Blood Sports and Cherry Pie

A bstract . The results are reported of empirically testing two hypotheses relating to violence in a professional team sport: one, that hockey fans have a taste for violence ( bockey is a “blood sport”) so that, in general, game attendance and violence in the National Hockey League are positively related; and two, more specifically, that the more extreme degrees of violence are positively associated with American, not Canadian, attendance. The data are game by game data for the 1983/84 season, violence is measured by various categories of penalty minutes (minors, majors, misconducts), and the model is a system of two reduced form equations. The results confirm that there is a significant and positive relationship between aggregate measures of violence (total penalty minutes) and attendance for games played in both American and Canadian cities; and there is a significant positive relationship between the more extreme forms of violence (proxied by majors and misconducts) and attendance only in American cities