he also says that occasionally, the need to “man up” comes at a cost.
To some fans and several commentators, Gillies’ pummeling of Pittsburgh Penguin Eric Tangradi last February crossed the line. Gillies elbowed Tangradi in the face, then punched him several times when he was down on the ice. Then, on his way to the locker room, Gillies taunted the fallen player. Gillies received a nine-game suspension by the league and the team was fined $100,000. “Not getting into it too much because obviously I’ve paid my penance with my fines, but there was some stuff that lead up to that,” he says. “Our goalie got knocked out by their goalie and their whole bench was laughing about it. They thought it was real funny and kind of bullied us all year.” Tired of their skill players taking hit after hit, Gillies and a couple others had a team meeting and decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. “We had guys fighting who had never fought in their lives,” he says. “It’s a band of brothers. You see one of your guys go down or getting hurt and you’re going to do something
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about it. That’s just the way hockey is. A lot of people don’t understand it, but those five guys on the ice are going to stick together. “A lot of people don’t agree with what I did, which is fine,” he says. “But people who know me here in town or back home or on my team or in my family know that I’m a good guy and I don’t try to hurt anybody. But emotions escalated and, at the end of the day, those 24 guys in that locker room love me. And so does my coaching staff and ownership, or I wouldn’t have gotten another contract.” That other contract allows him to stay in New York, where he lives during the season with his wife and two kids. The kids love it because of all the snow, and he’s happy to give them that. “Someday, there’s not going to be any more snow,” he says. He’s not talking global warming, he’s talking the end of his career, which at 32 he knows can be as soon as the next faceoff. “My saying is that I’m going to play
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