THE PUBLIC ENEMY

There's one thing keeping the Penguins' Matt Cooke from being regarded among the NHL's handiest third-line wingers: He also might be the dirtiest player in the game

Penguins co-owner Mario Lemieux wasn't biting the hand that feeds him as much as gnawing off the entire arm. In a scathing statement issued after a 9--3 loss to the Islanders on Feb. 11 that featured 346 minutes' worth of penalties, a game that trafficked in the basest of instincts and cruelest of NHL stereotypes, the Hall of Famer labeled the match a "travesty" and darkly insinuated he might walk away from hockey. The impact? Lemieux was almost immediately branded a two-bit phony, a sanctimonious sham. From all of the vitriol dumped on him, the outrage, basically, could be distilled to this: Lemieux had no business sermonizing as long as he employs the man widely considered the dirtiest player in the NHL.

"I guess," says Matt Cooke, who missed that game because he was serving a suspension, "Mario is guilty by association."

Cooke's wry smile is punctuated by a missing front tooth, which, in the demi-light of the Penguins' empty dressing room, makes him look like a rueful jack-o'-lantern. He speaks softly, at least off the ice. He is 32, but his exuberance—and penchant for dressing room pranks—suggest a player a decade younger. He is a compact 205-pounder who would be just another useful third-line leftwinger if not for the trail of broken bodies he has left in his wake and the recent fatwa issued against him.

Apparently the NHL does not have a violence problem as much as it has a Matt Cooke problem. Ken Daneyko, a three-time Stanley Cup winner as a Devils defenseman, and now a between-periods analyst for New Jersey on MSG Network, offered a solution. Warming to the subject on a radio show on Feb. 9, Daneyko said, "I'm as crazy as this: The NHL [should declare] open season for one week on Matt Cooke. You won't get suspended. Then we'll see if he'll continue [dishing out cheap hits] for the rest of the season or his career."

Cooke had already been having a turbulent week before Daneyko painted a bull's-eye on his sweater. With Pittsburgh trailing the Capitals by two goals in the final four minutes of a nationally televised game on Feb. 6, Cooke dinged Washington star Alex Ovechkin with a drive-by, knee-on-knee check. After the match Washington's Bruce Boudreau, who coached Cooke for 17 games in 2008, said, "It's Matt Cooke. Need we say more? It's not his first rodeo. He's done it to everybody. Then he goes to the ref and says, 'What did I do?' He knows damn well what he did." Cooke's penalty drew the maximum $2,500 fine and a rebuke from NHL senior executive vice president Colin Campbell, who told Cooke he did not want to be having any more such discussions with him in the immediate future. Two days later Campbell and Cooke spoke again, this time in a formal hearing. Insufficiently chastened, Cooke had rammed Blue Jackets defenseman Fedor Tyutin from behind into the end boards. Campbell suspended Cooke for four games, with $87,804.88 in lost salary, for a hit that former star Jeremy Roenick termed "chickens---" and worthy of a 20-game suspension.

Campbell's ruling was hardly surprising. The shocking thing about Cooke's suspension was that it was just the fourth—and longest—of a play-on-the-edge career that has spanned 800 NHL games. For all the worst-person-in-the-world bile directed at him, his suspensions total just 10 games. Disbelief has been suspended far more often than Cooke. Says former Penguins teammate Bill Guerin, "I told him he got one game for hitting from behind, one game for not thinking and two games for being Matt Cooke."

"If people suggest our game is violent," says Brad May, the former enforcer who also played with Cooke in Vancouver, "Matt Cooke is one of the guys inciting this violence."

There is actually much to admire in Cooke's game. He has won a Cup, scored at least 10 goals in nine of the past 10 seasons—he scored 15 last year with essentially no power-play time—and made himself invaluable on the penalty kill. In his first game back from suspension, he cashed in a shorthanded goal in a 3--2 shootout loss to the Blackhawks in Chicago on Feb. 20. (He is tied for the NHL lead with six shorthanded points.) Cooke is an actual player, unlike the Islanders' Trevor Gillies, who is one of three skaters in the past 10 years to have more than 100 penalty minutes in fewer than 100 minutes of ice time. (Gillies was suspended last Friday for the second time in less than a month for his hit to the head of the Wild's Cal Clutterbuck.) Pittsburgh general manager Ray Shero clearly values Cooke. Although Shero generally offers role players no more than two-year contracts, last June he signed Cooke to a three-year deal worth $1.8 million annually. "Cookie can create things," says Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, who is out indefinitely after suffering a concussion on Jan. 5. "It's not that he's just bouncing off bodies out there."

