Numbskulls, Hooligans and Losers – Welcome to the NHL

It’s springtime, the Toronto Maple Leafs are again out of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the powers-that-be who run the National Hockey League are eyeing the next stop on hockey’s long-time mission to conquer the United States. The destination? Las Vegas, which is where the NHL Awards show will be held next month.

Hockey in Las Vegas makes as much sense as it does in Phoenix, Nashville, Atlanta, or any number of other U.S. cities where the culture of hockey is non-existent. Curiously enough, NHL franchises in Phoenix, Nashville, Atlanta and the like teeter on the brink. The one in Phoenix, of course, has filed for bankruptcy, despite the league throwing in millions to try and keep the leaky ship afloat.

Ever since the NHL expanded in 1967, it’s been under the illusion that hockey matters in the U.S. I’m surprised that those Americans who run the NHL don’t grant a franchise to General Motors or make Obama Chairman of the Board in Phoenix and have the U.S. taxpayer rescue “an essential industry.” That would make as much sense as everything else they’ve done over the years.

Back in 1982, I wrote a piece for The Financial Post Magazine called ‘Is Hockey Healthy?’ The NHL had just absorbed four teams from the rival World Hockey Association (WHA), an upstart league that had signed such NHL stars as Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe – and for one season a 17-year-old phenom named Wayne Gretzky – and had raided and decimated several NHL teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs among them. With the WHA gone, good times were supposed to be here again. The NHL, in its wisdom, was again eyeing the huge U.S. market with its millions of sports fans and potentially huge TV revenues.

For that article, which was a financial look at the NHL, I interviewed several NHL owners, including Harold Ballard of the Maple Leafs, Peter Pocklington of the Edmonton Oilers, and Ed Snider of the Philadelphia Flyers. Snider impressed me because of his honesty. He said the league didn’t have any central planning, its marketing was awful, unlike other major sports leagues the teams shared nothing which resulted in have and have-not franchises, and this gem: “In the U.S. we are considered a fringe operation.” He also said Ballard was bad for the game.

As for Pocklington, he said the league had installed franchises in American cities where they didn’t have a hope. I later mentioned this to then NHL Commissioner John Zeigler, who promptly blew up at me over the phone and went ballistic.

It’s now 2009 and little has changed. Ballard and Snider have both passed on, and Pocklington was recently arrested in California on charges of bankruptcy fraud, which makes him the latest in a long line NHL men who got into trouble with authorities. The list includes the aforementioned Harold Ballard and his Maple Leafs partner Stafford Smythe, one-time NHL Commissioner Clarence Campbell, former Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall, former players union president Alan Eagleson, and such owners as John Rigas of the Buffalo Sabres, Henry Samueli of the Anaheim Ducks, and William Del Biaggio III of both the San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators.

Aside from the fact that a number of crooked fingers have been stuck into the NHL over the years, the league has been plagued by this so-called ‘vision’ of American millionaires and billionaires who think the future of pro hockey is to be found in the United States. The list of failed, and in some cases still struggling, U.S. franchises would fill a page in National Geographic: Oakland Seals, Atlanta Flames, Kansas City Scouts, Cleveland Barons, Colorado Rockies, Hartford Whalers, Carolina Hurricanes, Phoenix Coyotes, Nashville Predators, Columbus Blue Jackets, to name a few.

Franchises in such cities as Pittsburgh would have moved long ago if they didn’t land superstars Mario Lemieux and, more recently, Sidney Crosby. And even Original Six stalwarts such as Boston and Chicago were in serious trouble until their team’s on-ice fortunes turned around. The NHL has planted and supplanted franchises in U.S. cities where the game has no tradition, little if any following, no understanding, and no appreciation. It would be like putting a multi-million-dollar cricket operation in Montreal. But the league has done this over and over again.

Consider this. New York City and environs, with a population of about 15 million people, has three NHL hockey teams – the New York Rangers, New York Islanders, and New Jersey Devils. The Greater Toronto Area, with a population of about 5 million, has one – the Toronto Maple Leafs. If we used simple math, that 3:1 ratio might make sense, but it doesn’t make sense because when the number of hockey fans is the measuring stick, there is no comparison.

How about Southern California? It also has three teams – the Los Angeles Kings, San Jose Sharks, and Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Does Southern California have more hockey fans than the GTA, or better still, than Southern Ontario? Of course not. It’s not even close.

The biggest hockey market in the world is Toronto. The arena is always full and the team always makes buckets of money even when the product stinks. Forbes Magazine penned the value of the team at $448 million U.S., making it the NHL’s richest team, despite having the highest ticket prices in the league and not winning the Stanley Cup since 1967.

