The Game (41 page)

In other words, in the early years, he seemed like just the right guy.

The NHL owners had had things all their own way. In the 1950s, attempts to set up a players union had been beaten back, the instigators quickly traded to the League’s gulag of the time, Chicago. The owners treated their players, on the ice, as courageous, competitive, smart, and proud. Off the ice, they treated them as uneducated, ill-bred, Canadian farm-boys with broken-down faces, lucky to have a job at all, whatever they got paid. What the NHLPA needed was someone who understood the personal and collective strength of the players, who knew that if he worked with them, pushed them, coached them, gave them confidence, they would show how courageous, competitive, smart, and proud they were off the ice as well. Then the NHLPA would be a force.

The NHLPA was created, and the fights began. And any fights, compared to the time before of no fights, seemed like fighting all the time.

Eagleson and the NHLPA, it appeared, were really taking on the owners. He was “Uncle Al, the players’ pal,” and through the 1970s, that impression remained. It was reinforced during the 1972 Canada-Russia series when Eagleson, as off-ice leader of Team Canada, encouraged to calm himself, took on members of the Soviet Red Army, then jumped onto the ice, escorted to the safety of the Canadian bench by Team Canada players, his middle finger defiantly in the air. Love him or not, this guy, it seemed, wouldn’t back down from anyone.

As well, the players were now getting more freedom than ever before. Their salaries were rising immensely. It was because of the rival WHA, and Eagleson had nothing to do with that, but who noticed? And it didn’t seem that way. Then in 1979, the WHA was gone—and for the players, the troubles began. Eagleson had never built a real organization at the NHLPA. He had a few staffers, some players formed an executive, but Eagleson ran the show. He was the show. He was a solo act. Without a strike fund, there was no chance the players would go on strike. Without an organization, there was no power behind the bluster. In negotiations with the owners, Eagleson’s strategy was to shout “no,” and whisper “yes.”

By the mid-1980s, NHL player salaries were falling behind those in other sports, and there was still no free agency mechanism in place to alter that. The knives came out. They had always been there.

Eagleson could be abusive and obnoxious. There had been charges of impropriety and illegality. He had always done anything, for anyone, at any time he pleased, and had left a web of conflicts of interest behind him. He had made many enemies, and now those enemies had their chance. Under pressure, he resigned from the NHLPA in 1991.

In 1998, he was sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

I don’t think Alan Eagleson really liked players very much. He may have at the beginning, but the players needed too much coaxing and coaching, too much handholding. Off the ice, they were too needy, too weak, too dependent, and too young. He had once been like them, a kid from a working-class home who had fought his way up. But now he was standing on his own two feet. Why didn’t they? He didn’t need an Alan Eagleson. Why did they? In time, he came to resent the players. In time, I think, he came to like the owners more. They were like him—the same age, educated, with lots of interests. They were strong, tough, and independent-minded. They were self-made men, just like him. They were rich.

Alan Eagleson had many challenges as he took on the NHLPA in 1967. His most important challenge was to create a proud, confident organization of players, and to bring the players along with him, in time to push them out in front of him—to make them the focus, to make them as strong off the ice as they were on the ice, to create a real force. He didn’t do that. He was convicted of three counts of mail fraud in the U.S., three counts of fraud in Canada, and he went to jail.

But to me the real legacy of Alan Eagleson is that for twenty-four years, he treated the players like another owner.

Eagleson was replaced by Bob Goodenow, a Detroit-born, former Harvard hockey player as stolid and systematic as Eagleson was flamboy-ant. And while as a dealmaker, Eagleson’s instinct was always to say “yes,”

Goodenow’s is always to say “no.” It is to fold his arms, shake his head, and wait. And wait. That style, Goodenow’s determination to build a real organization of the NHLPA, and the inability of the League’s owners to wait in return, has resulted in huge gains by the players in the last ten years. Some of those gains have come out of the owners’ pockets. But most have come from money that hadn’t been there previously.

