Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (28 page)

The prime minister's great friend is none other than Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League these past eighteen years and a figure who, not unlike Prime Minister
Stephen Harper, causes wildly fluctuating emotions among those he encounters. While the changes in the professional game Bettman oversees have been dramatic—new franchises created in the south, teams moved from Quebec City to Denver and from Winnipeg to Phoenix, the players locked out by the owners for the entire 2004–05 season, the game reinvented to reward skill and speed, a salary cap put in place, Gretzky and Lemieux replaced by Crosby and Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby sidelined with the game's current curse, concussion—Bettman himself seems barely to have changed at all since he took office in early 1993.

He remains, at fifty-eight, a trim, smaller man whose dark brown hair remains precisely in place as well as space. His dark suits are as much a certainty as Dick Tracy's. He speaks with hands that often pound points home with fingers. He moves with an agility fully recovered from last fall's arthroscopic surgery on his knee and, this snowy day in Manhattan, he is off to a hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Florida Panthers.

It is a see-saw game, fast and turning, the crowd in Madison Square Garden rising and falling with every goal, Florida with the lead gained and lost, then the Panthers winning on their own comeback. Fans all about leap to their feet, sag in their seats, scream and sigh as the game moves on. He watches carefully but, watching him, it would be impossible to tell what is happening on the ice or, for that matter, what is happening in his thoughts.

“I never cheer,” he says. He has trained himself not to show emotion during a game. “I can't cheer. If I show emotion one way or the other, people get upset.”

He does, however, from time to time attend NHL games as a “regular fan.” It happens in New Jersey, close to where Bettman will sometimes take his four-year-old grandson—a Devils fan—to a match, the crowd unaware that the unshaven, sunglass- and cap-wearing man in jeans and an old sweater high-fiving with the little kid is actually the commissioner of the league.

This night, however, he is in familiar uniform: dark suit, crisp
shirt, red tie. He sits where the fans sit, and when he moves through the crowds and corridors the reception is, to a Canadian, somewhat surprising. “Great job, Gary,” a man cries out. A woman wants a photograph with him. “Love the product!” a man shouts as he passes by.

What would they shout in Canada?
One man swilling a beer in one of the Garden corridor bars shouts sarcastically from a distance—“Where'dya play yer hockey, Gary?”—but all the rest in those most American of venues are polite and approving.

Bettman's image in the country that calls hockey its national game and treats it as national religion is, at times, as polarized as Sarah Palin's in the United States. He is blamed for everything from the demise of the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets to the league's endless debates on what to do about headshots, one of which is threatening the year, if not the career, of Sidney Crosby, Canada's golden Olympic hero. Bettman has been accused of denying Hamilton its chance at an NHL franchise when BlackBerry billionaire Jim Balsillie was rebuffed in attempts to take over the Pittsburgh Penguins, Nashville Predators and Phoenix Coyotes, potentially bringing an NHL franchise to Hamilton.

His applauders have been less vocal, but there are those who believe if not for Bettman, Canadian franchises might have been lost in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary, perhaps even Montreal and Vancouver as well. “The Canadian franchises as a group have never been stronger,” he says. “Go back to the time period 1999 to 2001. There were tons of commentary, editorial articles suggesting there was only going to be one franchise [Toronto Maple Leafs] left in Canada. And that was something we could never allow happening. Canada is the heart and soul of this game, and this game is too important to Canada. If we couldn't be strong in Canada, we couldn't be strong anywhere.

“I knew that the first moment I took this job. I knew that
before
I took this job. I knew the history and the traditions and
the relationship between hockey and Canada. I mean, people can talk about baseball or football in the United States [but] that pales in comparison to the strength of hockey in Canada, and the importance of hockey in Canada.”

The franchises are indeed much stronger than they were a decade earlier, when it seemed only government intervention could prevent a number of the small-market northern franchises from going under. A combination of the league's Canadian team assistance plan and, most importantly of all, a quickly rising Canadian dollar to par or better with the U.S. dollar has created the reverse situation today: the Canadian teams, by and large, are the healthiest franchises.

