CHLPA  Self-Interested Rogers Sportsnet Media Goes All Out to Mock Potential Canadian Hockey League Players Association (but it’s probably an idea whose time has come, and eventually will come)

TV and radio media have lately been heaping scorn on the notion of a CHLPA, which bubbled up briefly but then appeared to burst, and this post addresses why the media may be doing it and why a CHLPA should not necessarily be dismissed just because of self-interested media concerns.

(Disclosure: Dan Zorg is not a member of a union, or a lawyer.)

Various sources suggest that CHL players make about $50/week.  Of course, they are billeted and no doubt have living and meal allowances and equipment covered and so on.  But they work very hard for an uncertain future and they aren’t paid anything even approaching minimum wage, which is what at least one would-be CHLPA lawyer or another was saying they should get.  Minimum wage?  What is wrong with that?  What’s in it for the media, the Rogers representatives from Peter Maher to Bob McCown, who lampoon people who think that, hey, maybe players should get paid minimum wage?  Well, keeping their jobs and making sure they make money while players don’t.

After all, it’s not like there isn’t a lot of money in CHL hockey.  The proportion of CHL franchises doing better than NHL franchises is obviously higher.  Why else would the CHL keep expanding?  Why else would a Western CHL team play 72 games a year, or 88% of an NHL schedule, and every bit as gruelling and inane a playoff schedule with seven-game series’?  Why else would teams like the NHL Flames also want to own teams like the CHL Hitmen?  Why else would Rogers Sportsnet enter into partnership with the CHL to broadcast dozens of games per year? 

But CHL players can’t make minimum wage?  And people like Peter Maher and Eric Francis and Bob McCown, who make infinite amounts more than junior players, the vast majority of whom will never make the NHL, think it’s really neat to make fun of a potential CHLPA?  What is in it for them?  Have they been instructed by their employers to mock the idea of a CHLPA?

Have a look at that schedule again.  The CHL is at minimum one, and more normally two or three rungs below the NHL.  But CHL players still play 68-72 games and the huge playoff schedule.  The schedules look wonky, with intense concentrations of games followed by several days off, and bus travel schedules seemingly designed by aliens.  It is not uncommon for teams to play, say, 5 nights in 7, or 3 in 4, with long bus trips in between.  Take just any old example—near the beginning of February 2013, the Prince Albert Raiders will play 4 games in 5 nights.  The first is at home, then they visit Saskatoon, Lethbridge, and Swift Current before returning home, having travelled 1400k in that time.  By WHL scheduling standards, that looks very geographically reasonable.  Still, hockey isn’t like baseball, where you stand around in a field.  Hockey is an intense, physical, aggressive game, and if you’re going to get to the pros, you better be on your game.  Anyone reading this play hockey, or just exercise?  What if I said to you that you’d play four games in 5 nights and ride the buses in between and get to hotels/motels at 2, 3, 4 a.m., etc.?  Is that how an athlete practises, refines, and perfects his/her abilities?  Is that healthy?  Is that how athletes, seeking optimal performance, would actually train?  No, it’s idiotic, and invites injuries, but someone makes a lot of money off of this, and it obviously isn’t the players who provide the entertainment in the first place for $50 a week.

Much has been made of the CHL’s education program—basically, if a player plays a year in the CHL, that player gets a year of tuition at a university.  Good.  But most degrees take four years or more.  How many players actually play four full years in the CHL?  (Anybody ever get injured?)  Would the CHL release those stats, instead of just bragging about how much it “invests” in players (how noble!—not like the league gets anything out of those players), or offering bland aggregates saying the CHL has awarded x 1000 “scholarships”?  And besides, the CHL education program is use it or lose it—don’t go to school within 18 months, and you don’t get those vaunted “scholarships.”  Say you actually did play 3-4 years in the CHL.  Odds are, you’d like to keep the dream of a pro career alive.  After all, hockey is all you’ve known, and it’s unlikely that your schedule and those bus trips have prepared you very well for academics, anyway.  So you might try the ECHL, AHL, Europe, whatever.  But spend barely more than a full season doing it, and poof, that “education program” is gone.  So yes, the CHL’s education program is a good thing—it didn’t used to exist, and it’s a good start.  But only a CHL flack could call it generous, and when one looks at the strings attached to it, it’s hard not to think that the program is designed for PR purposes, if not explicitly to minimize the CHL’s actual educational commitment.  

Elsewhere on this blog, one can find a post I made about the Graham James re-arrest/re-trial.  I certainly didn’t expect to gain anything but flamers out of that one, but I was trying to get at systemic queries, and what one tries to do with things/situations like that of James.  Suppose there had been a CHLPA when James was coaching in the Western CHL? Now, am I saying that the presence of a CHLPA might have stopped a Graham James?  No, I’m not saying something that simplistic.  But think about it.  If a vulnerable young player who knows he can’t go to an abusive, pedophilic, corrupt, immoral etc. coach, or team brass, or who doesn’t have or doesn’t feel he can talk to an agent or recruiter—who in any case want him to get, or to get him to the pros and make money and NOT hear anything bad--or who may have a bit of a messed-up background, etc.—IF that young player knows that at least there’s something like a union representative who can be approached in confidence and can assist in legal matters and so forth, then maybe that young player can get some help.  And what if a would-be predator knows there’s yet that one more level of social/professional/legal observance he’s going to have to get around?  What happened to all the media people who wanted to be tough on crime? It is fairly amazing to me that those who easily revile Graham James (at least when they’re no longer able to vote him coach of the year anymore) are also those most eager to ensure that junior players get zero workplace assistance or representation (such as many even in the private media enjoy).  That is a toughie, that one.  Just what makes the media such anti-union cheerleaders, eager to heap scorn on an idea that could work to players’ benefits in many ways?  Well, look no further than the team owners and networks that drive the media’s every utterance.  What a sad, sad state of affairs.

