Why do people talk about the long-term dangers of hockey fights but not MMA, where punches to the head are much more frequent?
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People who fight in MMA are professional fighters. They’ve trained to be fighters. That means they’ve been trained to know which moves are REALLY dangerous and to avoid landing blows in particular areas that can do severe damage. Likewise, since they expect to be attacked by opponents they’ve been trained in how to anticipate blows and move to lessen their effects or try to land in safer positions when knocked down.
That isn’t true for all hockey players. They *might* be trained fighters, but they’re on the ice because they’re good at playing hockey and being a martial artist isn’t required for that. So when they start fighting, they’re not as cognizant of which kinds of punches are dangerous and aren’t as trained to take those kinds of punches.
Also consider that in MMA, the fight is the event, so if a fighter believes something’s gone wrong and they’re hurt worse than they should be they can signal to end the fight immediately in ways the opponent can recognize and knows to respect. Hockey fights are not as structured, so if someone gets hit too hard they might try to make a signal but the other person might not understand it and keep going. This is exacerbated because the more often getting beaten up is part of your job, the better you are at knowing the difference between “that hurts” and “wait I just took an injury, this is wrong”.
So in either case severe injuries can happen, but intuitively we expect MMA fighters to have fewer random instances of those kinds of things.
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