Bettman says that the reason he and Harper, a hobby hockey historian, get on so well is that they “share an acknowledgment of the importance of the game to Canada—and the importance of Canada to the game.” He stops short, however, of pledging to move the shakiest U.S. franchises to Canada should those teams fail completely. Harper, as any Canadian politician would, supports the return of the NHL to Quebec City and Winnipeg, which lost their teams in the dire financial years of the mid-1990s. Quebec fans have long hoped that the faltering Atlanta Thrashers might fly north, while Winnipeg has for some time now been perceived as the natural soft landing for the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes, currently owned and run by the league as the search for a buyer continues. While conceding that Quebec City and Winnipeg would have priority should relocations prove the only solution, he cautions both cities not to get too excited by the prospects.

“We don't run out on markets,” Bettman says of the long-standing situation in Arizona. “You only leave as an absolutely last resort. It will turn out all right, one way or the other.” He remains convinced that the current negotiation will produce a new owner and a guaranteed future for the team in Phoenix. “But if it doesn't,” he adds, then “we will have done everything humanly possible to make it work … All sports are at risk if you can't determine who
can be a partner and where your franchises are located, because those are the two most important decisions that any sports league has to make.”

That thinking, of course, was at the very core of Bettman's refusal to accept BlackBerry billionaire Jim Balsillie as a potential owner of several U.S. franchises, including the Coyotes. Balsillie believed that the market and, if necessary, the courts could decide who owned what where, but saw that argument derailed when the league itself elected to take up ownership of the foundering Phoenix franchise. In terms of where franchises are located, Bettman appears equally reluctant to entertain another team in Southern Ontario, despite the clear sense that the fan base is there and there are already three teams located in the Greater New York Area.

Further expansion seems unlikely under Bettman's time. “Everybody tells me we shouldn't dilute the talent base,” he says. “There are also a lot of people who tell me we have more than enough talent to expand. My guess is there will never be a meeting of the minds of everybody on that subject.”

He knows he will never be cheered in Canada—booing heads of sports leagues is part of fan ritual—but says the boos from the stands, not to mention the anonymous web attacks, are very much at variance with what he hears face-to-face with Canadian fans. They like “the product,” as the man at the Garden shouted out. They like the “cost certainty” that came with the salary cap. They realize that the league is much healthier financially, with revenues soaring during his tenure to $2.9 billion this year from $460 million. They mostly like the new rules that opened up the game. And they like that NHLers now compete in the Olympics, of particular import to reigning gold medal winner Canada.

But he still gets it—and will get it again as these comments are dispersed. “I've developed a thick skin about it,” he says. “You can't be thin-skinned and still do whatever you think is right.” He is well used to the most common knock given to all in hockey who have never had their own rookie card—“Where'dya play yer
hockey, Gary?”—and his answer is simple: “They don't pay me to play.”

They do pay him, however, every bit as much as a top player: in the $7-million-a-year range. The multi-millionaire Gary Bettman is a far cry from the kid who used to pack a lunch, catch the subway and use his student card to land a fifty-cent by the rafters so he could watch basketball or hockey while doing his homework.

When he travels nowadays, it is with security—a reality that began during the earlier 1994 half-season lockout when player Chris Chelios angrily said Bettman should worry about his family and own well-being, as some crazed fan or a player “might take matters into their own hands.”

He still ignites anger, though such veiled threats are no longer spoken. But he also inspires enough loyalty that senior staff have largely stayed with him over the years and the various league owners—traditionally individualistic and at times difficult—have stuck by him despite occasional flare-ups.

The greatest example of owner solidarity under Bettman concerns the situation in Phoenix, where the Coyotes (formerly the Winnipeg Jets) have bounced from box-office disaster to the courts to several different potential ownership deals. It was Bettman who convinced the owners that the league itself had to buy the team to prevent Balsillie from taking over the franchise and moving it.

