Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  His applauders have been less vocal, but there are those who believe if not for Bettman, Canadian franchises might have been lost in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary, perhaps even Montreal and Vancouver as well. “The Canadian franchises as a group have never been stronger,” he says. “Go back to the time period 1999 to 2001. There were tons of commentary, editorial articles suggesting there was only going to be one franchise [Toronto Maple Leafs] left in Canada. And that was something we could never allow happening. Canada is the heart and soul of this game, and this game is too important to Canada. If we couldn’t be strong in Canada, we couldn’t be strong anywhere.

  “I knew that the first moment I took this job. I knew that before I took this job. I knew the history and the traditions and the relationship between hockey and Canada. I mean, people can talk about baseball or football in the United States [but] that pales in comparison to the strength of hockey in Canada, and the importance of hockey in Canada.”

  The franchises are indeed much stronger than they were a decade earlier, when it seemed only government intervention could prevent a number of the small-market northern franchises from going under. A combination of the league’s Canadian team assistance plan and, most importantly of all, a quickly rising Canadian dollar to par or better with the U.S. dollar has created the reverse situation today: the Canadian teams, by and large, are the healthiest franchises.

  Bettman says that the reason he and Harper, a hobby hockey historian, get on so well is that they “share an acknowledgment of the importance of the game to Canada—and the importance of Canada to the game.” He stops short, however, of pledging to move the shakiest U.S. franchises to Canada should those teams fail completely. Harper, as any Canadian politician would, supports the return of the NHL to Quebec City and Winnipeg, which lost their teams in the dire financial years of the mid-1990s. Quebec fans have long hoped that the faltering Atlanta Thrashers might fly north, while Winnipeg has for some time now been perceived as the natural soft landing for the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes, currently owned and run by the league as the search for a buyer continues. While conceding that Quebec City and Winnipeg would have priority should relocations prove the only solution, he cautions both cities not to get too excited by the prospects.

  “We don’t run out on markets,” Bettman says of the long-standing situation in Arizona. “You only leave as an absolutely last resort. It will turn out all right, one way or the other.” He remains convinced that the current negotiation will produce a new owner and a guaranteed future for the team in Phoenix. “But if it doesn’t,” he adds, then “we will have done everything humanly possible to make it work … All sports are at risk if you can’t determine who can be a partner and where your franchises are located, because those are the two most important decisions that any sports league has to make.”

  That thinking, of course, was at the very core of Bettman’s refusal to accept BlackBerry billionaire Jim Balsillie as a potential owner of several U.S. franchises, including the Coyotes. Balsillie believed that the market and, if necessary, the courts could decide who owned what where, but saw that argument derailed when the league itself elected to take up ownership of the foundering Phoenix franchise. In terms of where franchises are located, Bettman appears equally reluctant to entertain another team in Southern Ontario, despite the clear sense that the fan base is there and there are already three teams located in the Greater New York Area.

  Further expansion seems unlikely under Bettman’s time. “Everybody tells me we shouldn’t dilute the talent base,” he says. “There are also a lot of people who tell me we have more than enough talent to expand. My guess is there will never be a meeting of the minds of everybody on that subject.”

  He knows he will never be cheered in Canada—booing heads of sports leagues is part of fan ritual—but says the boos from the stands, not to mention the anonymous web attacks, are very much at variance with what he hears face-to-face with Canadian fans. They like “the product,” as the man at the Garden shouted out. They like the “cost certainty” that came with the salary cap. They realize that the league is much healthier financially, with revenues soaring during his tenure to $2.9 billion this year from $460 million. They mostly like the new rules that opened up the game. And they like that NHLers now compete in the Olympics, of particular import to reigning gold medal winner Canada.

  But he still gets it—and will get it again as these comments are dispersed. “I’ve developed a thick skin about it,” he says. “You can’t be thin-skinned and still do whatever you think is right.” He is well used to the most common knock given to all in hockey who have never had their own rookie card—“Where’dya play yer hockey, Gary?”—and his answer is simple: “They don’t pay me to play.”

  They do pay him, however, every bit as much as a top player: in the $7-million-a-year range. The multi-millionaire Gary Bettman is a far cry from the kid who used to pack a lunch, catch the subway and use his student card to land a fifty-cent by the rafters so he could watch basketball or hockey while doing his homework.

  When he travels nowadays, it is with security—a reality that began during the earlier 1994 half-season lockout when player Chris Chelios angrily said Bettman should worry about his family and own well-being, as some crazed fan or a player “might take matters into their own hands.”

  He still ignites anger, though such veiled threats are no longer spoken. But he also inspires enough loyalty that senior staff have largely stayed with him over the years and the various league owners—traditionally individualistic and at times difficult—have stuck by him despite occasional flare-ups.

  The greatest example of owner solidarity under Bettman concerns the situation in Phoenix, where the Coyotes (formerly the Winnipeg Jets) have bounced from box-office disaster to the courts to several different potential ownership deals. It was Bettman who convinced the owners that the league itself had to buy the team to prevent Balsillie from taking over the franchise and moving it.