Today it’s front-page news all over Canada that Jim Balsillie, billionaire co-founder of Research In Motion (RIM), has put in an offer to buy the now bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes and move the franchise to Southern Ontario. You can rest assured that NHL President Gary Bettman will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.

Former Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider was right. In the U.S., the NHL is not only fringe, but is regarded as little more than a circus. In Canada, however, the game is entrenched in the country’s culture and psyche. Neither of these things will ever change. And now the NHL is taking its awards show to Las Vegas, probably with the hope of landing a franchise.

Roll the dice.

Class and Ass Athletes

In 1992 I was writing my novel Gift of the Bambino, which is about a young boy and his grandfather, and how they are connected by baseball. The novel has a lot to do with Babe Ruth and baseball in the old days. While doing my research, I attended a reunion of the Lizzies, which was an organization of boys’ baseball and basketball teams in Toronto throughout the first half of the 20thcentury. My own father was a member of the Lizzies in the 1930s.

Perhaps 200 men attended that dinner reception, most of them old-timers. I sat down at a table, and began talking with the man next to me, who immediately asked what someone my age was doing at the reunion. The Lizzies, after all, had disbanded in 1946. The man was none other than Goody Rosen, who would pass away a couple years later, but to this day I am eternally grateful for that chance meeting with him.

Rosen was the first Canadian to play in a major-league All-Star game, which happened in 1945 when he hit .325 for the New York Giants and was the third leading hitter in the National League. He had arrived in the majors in 1937 as a rookie with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The first-base coach for the Dodgers that year was George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth.

The Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the greatest power hitter baseball has ever known, had retired as a player in 1935, but two years later the Dodgers brought him back as their first-base coach. And Goody Rosen proceeded to tell me all about Babe Ruth, who believe it or not had the locker right next to him in the Dodgers’ dressing room.

I whipped out a pen and started taking notes, and believe me, I couldn’t write fast enough. Rosen told me he had been entrusted with keeping Ruth’s humidor, which encased the Babe’s precious cigars.

“I understand he was quite a rabble-rouser,” I said.

“Yes he was,” said Rosen. “He was a good person though.”

And he was. When you write historical fiction and spend far too many hours doing research, you learn a lot about your subject. Today, I consider myself something of a Babe Ruth aficionado.

Ruth hit his first pro home run as a minor-leaguer with the AAA Providence Grays in Toronto on September 5th, 1914, and that home run was central to my novel. A couple years ago, I organized an event at Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto islands to unveil a plaque commemorating that achievement. The New York Yankees were in town to play the Blue Jays, and both teams were represented at the unveiling. We also had Ruth’s grandson Tom Stevens on hand.

I remember when Hank Aaron passed Ruth in 1974 to become baseball’s career, home-run champion. Ruth finished his career with 714 round-trippers, and Aaron would finish with 755. Hank Aaron has always been a consummate gentleman, a humble superstar who hit 30 or 40 home runs every season for over 20 years. It was an ugly stain for baseball when Aaron, a black man, received death threats because he dared to best the most famous record in sport. But he handled that the way he handled everything – with guts and class. Still, as good as Aaron was, he couldn’t come close to Ruth as a power hitter; witness the extra4,000 at-bats it took for him to better Ruth’s mark.

I have done many interviews about Babe Ruth and baseball, and like to say how Ruth was a man who hit all those home runs withperformance-diminishing substances. Like alcohol. It’s true. For most of his career, he smoked, drank too much, never paid attention to all the junk he ate, and wasn’t one for the gym. Indeed, one wonders how many home runs he might have hit had he taken care of himself. And maybe he wouldn’t have died at 53.

Today, baseball is badly diseased. It might even be terminal. Alex Rodriguez, better known as A-Rod, was until recently seen as the great hope who would one day replace the stigma of Barry Bonds as baseball’s all-time, home run king. But as everyone knows now, Rodriguez has admitted that when he was with the Texas Rangers he was on steroids. He had to admit it, because it’s been established that he did, in fact, take them.

No one has ever accused Alex Rodriguez of being a class act. He’s not. He’s just another in a long line of spoiled, obnoxious athletes. They seem to come off an assembly line. Perhaps zillion-dollar contracts have that effect.

Barry Bonds is another. He passed Aaron in 2007, and wound up with 762 homers. From my vantage point as a sports fan and writer, this man is unquestionably the most obnoxious athlete I have ever seen. The son of former San Francisco giants star Bobby Bonds, he spent his boyhood hanging around the likes of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, which isn’t a shabby start if you want to be a ballplayer.

Bonds was to appear in a U.S. court on March 2nd, but his trial has now been postponed at least until July. He may wind up behind bars for lying about his alleged steroid use when appearing before a Grand Jury, and I for one won’t lose any sleep if he goes to jail. But if perjury is the crime, it better be a big cell. He could one day be joined by Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and even a few pitchers with names like Roger Clemens.

