May 1997

SPEAKING OF SPORTS

by Barry Stagg

May 1997

HARD TIMES ON $2 MILLION A YEAR

With hockey season nearly over the various welfare departments all over Canada have to prepare for a rush of new cases. After all quite a few virtually destitute Canadian hockey players will be packing their bags from places like Washington and Boston and Chicago and San Jose. They are heading back to their homes in Canada to survive the off-season after working in humiliating and penurious circumstances across the American border.

Surely poor Adam Oates from Washington or goaltender Ed Belfour from San Jose will need a little boost from the welfare department after trying to scrape by on $2 million or so this season. Their respective teams both dithered about bringing the pay cheque up to some semblance of market value at four or five million or thereabouts. Such is the tough life of the hockey proletariat in these days of capitalist repression.

Pitiful Adam Oates even had to stage a one game strike in Washington when Harry Sinden of the Boston Bruins had the poor taste and even poorer judgment to dispatch Mr. Oates to Washington without having his contract renewed and revised upward. Oates certainly had every reason to be indignant. His contract had only this season and next season to run before it would normally be due. When are the ordinary fans and the employers as well going to learn that hockey players cannot work for that pittance that seemed so adequate last month when that new three year contract was signed. When a hockey player and his commission salesman/player agent decide that more money is needed then contracts become paper airplanes.

Prime Minister Chretien must be wary about calling an election before the Stanley Cup playoffs end. With all the coverage that these out of work hockey players can get during the bull sessions with Don Cherry and Ron MacLean there may be just too much adverse publicity on the television screens about the destitute flowing north across the border. Images of professional hockey refugees lining up for re-entry into the Canadian welfare state will not play well for the Liberals in their quest for re-election. A cautious Prime Minister Chretien will think long and hard before he risks having the spectre of an out of work Mark Messier filling the televisions screens during the run up to voting day. Sir, you are forewarned.

Surely those prominent in the labour movement, possibly the Newfoundland Federation of Labour, will organize some sort of Foreign Expeditionary Force of prominent labour leaders and organizers to get down to the United States. Those selfless missionaries of the common man can do something about organizing a more militant form of trade union to represent these poor wretches. Without timely assistance, exhaustion and humiliation may cause them to look to their disability insurance for some relief from the exquisite agony brought on by the chronic embarrassment of being underpaid in American money. Maybe then Newfoundland's version of Big Labour can stop harping about the evils of nasty volunteers helping their Newfoundland neighbours and taking away jobs from public service workers. There are bigger fish to fry when gentlemen like Oates, Belfour and Messier are suffering. Get the expense accounts ready to ride.

Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.


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