  “All sports is at risk if you can’t determine who can be a partner and where your franchises are located,” Bettman says, “because those are the two most important decisions that any sports league has to make.”

  While Bettman is master of the stock answers that usually match, word for word, what he said months earlier, he can at times become animated and spontaneous, even angry. It infuriated him that people were suggesting that it took a headshot to the likes of league superstar Sidney Crosby to cause the league to take the rising concussion issue more seriously. “I don’t buy that characterization,” he says. “In fact, in his case it was a collision.” There was no penalty on the play when Washington’s David Steckel caught Crosby’s head after a whistle had blown in the outdoor Winter Classic, played New Year’s Day in Pittsburgh. As such, Bettman argues, there was no criterion in place for further punishment or suspension.

  “That was a consequence of a physical game,” he says. “As long as body contact is encouraged, and our game is played at a high rate of speed, then you’re going to have some consequence.”

  In his opinion, Rule 48 that the league put in place in 2010 after a series of controversial hits to the head has worked just fine. The rule banned lateral or blindside hits where the head is the primary point of contact, but stopped far short of the ban on all hits to the head, accidental or not, that other contact sports have and that a great many in hockey have called for since the Crosby injury. “We’re still seeing more concussions than we’d like,” the commissioner concedes.

  He maintains, however, that the league’s track record on dealing with concussions is good, with baseline testing of injured players beginning a decade or more ago. While further work needs to be done to increase the level of safety, the answer does not lie, he believes, in automatic and standard suspensions handed out by the league like parking tickets.

  “The acts that need to be addressed by supplemental discipline are like snowflakes,” he believes. “No two are alike. There are always some similarities, but the
players’ histories are different, the circumstances different, the nature of the incident different, the time of the game different. It’s not susceptible to a template or a standardization where one size fits all.”

  He says he understands the criticisms and knows that this topic is volatile and emotional. The criticisms he will not accept are the personal accusations that arise with each suspension concerning the league’s intentions and, at times, the impartiality of those dispensing the league’s decision on justice.

  “Don’t challenge my integrity,” he says, voice rising. “This is what we do. This is what I do and [deputy commissioner] Bill Daly does and [league disciplinarian] Colin Campbell does. It is what we do and we do it with passion. You can’t function if you blow with the wind.

  “Why would you do anything but the right thing, or at least what you believe to be the right thing?”

  The 2010–11 season proved to be one of Gary Bettman’s most difficult years, with the Phoenix ownership situation unresolved, the Atlanta Thrashers foundering and a huge public outcry over headshots following the Sidney Crosby concussion. Bettman used the general managers’ annual meeting in Florida in March to announce a five-step plan to address player safety, including a new testing protocol and steps to improve rink facilities and equipment. The league stopped short, however, of banning all hits to the head. While he may have lost some public support, he maintained the support of the owners who employ him, as they granted him a five-year contract extension. Shortly after, the Atlanta Thrashers conceded defeat and the franchise was moved to Winnipeg, striking a hard blow to Bettman’s “southern footprint” strategy for NHL expansion.

  “A MAN’S GAME”

  (The Globe and Mail, February 12, 2011)

  If hockey is truly “a man’s game,” then why are the games brought to us by Cialis and Viagra?

  Erectile dysfunction appears to have become to the modern National Hockey League what Imperial Esso’s “Happy Motoring” once was to the Original Six—Viagra plastered to the rink boards, Cialis wink-wink ads filling every stop in play on the television, Levitra promising you’ll be ready to play should the coach tap you on the shoulder …

  This has been another terrible week for the “man’s game.” Despite unprecedented criticism of professional hockey’s unwillingness to address a matter that is threatening its players, the situation continues unabated: New Jersey’s Anton Volchenkov suspended three games for a headshot to Zach Boychuk of the Carolina Hurricanes; Pittsburgh’s Matt Cooke (hockey’s serial offender) suspended four games for leaving his feet in an attempt to crush the cranium of Columbus defenceman Fedor Tyutin from behind.

  It was a week in which one elite player, Marc Savard, packed it in for the season due to concussion, a week in which rumours spread concerning the game’s most elite player, Sidney Crosby, possibly losing the remainder of what should have been his greatest season to concussion.

  And it was a week in which one sensible player, Boston’s Andrew Ference, was attacked on Hockey Night in Canada for daring to say a headshot delivered by teammate Daniel Paille on the Dallas Stars’ Raymond Sawada was “a bad hit.” A wonderful week, indeed, to head into the CBC’s Hockey Day in Canada, in which the national game will be sentimentalized, lionized, glorified and worshipped.

  It is a great game, but it surely needs some work. The problem is that headshots have become the global warming of hockey, a polarizing issue that pits the disbelievers against the believers, with no results to show for all the braying back and forth. Hockey Night in Canada, with its vast array of old-school thinkers, has become Fox News. The mainstream media, with their editorials demanding action against headshots, have become Al Gore. So nothing ever seems to get done.

  The loudest shouting has come from the naysayers. Mike Milbury has groaned about the “pansification” of the game and dismissed those who disagree with him as “soccer moms.” Don Cherry—who began his media career with Rock’em, Sock’em videos—blows a gasket over Ference speaking his mind, suggesting it breaks some imagined “code” of the sacred hockey dressing room.