What is the (sports) world coming to? When my son was growing up, he idolized Wayne Gretzky. If #99 had ever been connected to drugs, the kid would have been crushed. During his heyday with the Edmonton Oilers, Gretzky once volunteered to be the official spokesman for an anti-drug organization. He said he would gladly take a drug test every day of the week. I wrote a newspaper column about that, and praised him. A couple weeks later a letter arrived from the Edmonton Oilers. It was from Gretzky, who thanked me for the article.

Babe Ruth and Goody Rosen wouldn’t be impressed with what is going on now. Something tells me Hank Aaron isn’t either. There are really only two kinds of pro athletes – class and ass. Today there are too many of the latter.

The Olympics and the Saudis

Imagine that you are a woman who can run 100 meters in a shade over 12.5 seconds just like Michaela Kargbo of Sierra Leone does. Or that you’re a middle-distance specialist who can do 800 meters in two minutes flat like Tetiana Petliuk of Ukraine. Or a long-distance runner who can match the sub-33-minute performance of Dulce Maria Rodrigues of Mexico in the 10,000 meters. The only problem is that you are a woman from Saudi Arabia and so, are not allowed to compete.

While I certainly got caught up in the brilliance of such athletes as swimmer Michael Phelps and sprinter Hussein Bolt at the Beijing Olympics, for me the biggest story of the games (that didn’t seem to get a whole lot of attention) concerned the Olympic team from Saudi Arabia. But I suppose that’s because this exposes the blatant hypocrisy of the entire Olympics movement.

In 1964 the Olympics were held in Tokyo. Leading up to those games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that South Africa would be barred from the games because of its apartheid policies. The IOC said this decision would be overturned only if South Africa renounced racial discrimination in sport and ended its policy of not allowing competition between black and white athletes. South Africa then said it would include seven non-whites on its Olympic team, but that wasn’t good enough for the IOC. South Africa was out. The IOC, after all, was an organization steeped in principle and fair play.

For almost three decades following South Africa’s ouster from the Olympics, that country was a touchy subject as far as the Olympics were concerned. At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, more than two dozen countries boycotted the games because New Zealand’s cricket team had been touring South Africa. Some of the countries that took this stance included such leading bastions of human rights as Libya, Iraq, and Iran.

In 1991, South Africa finally repealed its apartheid laws, and the next year at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, it officially returned to the Olympics fold with great aplomb. Nevertheless, for many years the IOC stood its ground on this issue about discrimination in sports and insisted on taking the high road. And why not? It was merely upholding its own constitution.

The Olympic Charter is unequivocal in what it says about discrimination in sport. The section called Fundamental Principles of Olympism states the following: “The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.”

It also states this: “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”

Well, Saudi Arabia clearly violates the Olympic Movement. So what was a country like Saudi Arabia doing in Beijing?

Of course, the issue of Saudi Arabia goes far beyond excluding women from its Olympic team. In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to vote, buy property or travel. They are not to be seen. The country is the very antithesis of a liberal democracy since no one is even allowed to practice any religion except Islam. It’s against the law.

While it may be naive for Western leaders to preach democracy and human rights to countries and cultures where such things are alien, there is no mistaking the Olympics credo. It’s written in stone. So where is the IOC on Saudi Arabia? What happened to all those noble principles that the organization embodied during almost three decades on the South Africa file? I’ll tell you what happened. Oil.

Saudi Arabia is home to one-quarter of the world’s known oil reserves. What’s more, while all that oil is flowing out of Saudi Arabia, a lot of American and Western money is flowing in.

Surely no one in their right mind would call China a leading purveyor of human rights, and it isn’t. While the country has certainly accomplished a great deal in recent years, what was the Tiananmen Square massacre all about? It has been expunged from the history books, not only in China where it never got into the history books, but even here in the West. It is forgotten.

Some voices in the Arab world are courageous enough to speak the truth about Saudi Arabia, although though they are few and far between. One of them is that of Saudi journalist and scholar Ali al-Ahmad who last May wrote these words about the Olympics in the International Herald Tribune: “Bar countries that bar women athletes.” Indeed.

Never mind dreaming that Saudi Arabian women will compete on the track. How about the diving board? Or, God forbid, beach volleyball? Hell, these women can’t even drive a car in their own country, which is a long way from parading around in a bikini.

In the U.S., especially since 9/11, it is said that security will always trump economics. I don’t know if security will always trump economics in the Olympics, but we may very well find out in 2012 when the next summer games are held in London. That will be a security program like the world has never seen before. But one thing is for damn sure. In the Olympics, economics will trump principle every time.