“All sports is at risk if you can't determine who can be a partner and where your franchises are located,” Bettman says, “because those are the two most important decisions that any sports league has to make.”

While Bettman is master of the stock answers that usually match, word for word, what he said months earlier, he can at times become animated and spontaneous, even angry. It infuriated him that people were suggesting that it took a headshot to the likes of league superstar Sidney Crosby to cause the league to take the rising concussion issue more seriously. “I don't buy that characterization,” he says. “In fact, in his case it was a collision.” There was no penalty on the
play when Washington's David Steckel caught Crosby's head after a whistle had blown in the outdoor Winter Classic, played New Year's Day in Pittsburgh. As such, Bettman argues, there was no criterion in place for further punishment or suspension.

“That was a consequence of a physical game,” he says. “As long as body contact is encouraged, and our game is played at a high rate of speed, then you're going to have some consequence.”

In his opinion, Rule 48 that the league put in place in 2010 after a series of controversial hits to the head has worked just fine. The rule banned lateral or blindside hits where the head is the primary point of contact, but stopped far short of the ban on all hits to the head, accidental or not, that other contact sports have and that a great many in hockey have called for since the Crosby injury. “We're still seeing more concussions than we'd like,” the commissioner concedes.

He maintains, however, that the league's track record on dealing with concussions is good, with baseline testing of injured players beginning a decade or more ago. While further work needs to be done to increase the level of safety, the answer does not lie, he believes, in automatic and standard suspensions handed out by the league like parking tickets.

“The acts that need to be addressed by supplemental discipline are like snowflakes,” he believes. “No two are alike. There are always some similarities, but the players' histories are different, the circumstances different, the nature of the incident different, the time of the game different. It's not susceptible to a template or a standardization where one size fits all.”

He says he understands the criticisms and knows that this topic is volatile and emotional. The criticisms he will not accept are the personal accusations that arise with each suspension concerning the league's intentions and, at times, the impartiality of those dispensing the league's decision on justice.

“Don't challenge my integrity,” he says, voice rising. “This is what we do. This is what I do and [deputy commissioner] Bill
Daly does and [league disciplinarian] Colin Campbell does. It is what we do and we do it with passion. You can't function if you blow with the wind.

“Why would you do anything but the right thing, or at least what you believe to be the right thing?”

The 2010–11 season proved to be one of Gary Bettman's most difficult years, with the Phoenix ownership situation unresolved, the Atlanta Thrashers foundering and a huge public outcry over headshots following the Sidney Crosby concussion. Bettman used the general managers' annual meeting in Florida in March to announce a five-step plan to address player safety, including a new testing protocol and steps to improve rink facilities and equipment. The league stopped short, however, of banning all hits to the head. While he may have lost some public support, he maintained the support of the owners who employ him, as they granted him a five-year contract extension. Shortly after, the Atlanta Thrashers conceded defeat and the franchise was moved to Winnipeg, striking a hard blow to Bettman's “southern footprint” strategy for NHL expansion
.

I
f hockey is truly “a man's game,” then why are the games brought to us by Cialis and Viagra?

Erectile dysfunction appears to have become to the modern National Hockey League what Imperial Esso's “Happy Motoring” once was to the Original Six—Viagra plastered to the rink boards, Cialis wink-wink ads filling every stop in play on the television, Levitra promising you'll be ready to play should the coach tap you on the shoulder …

This has been another terrible week for the “man's game.” Despite unprecedented criticism of professional hockey's unwillingness to address a matter that is threatening its players, the situation continues unabated: New Jersey's Anton Volchenkov suspended three games for a headshot to Zach Boychuk of the Carolina Hurricanes; Pittsburgh's Matt Cooke (hockey's serial offender) suspended four games for leaving his feet in an attempt to crush the cranium of Columbus defenceman Fedor Tyutin from behind.