Pro Hockey and Social Justice

p>On Feb. 16, Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League, announced the cancellation of the remainder of the hockey season. 

This action marked the first time that a major sports league in North America canceled an entire season. The two sides in the labor dispute could not agree on how they would share $2 billion.  As a result, the league was shut down and the pie evaporated.

After following the protracted, bitter and futile labor negotiations between the owners, represented by Bettman and the National Hockey League Players’ Association, I have changed my image of hell.  I now think of hell as a place of limitless luxury and billions of dollars readily available.  But the devils and the new arrivals cannot agree on how the money is to be divided.  Consequently, the various luxuries recede, like food from the mouth of Tantalus, while both sides go on for all eternity calling each other greedy, arrogant and intransigent.

The negotiations were a sham.  The players’ association did not believe that many of the owners of the 30 franchises were losing huge amounts of money.  Yet, its representatives repeatedly refused to examine the books, study the report of an independent auditor or retain an independent auditor of their own choosing.

Nonetheless, four teams filed for bankruptcy and the league was spending an exorbitant 75% of its revenues on player costs. 

“A $350-million loss is a $350-million loss,” Chicago Blackhawks’ Owner Bill Wirtz said. “No matter how you want to do it, vanishing cream is not going to expunge those losses.”

 In a last-minute attempt to salvage an abbreviated season, the league owners, at considerable financial risk to themselves, agreed to remove linkage between revenue and player salaries, though they insisted on a $42.5-million salary cap for each team.  Although this offer provided room for an average salary of approximately $1.5 million for each player, the players’ union rejected it. 

As a result, the NHL is hurled into a dark void with the possibility looming of canceling part or all of next season.

Various polls indicate that slightly more than 75% of fans side with the owners and have little or no sympathy for the overpaid players who cannot see life in any broader terms than their own paychecks. 

When Bob Goodenow, executive director of the Players’ Association, was asked about fan sentiment, he responded by stating that he had been engaged in a labor dispute and not engaged in a public relations campaign.  His implication is that had he been involved in a PR campaign, he would have won the fans over to his side.

Apparently he believes public relations is more effective than vanishing cream. Nonetheless, people can see what is transpiring. Goodenow’s smoke screen cannot obscure reality for everyone.  He stated that if people think players are greedy, it is because “the league has tried through multiple public relations initiatives to paint players as being greedy.”

 Does Goodenow really think that hockey fans (as well as impartial observers who may not be hockey fans) are so alienated from reality that their convictions are formed solely on the basis of professional word-spinning?  Does he think that he alone sees reality in an objective way?

 There is one group of people who are not bamboozled by word-spinning or self-serving rhetoric.  This is the group of people in various service positions allied to the NHL — from ticket takers to beer vendors — who have lost their jobs as a result of the hockey shutdown. 

They know they are out of work and no Goodenow spin is going to convince them otherwise.  They know their losses came about because of shortsightedness, myopic self-interest and greed.  These people are numbered in the thousands (There are approximately 700 hockey players in the NHL). 

They have no representatives to bargain on their behalf, little public sympathy and no media status. They are real people who have lost real jobs and find themselves in real difficulties.

It is a painful irony to realize that they are the innocent victims of the unreal “negotiators” who resort to unreal strategies in order to achieve unreal ends.

Never once did I see or hear mentioned during the long labor dispute the phrase “social justice.” Rather, words such as “greed,” “stupidity,” arrogance” and “intransigence” were common coin throughout the discussion. 

If we are to learn one salutary lesson from the abortive hockey dispute, it is that social justice depends not upon the availability of money, but on the presence of virtue.  Social justice cannot flourish in the absence of humility, gratitude, generosity and concern for others.

It seems unlikely that the National Hockey League’s players and their union representatives will suddenly be animated by virtue.  In the grander scheme of things, it is a relatively unimportant matter whether the league and its owners ever find a common ground to agree upon.  What is and will always remain important is for people to relate to each other virtuously. 

Labor-management relations do not always need to be vicious.  Social justice itself is a virtue and its flowering bed must also be one of virtue.  We cannot expect social justice to emerge form a context of greed and foolishness.

Dr. Donald DeMarco

is professor emeritus at Ontario’s St. Jerome’s

University and adjunct professor at Holy Apostles

College & Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.