Challenged by the players to try harder, to do a better job so that they could afford a better team, to win, the owners hired managers and challenged them to challenge the fans to pay more for their tickets. They also challenged companies to put up their money for expensive corporate boxes; sponsors to buy space in the ice, on the boards, or around the arena for their messages; broadcasters to challenge their advertisers and subscribers to ante up more for the games; fans outside the arena to pay more for seeing their team inside their own home and to buy jerseys, key chains, and posters as well. The result? To an extent that has shocked both the challengers and the challenged, all have met the tests.

The owners have done all this by building new arenas with corporate boxes closer to the ice; with club seats, specialty restaurants, and bars; with concession stands that serve more than hotdogs and stale beer; with cushioned seats with longer legroom; with a video board and sound system that entertain. All of this comes with a new understanding that a hockey game doesn’t have to be just for the hockey fanatic.

Hockey can provide an evening’s enjoyment for a casual fan as well, someone who might otherwise have gone to the opera, the theater, a movie, or to a restaurant. But to attract that fan, you need to provide what he or she is used to and expects from any entertainment: a comfortable, friendly atmosphere; attentive people; a sense of pride and caring; and an engaging experience that can be talked about later.

Sports needs that fan. There are now lots of interesting things for everybody to do, and they are available to more people, especially to those who can afford season tickets. Season ticket holders don’t want to go to all forty-one games in a season. If they don’t find others to take up their tickets for some, indeed most, of those games, except perhaps in Toronto, they will give up their tickets entirely. Thirty years ago and before, most season ticket holders went to most games themselves.

Now, they spread their tickets around and most fans attend games as a special occasion. Going to a game is like going to
The Lion King
or
Phantom of the Opera
, something they budget for, that they only do once or twice a year. Without the casual fan, the number of season ticket holders would fall, and the price of tickets would go down. The more people the tickets can be spread among, people who will accept special occasion prices for a special occasion experience, the more teams can raise the price of tickets. Season ticket holders don’t want to pay more—that’s their bottom line. If that means going to fewer games, if that means purposely fooling themselves, that’s OK.

The crowd has changed. The fans complain that higher costs mean that they can’t go to games any more, let alone take their kids.

And in some arenas there are fewer kids. As hard as it is to pay $100 a ticket, it is harder for a company or a parent to justify paying that kind of money for a kid. $12 or $25 is easily ignored; $100 is conscience raising. Yet, the fact is, in Montreal and Toronto, those fans never could go to games. What price had once allowed, lack of access did not allow. If the great-grandparents of today’s fans were not rich in the 1930s or 1940s, the tickets were already snapped up, passed along to new generations and gone forever and those fans were out of luck. Yet, undeniably, things do feel different now. Once, people accepted that there were certain others who were able to go certain places and have certain things that they didn’t, and that was simply the way it was. We don’t accept that today. Privilege is for everyone. Not going to games in earlier times because of lack of access, when access wasn’t assumed and cost wasn’t a barrier, was only to be regretted. Now, not going to games even with better access, when access is assumed and cost is a barrier, is deeply resented.

With fewer kids at games, the mood is now less joyful and unrestrained. Good games feel the same; mediocre or bad games feel different. When a price is low enough to seem irrelevant to the experience, the fan expresses only what a fan truly feels—hope. When it isn’t, the fan expresses entitlement. Hope unmet brings disappointment. Entitlement unmet feels sour.

A game is now much more a full entertainment experience, with music, video replays, and features to support the action below. Those fans old enough to remember when the only music was the clickety-clack of stick against stick and puck find it all too much. Those under thirty, who have been raised on the pound and blare of sound as energy, wonder what the fuss is about. To them, and there are more of them all the time, this is their life.

