Jack Blatherwick

A word to the PPA’s and MBO’s: Get serious!

Details

Last Updated on Thursday, 06 December 2012 18:45

By Jack Blatherwick
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

For the life of me, I can’t understand how a lockout goes deep into the winter months, when both sides claim to love hockey. Where I come from, the real hockey lovers wouldn’t pass up a cold day in December to extend a childish argument that’s been going on for months. Hey, there’s ice on the pond. Get serious. You’ve both presented your arguments, and you know this will end in a compromise some day. So … compromise.

But, what do I know? Maybe it’s not a childish argument. Maybe this is about real important money, the kind we all worry about – like, food on the table. Since it’s not an argument about physiology or a frozen puck sliding across the ice, and it’s about free market capitalism, I decided to call in Ayn Rand, the expert on such matters. So the rest of this piece is hers. I’m going out to look for a frozen pond.

It’s obvious they don’t understand how the free market works. Right now, there are millionaires on one side of the table and billionaires on the other, and they’re arm wrestling over a few pennies while customers are wondering why they can’t put dollars into the business. The Pampered Professional Athletes (PPA’s) and the Multi-Billionaire Owners (MBO’s) are having a difficult time keeping a straight face, trying to explain why members of the same teams can’t come to an agreement in four months.

“PPA’s?” Since I’m talking about some close friends here, let me use a couple examples to show how far we’ve come from a time when athletes were not pampered. I once heard Glen Sonmor reminisce about his experience as a professional hockey player. Team owner Eddie Shore was a former player, and one of the NHL’s all-time roughians. His fisticuffs were legend. So was the incident when he froze his ear in snow after an opponent slashed it off – then drove hours to have his doctor sew it back in place.

Later, as a team owner, Shore understood the concept of power. Players were not pampered. When they lost a home game, they came in early the next day to clean the arena. This gave them a proper sense of who was holding all the cards. So, on contract-negotiation day, Sonmor reported to the office with all the other right-wingers in the organization and several others who wanted those same jobs next year. They all sat in the waiting room, trying not to stare at each other until the boss finished his coffee. Then, one at a time they were called in to “negotiate.” Agents and unions hadn’t entered the scene yet, so the word “negotiate” simply meant, “Sign on the dotted line, or send the next guy in on your way out the door.”

We Minnesotans met a slick MBO a few years ago when Norm Green breezed into town and bought 51 percent of the North Star stock. He immediately began trimming expenses, firing 70 percent of the staff, and blaming the public for empty seats when his team was losing games right and left.  “We gave out 900 dismissal slips,” he bragged. 

Now that’s an owner who understands Ayn Rand capitalism … if not hockey. Searching for a market with oil money, Green moved the franchise to Dallas, and eventually sold the Stars for tens-of-millions more than he had paid. All those “operating losses” he whined about each year (and wrote off on his taxes) turned into millions in capital gains (not to be taxed at the same high rate as operating profits would have been). Now there’s a little insight into MBO negotiating logic.

Of course PPA’s are the cream of the crop – the best in the world, so they should be paid a lot. In fact, they should be paid whatever the ticket holders are willing to spend. And the MBO’s should make a profit (or capital gains plus tax write-offs). That’s simple, straightforward capitalism. 

But some PPA’s and MBO’s may not have read my books, so let me explain where they’ve drifted far from the free-market philosophy. I’m talking about professional football, basketball, hockey and baseball – and how they extort the public – not the ticket-holders, but the rest of us who can’t afford tickets or wouldn’t buy one if we could. They threaten to leave town if public money isn’t forthcoming to build their expensive new playgrounds. If this sports business were a legitimate free-market enterprise, revenues would cover the cost of salaries and buildings, and public money would not be necessary. 

The Vikings have just about finished their extortion scheme by selling politicians the pie-in-the-sky concept of “economic impact to the community.” We heard this song and dance with the Twins, Wild and Wolves: claims about business revenue for local bars and restaurants, plus the increase in tax base, etc. For all I know it might be true.

But then they stage a lockout, and forget about the devastating economic impact on local businesses and employees. Of course, local tax revenue drops to zero.

So I’ll make a suggestion to the taxpayers who are stuck with the bill, even when the games are locked out: If there is some time remaining in negotiations between the Vikings and the people, I suggest that all this “economic-impact-and-tax-base” language be written into a contract. Then, if there is a frivolous “lockout,” the locals are reimbursed for what was promised before arenas were built. For every game missed, the community is paid, because mortgage payments are not suspended when games are.

I think this would speed up the rate at which folks negotiate in good faith.

Visit Jack’s website at www.overspeed.info.