NHL's followers are victims of their leaders
Union members pay for blind loyalty
DAMIEN COX
HALIFAXIt was significant news in these parts that five count 'em, five Nova Scotians were among the 40 players named to attend a training camp for Canada's under-18 team this week.
One of them, sniper James Sheppard of Lower Sackville, is already being talked up a great deal, not quite in Crosby-like terms but certainly as a prominent possibility to be a major part of the next generation of Canadian hockey stars.
It is to be hoped that generation, joined down the line with other burgeoning hockey talents from the United States and Europe that we have yet to hear about, will learn the hard lessons from the generations that came before when it comes to their professional careers if they become part of the NHL Players' Association.
Lesson No.1: Sheep get slaughtered.
For the NHLPA, this was the case pre-1990 when, under the leadership of Alan Eagleson, many players were silenced, bullied and cowed by Eagleson's hardminded leadership and failed to ask the necessary questions.
If it is true any group with voting power gets the leadership it deserves, the union back then deserved to be treated as it was by Eagleson, who ultimately was convicted for his financial manoeuvrings with the union and its pension money.
Fifteen years later, it has been, in some ways, déjà vu all over again for the players' union. Nobody has accused Bob Goodenow of illegalities of any kind and it is true that for more than a decade his unrelenting drive to raise player salaries made the athletes he led wildly rich.
But when it came to the labour struggle in which the union is still engaged, one in which they have been locked out of their jobs for 10 months and have lost more than $1 billion (U.S.) in salaries, once again the majority of players declined to even try to understand where their paid executive director was taking them.
All you had to do over the past months is ask a player a few questions, even a union rep, and invariably it became crystal clear that they had done little critical thinking of their own and could only mouth union propaganda.
Remember Scott Walker, a veritable poster boy for the honest, hardworking hockey player, appearing on TSN's Off the Record and sarcastically comparing the NHL's insistence on a salary cap to a parent trying over and over to force a child to eat vegetables?
Within days, the union had caved on the cap. Hundreds of players, including Walker, one supposes, were left looking as if they had no idea what their union was doing.
Whether under Eagleson or Goodenow, NHL players have yet to forcibly and permanently grab control of their own union, one founded on some very worthy principles 38 years ago. It cost them in the pre-1990 era and it has cost them again.
Humbled by the owners in this round of collective bargaining, forced to accept not only a salary cap but linkage, as well as a 24 per cent across-the-board pay cut, it is almost funny to hear union members and even some media people try to argue that the players are looking to cut a deal now because they love the game.
As if they really have a choice any more.
For months, these same voices shouted that the owners would crack, or that the end game of the Bettman administration was always to reach a stalemate and then force replacement players down the throats of unsuspecting hockey fans.
That never really made sense and now that it has been proved to have been an incorrect supposition from the start, it's been quietly dropped. But that was what Goodenow and his lieutenants were selling to the players last summer and fall and they bought it unquestioningly.
Just as if it was 1980 and Eagleson was doing the selling.
If players had reason to believe in Goodenow, they also, based on history, had very good reasons to be skeptical and to make sure dissenting voices were heard.
Remember last fall when a handful of players like Steve Thomas and Mike Commodore chose to question the direction of the union?
They were crushed and silenced and, in some cases, forced to recant.
In recent months, it became almost sad to hear once-defiant players whining about the unwillingness of the owners to bend, as if it should suddenly have become the owners' responsibility to bail out the players from the untenable corner into which they had painted themselves.
When this lockout is finally over, the players' association must sit down and go through a painful self-examination and try to understand how once again their union was essentially hijacked by a small group of strong-willed individuals and paid employees with the broader interests of the majority shoved aside.
Some should ask, for example, why, on the day the season was cancelled in February, was there not a union representative in New York at least available to meet with the league when there was possibly a deal to be done that might well have been superior to that which they will soon accept?
This union must find a way to establish a more lively and vibrant democracy.
Over the past 38 years, being blind followers has cost these fine athletes too much.