Media badgerers like Bob McCown made a big deal out of how the nascent CHLPA couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say how many it had signed up and where.  He and his cohorts sympathized deeply with poor David Branch, CHL Commissioner, who really did cast himself as just about the most befuddled and put upon man in the land.  Undeniably, it does look like the CHLPA effort was mishandled and poorly organized, but then again, trying to organize and certify a union of any kind, against media and management pressure, is incredibly difficult.  Trying to organize a union of teenaged kids competing amongst themselves and dreaming of the big time and lottery money is doubly improbable, no matter how much money they’re making for others (and how much, much more ~relatively~ speaking, any potential union executives or lawyers could make out of the deal).  Where’s the media to speak on behalf of the union, or rather, players?  It doesn’t exist, because if such media appeared, that media would be fired by the league and owners and the media broadcasters who pay the owners and the league.  Talk about a closed loop.  According to the Windsor Star, Branch “said that just because there is not a union does not mean the players' concerns will be ignored. ‘We don't think a third party can do it better than us.’”

[Read more: http://www.windsorstar.com/Branch+breathes+easier+union+move+collapses/7493382/story.html#ixzz2BEPm5dvF]

Nope, no conflict of interest there.  Only the league that sells and profits from the players, trades them, releases them, etc.—only the league can really look after them.  What if a member of the Calgary Hitmen wanted to join a potential union—the Calgary Flames, broadcast regionally by Rogers Sportsnet, also own the Heat, the Hitmen, the Roughnecks, and the Stampeders.  Talk about a company store.  Can you imagine how fast you’d end up in Siberia if you indicated a willingness to be represented by anyone but the cartel that owns you?

*IF* the CHL was doing such a wonderful job helping its players “voluntarily” (well, that’s big of them, to help their players “voluntarily”—one only wonders what “involuntary” looks like-- http://www.chl.ca/article/statement-from-the-canadian-hockey-league), then why hasn’t the league splattered all over its websites and affiliates’ websites 100s of success stories about the game and what all the amazing scholarship winners they’ve anointed have gone on to do? 

Who could really provide employment assistance, training, legal advice, abuse counsel, etc.?  A players association could.

Eric Francis of Hockey Night in Canada was another who scoffed at the union idea.  He thought it was a big joke, and chipped in on the FAN590 that he didn’t think Georges Laraque was “very smart.”  Based on what I’ve seen of Eric Francis, I can’t imagine what his qualifications are for assessing the intelligence of others.  Based on what I’ve seen of Georges Laraque, he strikes me as a thoughtful guy, willing to step up and support good causes and his community, willing to get involved in public or political situations, and generally use his minor celebrity both to advance progressive things and, I imagine, also himself (though given the money he made in the NHL, more than many of us will make in a lifetime, it seems to me to be a cheap shot to say that he’s in it for the money or fame when he could just be golfing like many other retired players, instead of hanging out in Haiti doing relief work, say).  (And it is also a fact well-known to any hockey fan that, just as there’s a disproportionate number of catchers who go on to be managers, there’s an unusual amount of tough guys like Laraque who end up being the most articulate and philosophical and reflective about the game they took a small but highly visible part in—the Sheehys, the Grimsons, the Cherrys and Kypreoses—it’s striking how often it is the tough guys who end up being agents and lawyers and coaches and pitchmen and commentators and so on.)  For what it’s worth, Eric Francis is also a big backer of Lance Armstrong, who he still supports because Armstrong has done so much to raise money in the fight against cancer.  So Armstrong, who, like many other athlete/steroid-chemical users who experience long-term or premature life-ending consequences as a result of their drug habits, may well have even gotten cancer partly as a result of the huge amount of cheating and doping he did, he gets a free pass from Francis.  It’s true that cycling’s a dirty sport, but as the voluminous USADA report shows, Armstrong was amongst the dirtiest and most vicious in that sport; he was not only fairly casual (such a prima donna was he) about letting those close to him see him dope, but also a ruthless ringleader (don’t use juice to support Team Lance?  You don’t have a job with Team Lance).  When those who had evidence against him accused him, he sued them, all the while knowing he was cheating, and that other people knew it and had seen it. That, in view of all the counter-lawsuits he’s going to get now, that was smart?  So lessee, we’ve got Laraque, an athlete who maintains a public profile and does good works, and we’ve got Armstrong, a cheating athlete who maintains a public profile and does good works and sues those who know he’s cheating.  In Eric Francis’s view, Armstrong’s still a fine exemplar, but Laraque “isn’t very smart.”  Well, you draw your own conclusions about what makes Eric Francis draw the conclusions he does, whoever’s paying him.

Bottom line: The CHL is big, big money—for owners, for the league, for media rights holders.  Sooner or later, the CHL is not going to be able to get away with paying its employees/junior players on the order of $50/wk (despite magnanimous gestures like feeding them).  Media talking heads, especially those who are themselves owned by private networks, will fight the players they feast off as much as they can, but one day the players will have to get a sop.  What if the World Junior Team asked for a 1% cut of TSN’s revenues?  Can you imagine the storm over that one?  Even if lawyers take .99% of that 1%, the players, and the game and society, would be better for it.  Some of the players who don’t make the NHL might even become lawyers.

--zr