Cooke might even qualify as an impact player, but his impact is most apparent at the point of contact. With good checks and bad, with hits that stretched rules and in one memorable case rewrote them, Cooke has earned a great living and a poor reputation. He has devastated the careers of star players. In March 2010 he concussed the Bruins' Marc Savard with a predatory blind-side hit, a check that moved the NHL to adopt Rule 48, which bans lateral hits that target the head. As a member of the Capitals in April 2008, he hit Vincent Lecavalier when the Lightning center did not have the puck, knocking him to the ice and dislocating his shoulder, an injury that required surgery. Savard, currently out for the season with another concussion, has played just 25 regular season games since being wallpapered by Cooke. Lecavalier scored 192 goals in the five seasons before his shoulder surgery, .475 per game. Postsurgery, his scoring average has dropped to .333 goals per game. (Cooke also shredded the knee of Canadiens defenseman Andrei Markov in the 2010 playoffs with a devastating, if perfectly legal, check; Markov played seven games in 2010--11 before reinjuring the knee, which required more reconstructive surgery.) Cooke, fined $2,500 for the Lecavalier hit but spared supplementary discipline for blindsiding Savard, also targeted the Rangers' Artem Anisimov and the Hurricanes' Scott Walker in 2009, earning a pair of two-game suspensions. Amid the accusations of headhunting, there is evidence Cooke has not ignored other body parts. In 2009 he clicked knees with Atlanta's Zach Bogosian and, in the playoffs, Carolina's Erik Cole. "There are times," Cole says, "when I think he just doesn't care if a guy is in a vulnerable position."

"Matt Cooke has found his niche and [plays] his role very effectively," says Mike Keane, who played 16 NHL seasons, including one as Cooke's teammate on the Canucks in 2003--04. "He goes out and hits Ovechkin, hits guys from behind. If he hurts Ovechkin, who cares? The Washington Capitals won't win the Stanley Cup. He did his job. For Matt Cooke, that's perfect."

The only check in question on this off day is at lunch. Cooke is at an Italian restaurant in Pittsburgh's Strip District with John Lawrence and his family. Lawrence is 19. When he was 16, he suffered extensive brain and spinal injuries in a car accident and remained in a coma for 10 months. When Cooke heard about Lawrence through his foundation last fall—Matt and his wife, Michelle, started the Cooke Family Foundation of Hope five years ago—he invited Lawrence's family to the opener in Pittsburgh's new Consol Energy Center in October and took him to practice the following day. While Cooke was being trashed in the wake of the Ovechkin and Tyutin hits, Lawrence's father called a reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review who previously had written about his son—John hunts deer with a crossbow from his wheelchair—to say the city should know the other side of Matt Cooke. "John admired Matt's bravery and strength and turned to that when his rehab was rough," said his father, who is also named John. "Everybody was teasing John that his favorite guy was a dirty player, a goon, but Matt's just a guy who fights for his position on the team. A battler."

Cooke had to battle to reach the NHL. At 16, he played Tier II hockey for the Wellington Dukes in eastern Ontario in a rink affectionately known as the DukeDome, essentially a broom closet with a Zamboni. The ice surface was 180 feet by 80 feet, 20 feet shorter and five feet narrower than an NHL rink, and the crowd was so close to the ice, an observant winger could tell who in the Whiskey Corner section had had a tonsillectomy. If you played for the Dukes in that crazy old barn, you finished your checks. Nonnegotiable.

He was only a middling junior prospect, Windsor's 10th-round choice in the Ontario Hockey League's 1995 draft. "The first thing Paul Gillis, who became my coach that first year, said to me was, 'You're playing the same way in the OHL that I played in the NHL; keep your elbows down,'" Cooke recalls. His elbows came down—shifting his focus from hitting to playing—and his stats went up. Cooke began his major junior career as a so-called energy player, but the speed and surprisingly sweet hands he showed in Windsor translated to 45 goals in his second season and to an NHL opportunity when the Canucks selected him 144th overall in 1997.