  The quieter voices are more numerous, but have gained little. The NHL did bring in a specific rule against blatant headhunting, but still lags far behind other team sports when it comes to offering protection for vulnerable brains. For weeks the debate has been about what happened to Sidney Crosby’s head, whether the concussive blow was delivered, perhaps by accident, by Washington’s David Steckel during the New Year’s Winter Classic or by intent when Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman crushed him into the boards a few days later.

  No longer. Instead of looking back, the hockey world now looks ahead: When will Sidney Crosby come back? Will he come back at all this year? He himself says he expects to, but can offer no date. “There’s no timetable,” he said on Thursday. “I hope I’m back.”

  So should the league. Crosby was in the midst of a seminal year. He was running away with the scoring race. He had just come off a twenty-five-game scoring streak when the first blow landed at the Winter Classic. His only serious rival over the past few years, Alexander Ovechkin, had been reduced to star status from superstar—of which hockey now had only one.

  While hockey is a team game and golf an individual sport, comparing Sidney Crosby’s impact on hockey in 2010–11 is not that much of a stretch from Tiger Woods’s impact on golf in the years leading up to his self-inflicted blow to his image. When Woods departed the golf scene for a significant time, the PGA went into freefall in terms of interest and TV viewership. The falloff would not be so dramatic if Crosby were lost for the season, but it would be significant. The Crosby–Ovechkin storyline had been compelling for years; that storyline is, for the moment, lost.

  It is no stretch at all, however, to compare Crosby’s concussion problems to those of earlier players such as Paul Kariya and Eric Lindros. Kariya, it will be recalled, was on the cusp of NHL superstardom when he was struck down. Lindros had reached NHL superstardom when he suffered the first of several concussions. Neither was ever to reach those heights again.

  It could be, before all this is over, that Sidney Crosby’s greatest contribution to the game will not be the Olympic gold medal–winning goal of a year ago, but his sad situation forcing the NHL—the braying naysayers included—to wake up to what hits to the head have done and are doing to hockey.

  It’s not a man’s game at all. It’s a child’s game. And it is what has become dysfunctional.

  LOST AT SEA: HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA

  (The Globe and Mail, October 2, 2010)

  “Hockey Night in Canada has become a program about itself.” There is nothing new to this statement—apart from the fact, perhaps, that it has now been typed and printed—as it has been said now for some time by those who were once part of the CBC’s flagship sports program and is often said by those still involved with it.

  Think of the recent HNIC as the Seinfeld of TV sports, a program that, in the final analysis, is really about very little, at times nothing, but the characters, often outrageous, who come and go between commercials—or, in this case, between periods. If only it were as funny. It has become a program about itself, when it should be about the game.

  No one—apart, perhaps, from nostalgic Toronto Maple Leafs fans—is asking the program to happily motor back to the era of Murray Westgate and Ward Cornell, but just as the iconic hockey show evolved over the years from 9 p.m. starts and the dreaded telestrator, it is time to rethink a program that is vitally important to Canadians but has clearly lost its way.

  While the production values of the broadcast, including much of the play-by-play work, remain world-class, the package has become not only predictable but seems, at times, barely aware that viewers have tuned in to see a game. For some time now, the TSN package has been far more informative and, most significantly, far more on topic.

  It is difficult to say what happened to such a once-venerable show, but something undeniably has over the past few years. The game invariably takes a back seat
to the Don Cherry–Ron MacLean grand entry, to the ramblings of the Coach’s Corner segment in the first intermission and to the views of new additions to the show who often seem so stuck in the game’s past that, unbelievably, Cherry at times emerges as the voice of reason.

  Cherry is a most difficult subject to address. His national popularity is undeniable, his humour, and that of his gifted partner MacLean, often quick. But he seems only vaguely interested in today’s game and, despite the endless “I told you so’s,” has largely lost sight of how today’s game is played. His sermons on kids getting themselves and their sticks out of the way of shots are now ancient strategy; today’s defensive game is all about shot blocking, the goaltender often the last to see the puck. The program no longer reflects public taste when it comes to officiating. HNIC seems to hate the new rules, while polls have claimed 85 percent of fans embrace the crackdown on obstruction.

  The listing of military and police tragedies on Coach’s Corner is seen by some as an honest tribute by a sentimentalist who truly cares (my own view) and by some as a sly trick to ensure invulnerability from criticism. This facet of the show cannot possibly be addressed, deciphered and fairly dealt with in such short space, but it is still fair to say it is a reach from the show’s mandate to bring the national game to a national audience.

  Analysis, partly because of these heart-wrenching interludes, now falls to others. Recent additions such as Mike Milbury—Don Cherry on training wheels—and the excitable P.J. Stock seem more out of the last century than this one. While regular panellist Pierre LeBrun brings superb reporting to the grouping—and the brief new media section offers welcome insight—too often the talk disintegrates into the tired “It’s a man’s game” chatter and National Hockey League Players’ Association minutia rather than the striking and fundamental shifts the game has undergone since the lockout and the salary cap.