by Barry Stagg
March 1996
THE SPORTING LIFE
The Michael Jordans and the Wayne Gretzkys of professional sports have brought a new era of selfishness, greed and vanity to the spectator sports of North America. Team play and the idea of subordinating a player's aspirations to his team have virtually become jokes. Take for instance the vain efforts of Wayne Gretzky to trade himself from the floundering Los Angeles Kings to a team that will more richly reward him for his fading ice-level efforts. Side by side with the great Gretzky we have Jordan, the walking marketing tool of professional basketball whose career moves including his wonderfully wrong-headed decision to play baseball are all based on the profitable promotion of Michael Jordan.
Jordan summed up his sports philosophy recently when he indicated that in effect present day basketball players look upon the professional sport for what it could do for them whereas "old fashioned" basketball players focused upon the sport itself. In other words the old maxim "the game's the thing" has been replaced by "the money's the thing". That this should be the present state of professional sport in 1996 comes as no surprise to anybody who spends any time at all scanning the sports pages and wondering about the wonderful overlap of sporting news and the business pages. After all, every major professional sport on this continent has gone through strikes or threatened strikes and the overpaid and largely self-deluded prima donnas in baseball, football and hockey have all carried out supposedly blue collar "work stoppages" to make the point that their pain-ridden and poverty-stricken working lives must be made better by the sacrifice of long suffering ticket buyers.
Fortunately, some sports fans, those fans who can still afford tickets to the games, have started to rebel by staying away in ever increasing droves from some of the more mediocre sporting events put on by the masters of production. Dwindling attendance all throughout the overblown sports empires of American and Canadian cities has sent a shudder through the board rooms of players and owners alike.
It is curious to note that with the popularity of scandal mongering amongst sports writers these days, there has been little written about the obvious scandal and criminality of disgraced and convicted sports magnate Bruce McNall. McNall's crimes which amount to fraud on a massive and premeditated basis go right to the heart of the National Hockey League. After all it was McNall who purchased the young and ascending Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers . It was McNall who initiated and negotiated the latest NHL expansion which conveniently brought him a $25 million dollar payment from the Anaheim Mutts at what was apparently a very convenient time in his life of crime. While old news is recycled about the business methods of Allan Eagleson, with some of the supposed revelations going back more than twenty years, the McNall fiasco is treated as if it were a cancer for which someone fortunately had found a convenient antidote.
It will be interesting to see where the tentacles of McNall's fraudulent reach extend when and if the present cabal of muck-raking sports journalists get around to finding the courage to write about current events involving people who are still powerful and still in places of privilege in the sporting industry.
The McNall era is not over in the National Hockey League and it is incredible that a convicted criminal who was chairman of the National Hockey League Board of Governors when scandal descended upon him is regarded as virtually a non-person when it comes to the predatory urges of the so-called investigative journalists who are now patrolling the borders of morality and decency in professional sports.
When sports journalists are reluctant to even write about the selfishness of prima donna athletes like Jordan and Gretzky it is preposterous to hope that any would wish to tackle a power structure and its players that are the still fresh products of the putrid McNall era.
The sporting life: there is no life like it.
Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.