The owners have met the test of higher salaries with higher ticket prices and with “up-selling.” “You want a beer? Can I get you a hotdog and fries with that?” “You want a ticket? Can I get you a private box, or a club seat, or a restaurant reservation as well?” And also by selling anything and everything. Every bit of space and time is a potential message opportunity. Signs are everywhere—in the ice and on the boards, especially signs that are “camera-visible.” As background to the photo of the winning goal in the newspaper, but far more important during shots of practice on the daily reports of the all-sports TV channels, and during random moments over two and a half hours of a game, all of which games are now broadcast. “Camera-visible” means extending the commercial message far beyond the 19,000(p)eople of an arena. It means more money for a team. As well, there are now more and longer commercial breaks for TV to sell; these increase the value of broadcast rights and are also used in-arena to do the same for sponsorship packages. Inside the arena has changed just as outside the arena has changed. On billboards, on bus shelters, in movie theatres and elevators, commercial messages are everywhere. Bright, often attractive, they have become part of our entertainment.

The owners have also met the players’ test by expanding the League to thirty teams, generating a windfall of more than $500 million in expansion fees, and then taking their share and spending it on players, setting new salary levels, generating new standards and expectations, thus creating a new economic structure based on one-time windfalls that couldn’t continue. And the owners have met the players’ test because, to everyone’s surprise, in constructive and destructive ways, they could. The fans would pay enormously more; broadcasters would pay enormously more; commercial sponsors would pay enormously more. Hockey and sports meant more to more people than anyone had imagined. To the extent that fans, broadcasters, and sponsors were willing to pay more but not enough, owners were willing to pay more themselves for reasons that surprised even them. Owners are businessmen. They like to make money. They think they are special, and they want others to think of them the same way. Some also want attention, not just status. They don’t want to be just another “dime a dozen” multi-millionaire invisible to all but their colleagues and cronies. Ownership of a sports team can do that. It will get them attention. It will make them important. What the owners didn’t realize was that attention and importance can be good or bad. Only winning makes it good.

And winning isn’t easy. It has come to cost money, especially since the early 1990s when greater, though limited, free agency (limited to players, for the most part, thirty-one years of age and older, and beyond their peak years) has made money a competitive tool. There is no exact correlation between team payroll and success. The New York Rangers routinely lead the League by far in payroll, and they routinely don’t make the playoffs. Every year, there is an Ottawa or a Carolina or a Minnesota or an Anaheim that does better than their payroll would suggest. But year-in, year-out, the top teams, the teams that win or contend for Stanley Cups—Detroit, Dallas, Colorado, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Toronto—are the top spending teams. New Jersey, with a mid-to-high player payroll, is the only exception.

So what is it like for the proud owner of an NHL team that loses?

“Your team sucks.” It is one thing to hear that from people you don’t know. It is another to hear it from your next-door neighbor and from your cronies at the club. It’s not fun. By implication, you are stupid and everybody knows it. That’s not fun either. That’s not what you thought you were buying when you bought this team. You had images of Stanley Cups dancing in your head, a grateful city singing your praises. So now you’re in and you can’t get out in any way that isn’t embarrassing—without winning. So now, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, you escalate. You spend more money. And you spend it until you run out, or until someone with the same images dancing in his head buys the team from you, or until you lose enough money that, offended at yourself by violating your own most fundamental image of yourself as a smart businessman, you just get out because you decide you can live less easily with being a private fool than a public loser.

Owners and players both like to win. They are both used to winning.

Both got to where they are because they are great competitors. When both have a choice—when a player is a free agent or when an owner might lose a free agent or acquire one from another team—money is a consideration for both of them, but both also want to win. There is one difference: a player can get his money and still win in a few different places. The owner can only win where he is. The player can leave; the owner can’t. So owners chase the players, salaries go up, fans pay, and sometimes owners pay. It is why we are where we are today.

When you look around sports, it is easy to see money everywhere, in everything. Indeed, sometimes it is hard to see anything but money. The fans pay more; the players get more. Some owners get more; some get less. A bigger, broader industry has grown up around sports. All-sports radio, all-sports TV, magazines, newspapers, journals, all with a stake in sports getting bigger, all serve to make sports bigger. There are new arenas, many of them more fun to be in; some not. Players, with lifetime security now at issue, invest in themselves year-round—working out, employing personal trainers, improving themselves. Owners, with more money invested, often with financial institutions as partners and needing to protect their investment, have become more rigorously corporate.