I'm a union guy and I can tell you this: Every step over a hated slab of sidewalk, every foam cup pushed into a chain-link fence reminds you that in the eyes of management, you don't matter. You are the help and when you cleave yourself from your employer, you find yourself underfinanced, unloved and alone.
When you're on strike or locked out, you learn it's not your newspaper, it's Quebecors', or Torstar's or the Aspers'. It's not your plant, it's Ford's.
They started it or bought it from some member of the succession of people who did. They run it and the people responsible will damned sure feel less impact on their household budget than you will on yours.
The NHL's hockey playing fraternity had forgotten that. They are now being reminded.
Every day, another player with a mortgage on two houses he couldn't otherwise dream of and a wife or girlfriend (or both) who is sick as hell of him, scratches his head and wonders what he's in this for.
Every day, a player accustomed to five-star hotels and private jets finds himself bussing through a mountain pass in Switzerland. He is tarted up like a circus pony to play in front of people who shout things he can't understand in a country he would have never fathomed visiting, let alone working in.
GOOFING AROUND
Tuesday, after an October spent goofing around Europe or watching the leaves turn, the NHLPA and its 30 player reps will meet in Toronto.
The truth will reverberate through the room. The player is not the game anymore than vanilla is Baskin-Robbins.
They're right, all of them, the Owen Nolans, the Rhett Warreners, the Mike Commodores, the John Maddens and all the rest of the players who have chafed at the non-talks between the union and the league.
That the union under Bob Goodenow has got too big, too bloated, too self-important, is the central dynamic of the lockout. That ownership couldn't spell puck without the p and the k matters not a lick. It's still their game.
This is a union that spoils for conflict, a union that forgot they lost the last war, the 1994 lockout, but won the peace. Last time, owners landed a contract that included a hard cap for rookies and pegged free agency at 31 but some sharp work by the NHLPA prompted a decade of unparalleled salary escalation.
It's easy for NHL players to think themselves on par with the titans who pay them and who sheepishly ask for their autograph. And it's natural for the players to credit their leadership for stratospheric gains that have tripled the annual salary to over the last decade.
Actually, the players' principal ally is the man they vilify now.
For the players, the Gary Bettman era was a spectacular bubble of good fortune, ushered in on the shoulder's of Bettman's vision of an NHL that somehow belonged in the top four North American sports.
Bettman presided over an era of 23 new arenas, each with a pressing mortgage to be paid.
He welcomed a new generation of owners, many who thought, as did Dallas Stars owner Tom Hicks, that if you paid Alex Rodriguez $252 million US over 10 years, Bill Guerin at $45 million over five looked like a steal.
Owners foolishly extended the CBA to guarantee NHLPA participation in future Olympics thus lengthening the players' honeymoon.
The NHL, a league with negligible television revenue, pays its employees demonstrably more than the NFL ($1.8 million in 2004 compared to $1.17 million). Yet, the NFL completely subsidizes the $75 million it pays in salaries through television money.
Alas, for the NHLPA, nobody stays that stupid that long.
Ownership has smartened up, or at least turned to the CBA to solve its own self-inflicted problems.
This isn't a fight at all and it won't be until the owners have to go work in Switzerland or St. John's or until they are cut off from other sources of capital. Enjoy the wait.
The question for the players is how to save face.
That's what they should be talking about Tuesday.
If they don't, their next meeting should be for a mutiny.