When Cooke arrived in Vancouver in 1998, the left flank was stocked with Markus Naslund and Mark Messier. He did not need a memo to know he wouldn't be a first-liner. "So I took the approach that every day I wanted [coach] Mike Keenan to go, 'Number 46? Oh, yeah, that's that Cooke kid. He ran around and hit everything,' " he recalls. "I didn't want him to go, 'Number 46? Who the hell's that?'"

Cooke played with abundant energy and menace in his early years in Vancouver, but he did not "take ownership" of his game. In the sometimes indecipherable NHL code, the phrase essentially means that he was reluctant to fight. (He did fight Avalanche forward Steve Moore in March 2004 before teammate Todd Bertuzzi's infamous assault on Moore in the same game.) In some ways his hesitance to drop his gloves explains the widespread disdain around the NHL for Cooke almost as much as his record of borderline hits. Cooke was a practitioner not of old-time hockey but of new-era hockey, a seminal figure in the age of the Super Pest, in which fighting your own battles was less of an obligation.

Cooke has had 20 NHL fights, according to hockeyfights.com, but only 10 came in his 566 games with the Canucks from 1998 to 2008. He maintains that part of the reason was coach Marc Crawford's theory that his effectiveness as an agitator would erode if he gave opponents the satisfaction of fighting. (Crawford, now the Stars coach, says he does not recall giving Cooke those instructions.) "So many days I'd say, This guy [is] a factor; Cooke helped us win," says May, the ex--Canucks tough guy. "And other days I'd be icing my knuckles or my temple and thinking, I wouldn't have been in that fight at all except for that ass----."

Cooke has had 10 bouts in just 217 games with Pittsburgh, which qualifies as accountability and maturity in the NHL. Shero reminded him before his recent disciplinary hearing to accept ungrudgingly Campbell's ruling on the Tyutin check.

"Is he a dirty player? Yeah, he's a dirty player. [Former defenseman] Ulf Samuelsson was a dirty player. But there's value in that. Is there value in injuring players and getting suspended? No. But there are football players in the Hall of Fame who were dirty. There are brushback pitchers in the Hall of Fame."

After a year in which he forced a rule change and endured the longest suspension of his career, Cooke considers himself duly brushed back. Penguins coach Dan Bylsma has actually met with the winger this season to ask why he had turned down the opportunity for more heavy hits, which Cooke explained as a hangover from Rule 48—the Cooke Rule. He was certainly prepared for the run that Capitals winger Matt Bradley took at him on Feb. 21 in Pittsburgh's first meeting with Washington after his knee-on-knee hit of Ovechkin. As Bradley noted to reporters after the game, "You can't go hit our best player with a dirty hit without us retaliating."

"The biggest thing for me is that on the ice, there's a persona," Cooke says. "It's what it is because that's what's made me successful. But that has nothing to do with who I am."

So who's the dirtiest player in the NHL?

Cooke throws back his head and snorts. "No comment," he says, smiling. Pause. "But I don't think it's myself."

The vox populi begs to differ.

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"COOKIE CAN CREATE THINGS," SAYS CROSBY. "IT'S NOT THAT HE'S JUST BOUNCING OFF BODIES OUT THERE."

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Photograph by GREGORY SHAMUS/NHLI/GETTY IMAGES

COOKIE MONSTER Cooke's buoyant dressing room presence—he's a notoriously gleeful prankster—belies his reputation for ferocity on the ice.

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DAVID E. KLUTHO

BOOMTOWN MATT Markov has played only seven games since he injured his knee when Cooke laid him out with a clean check during the second round of last year's playoffs.

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GENE J. PUSKAR/AP

[See caption above]

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CHARLES LECLAIRE/USPRESSWIRE

FIGHT CLUBBER Cooke has been quicker to drop the gloves of late, but he's still best known for dishing out iffy hits—as he did with Tyutin on Feb. 8 (right).

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JAMIE SABAU/GETTY IMAGES

[See caption above]