Roger Pires Jan 17,, 2013
When he's not offering his take on daily life, Roger Pires spends his days as a computer systems analyst. It's not exactly a glamorous calling but hey, it pays the bills. He enjoys hockey, canoeing, snowshoeing, and spending as much time as he possibly can outdoors. He lives in Udora with his wife and two kids, who are his prime inspiration for Ravenshoe Ramblings.
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The puck stops here
A funny thing happened the other day. I was attending a lawyer’s convention and a hockey season broke out. You can gather two things from this: 1) that I gulped down way too much eggnog over the holidays and 2) the NHL lockout is finally over. So given this rapturous moment in mankind’s history we should all be shouting from the rooftops and prancing around our TV sets hurling rose petals into the air. Right? Well, not this disgruntled hockey fan. Not now.
If we understand anything about ourselves as Canadians it’s that we love our hockey. We can’t help it. Normally, the phrase “it’s in our genes” can be neatly filed under the heading, “Text Book Examples of Hyperbole”. But not in this case. Aside from grousing about the weather, hockey is our most hallowed national obsession. We’re all familiar with the refrain about identity, our national fabric, and how puckdom is the granddaddy of cultural icons. And since forever it seems, the National Hockey League has been the ultimate manifestation of our love affair with a sport that borders on religion.
Perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate what image of our beloved game we tattoo on our hearts. Every time I see the highly-paid mug of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman peering over the podium at a fawning media, I have an uncontrollable urge to cancel my subscription to TSN. And when he and his cadre of Manhattan attorneys begin to spew platitudes about “making the sacrifice” and “sharing the pain” their mock sincerity is drowned out by the rumbling in the pit of my stomach.
This isn’t the first time billionaires and multi-millionaires have engaged in a tug of war over an obscene pile of money. The last time they squared off, the league and its players felt their interests were best served by hanging up the skates and keeping the corporate boxes locked up for an entire season. The combatants appeared before the press dutifully and contritely apologizing to the fans who feed the kitty for such a regrettable outcome. But the NHL was broken and everyone felt the long-term health of the game those of us north of the 49th love so much could only be repaired by taking these drastic measures. So we bit our lip and accepted the newly scorched landscape in the interests of progress. Next season would usher in a brave, new world of salary caps and fiscal restraint we haven’t seen since Bing Crosby crooned, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
Meanwhile on the other side of the border - where hockey’s popularity ranks somewhere between tiddly-winks and root canal - nobody noticed. Shockingly, the outraged citizens of Nashville failed to amass in front of the Grand Ole Opry to protest the cancelling of the season. The NHL’s Houdini act was of grave concern to the editors of the Nashville Tennessean. How would they fill the empty space on page 36 of the sports section, right below the ad for “Pinky’s Pizza: Get a free Slurpee with every order of wings!”?
At first the prophecy was realized. The marginal player could no longer afford to buy his own Lear jet. And the Sultan of Brunei’s reign as the highest paid dude on the planet was once again safe from guys with smiles that looked like bowling spares. All thirty teams could now compete, not just those whose payroll qualified them to be China’s largest trading partner. Everything was hunky-dory in puck paradise.
Of course, it didn’t take long for the fig leaves to drop. If there is one thing we can all be certain of it’s the absolute nature of greed. You can set your diamond-studded Rolex by it. Soon, the owners were leering jealously over each other’s shoulders. And with no real mechanism in place to save these profligate spenders from themselves, they began to engage once again in financial suicide. Smelling blood, player agents swooped in for the kill. Negotiations descended into absurdity:
“My client scored twenty goals last year - a breakout season. He’s entitled to an eight-year extension on his contract and veto rights in the naming of your grandchildren.”
“But half the goals bounced in off his butt because he’s too big for defensemen to move.”
“OK Genghis Khan, here’s the deal. If you don’t sign him, your pal over there in the next yacht will do it. Then you’ll be sorry. And I notice his ivory tower is higher than yours.” Fighting words if there ever were any.
So we fast-forward to the winter of 2012/13 and the score is once again, Greed 10, The Fans 0. The mea culpas have been trotted out and this time the aggrieved parties have concluded that maybe a three billion dollar pot of gold – no matter how you split it - is worth playing for after all. Now all they have to do is convince John Q. Public in the Arizona desert to fork over a week’s wages to watch Alex Ovechkin make twice his annual salary for twenty minutes’ work. Good luck with that. Of course we know that love is blind here in hockey’s homeland. Yeah we’ll be mad for a while. But as in every lover’s spat, we’ll soon kiss and make up. All will be forgiven.
Or will it? It took them half a century but they’ve finally achieved the impossible: they’ve caused this life-long, die-hard hockey fan to turn his back on the NHL. At least for now.
