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Sports

Last Hockey Playoffs for Two Years?

Maybe. But we've been here before, about a century ago.

Michael McKinley 7 Apr 2004TheTyee.ca
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TheTyee.ca

Now that the Stanley Cup playoffs are here, giddy fans will find it easy to drown out the sound of hockey's Cassandras banging their drums of doom, predicting a long and ugly battle come September 15, when the Collective Bargaining Agreement between NHL players and management expires.

Sorry to remind, but pundits warn it might be two years before we see the Stanley Cup playoffs come round again.

The players are all but mum about the trouble ahead. Finally, though, one of them has bravely appealed to the media for help in getting a better deal from rapacious team owners.

Dear Sir:

 

For some little time now, the newspapers… have been handing it to the hockey player. It seems to me about time somebody took up the cudgels on behalf of the players, who, after all, are not asking for princely salaries, but who do object to doing all the work and getting a small portion of the gain, as they will do if they go into clubs [with a salary cap].

At first blush it's tempting to think Todd Bertuzzi is just trying to make peace and plead justice. After all, he has a lot of time on his hands and a new role model to fulfill as the crucified messiah, as he is now depicted on "The Passion of the Bertuzzi" t-shirts that fans can buy from street vendors near GM Place.

But no, the letter calling for a fair deal for the players was written nearly a century ago in November of 1910 by Art Ross, a defenseman for the Montreal Wanderers. The NHL's direct ancestor, the National Hockey Association, was embroiled in a battle with its players over things that sound remarkably contemporary: a potential strike by the puckchasers if team owners had the nerve to slap on a salary cap at $5,000 dollars CDN (which is possibly what the NHL's current multi-millionaires spend on personal grooming products over a season).

Early owners cried poverty

Art Ross was no obscure hockey back bencher trying to grandstand. At age 24, he had already won two Stanley Cups, and was one of the game's stars. In time, he would come to be known as one of hockey's great pioneers, as the inventor of the B-shaped goal net, a truer, faster puck (by beveling the edges--a puck still used by the league), a protective device for vulnerable Achilles tendons, and the Art Ross helmet. Today, the NHL's top point-scorer wins the Art Ross Trophy, arguably the most coveted outside the Stanley Cup itself.

Back in the winter of 1910, though, Art Ross wasn't thinking about his gilded legacy, he was writing to the editor of The Montreal Herald to try to persuade the public that hockey was in danger because of managerial greed.
 
The game had only become a profession just a few years earlier, when the International Hockey League set up shop in Michigan in 1904. Until then, Canadian hockey was a resolutely "amateur" affair, and players who took payment for their work on the ice could be harshly sanctioned.
 
But the IHL changed all of that, and when Canadian teams saw their best players heading across the border in our first "brawn drain," they rushed to make up for lost time and money.

Art Ross's problem was they were making up for it on the backs of the players. While NHA teams cried poverty, Ross pointed out in his letter that his Montreal Wanderers had been able to afford to pay "on the average from $10,000 to $14,000 a year in salaries since they first started the pro game." To scale that back to a firm $5,000 a year suggested the owners were trying to pull a fast one.

When the Ottawa hockey club president D'Arcy McGee protested that his team had recorded a deficit, even though they had pulled in $25,000 in revenue and paid out just $15,000 in salaries, the players threatened to start their own league.
 
Rabble-rousers shipped out

And then they collided with ice cold reality: all the rinks were under contract to the NHA. The players could start their own league if they wished, but they'd be back playing on frozen ponds for free.

Art Ross was nearly suspended for his labour rabble rousing, and for the next half century, any player who tried to demand a fair deal was sent into the wilderness--often literally.

In the spring of 1925, when the Hamilton Tigers' players went on strike over playoff money owed to them, the NHL responded with enlightened concern: they sold the entire team to New York City bootlegger William Dwyer for $80,000, and the Tigers became the New York Americans.

In the summer of 1957, when hockey writers were sipping umbrella drinks at the beach, the Detroit Red Wings quietly shipped Ted Lindsay, their former captain and winner of the Art Ross Trophy, to the dreadful Chicago Blackhawks as punishment for attempting to start a players association (read: union).

The message to other players was chilling: if a star like Lindsay could be exiled, think what could happen to them. And in the crowning irony of it all, if Lindsay has won his labour war in 1957, there would have been no need for lawyer/player agent Alan Eagleson, who was a key mover in eventually establishing a players union and pension fund, which he then used for his own criminal purpose as he robbed the players he was supposed to protect.

Modern day war chest

So, the coming labour dispute between the NHL millionaire players and owners is as it's always been--a tussle over money, with the only difference now being that the players have a much larger war chest, and can hold out much longer.
 
Even so, a protracted holdout/strike could irreparably harm a league and a game that has been seeing much criticism of late, due to things like the "Bertuzzi Incident."  The players could well win the battle but lose the war if the end result is that some teams in shakier markets decide to fold altogether, costing dozens of player jobs.
 
As for Todd Bertuzzi, currently the people's hero again in Vancouver judging by the standing ovation he received when he made a surprise appearance in civvies at the Canucks last regular season game on Saturday, don't worry about him. His fat new contract with the Canucks sees him getting paid his millions whether there's a strike or not.


Vancouver-based author and film documentary maker Michael McKinley is the author of Putting a Roof on Winter: Hockey's Rise from Sport to Spectacle.  [Tyee]

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