CHAPTER TEN

Gary Bettman never played the game. And he is American, a fact that has never gone unnoticed by Canadians. He attended Cornell University, where hockey is the biggest sport on campus, but hockey had not been a priority in his life before he became the NHL’s commissioner. When he took on that role in 1993, it instantly became his job to run a league that dominates the direction of the sport, worldwide, for all the players and fans who absolutely love the game. Bettman has not always had the trust of those players and fans.

He was also taking over a league that did not function much like a league, which made the NHL just like every other major North American professional sports league. For a long time, these leagues had operated as little more than a collection of individual teams with very individual owners, who ran what they owned the way they wanted to run them. Their message to the league officials whom they employed was: “Schedule the games, hire the referees, and get out of our way.” The teams made their money locally; it was certainly not the leagues that put “bums in seats,” or company logos around arenas and stadiums. Leagues were understood by team owners as an expense—apparently necessary, but one that needed to be minimized.

This perception began to change with the National Football League in the 1960s and 1970s. The league’s commissioner, Pete Rozelle, believed that a strong NFL would make a strong Chicago Bears or New York Giants even stronger, and he reinforced his case with team owners when he negotiated a big new network TV contract for the league.

David Stern believed the same of the National Basketball Association. Many of the NBA’s franchises had been weak for decades when Stern was hired as the league’s commissioner in 1984. He knew that the NBA’s great stars and great teams gave presence—and financial value—to the rest of the players and teams, who were not great. Again, it was a big network TV contract that persuaded the owners of the league’s value. Bettman had been third-in-command at the NBA before he was hired by the NHL, and had learned its lesson: a strong league is critical to the success of its teams. His problem, as it had been for Rozelle and Stern, was that for this to happen, he needed to sign a big TV contract in the U.S., which—given that hockey was nowhere near as popular as football, baseball, and basketball—was far from certain.

Bettman had a shaky first decade. He did get his initial big TV contract in the U.S.—at least, big by NHL standards—but that was followed by one that was smaller. The league had decided even before Bettman was hired that, to be relevant in the U.S., the NHL needed a fully national U.S. footprint. It developed a “Southern Strategy,” led and implemented by Bettman, which by expansion or by franchise transfer saw teams move into San Jose, Dallas, Anaheim, Florida, Colorado, Phoenix, Carolina, Nashville, and Atlanta; later Columbus and Minnesota, were the only northern exceptions. The results were decidedly mixed.

Bettman also had some bad luck. The Canadian economy turned downward, Canada’s federal and provincial governments ran up large deficits, commodity prices fell, and the value of the Canadian dollar plummeted from just over 80 cents to the U.S. dollar in February 1993 when Bettman began to 63 cents in August 1998, to its all-time low—61.79 cents—in January 2002. Most of the revenues for Canadian teams were in Canadian dollars; all player expenditures were in U.S. dollars.

Toronto was a rich enough city for the Leafs to cope with the currency gap and to compete with U.S. teams for free agents; Montreal and Vancouver less so. Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa had great difficulty. Their teams and their fans were losing confidence; they weren’t sure when and how they could compete at the top again. All of this—combined with the rise of European and American players in the NHL, Canada’s disappointing finishes in world and Olympic championships, and the departures of the Quebec Nordiques and Winnipeg Jets to the U.S. in the mid-1990s—made this American who had never played the game a very unpopular person in Canada.

Bettman wasn’t much more popular in the U.S. New cities got their teams, but many of the teams couldn’t seem to emerge from their apparently perpetual struggle to survive. It seemed that the commissioner’s job, much of the time, was to keep the many franchise fires from getting out of control, then find new owners to stabilize things a little until the next fire popped up. With all this uncertainty, franchise values were not increasing the way they were in other sports, which didn’t make team owners happy. And what made them even less happy were player salaries. Despite the fact that the NHL was a distant fourth in popularity among professional sports leagues in the U.S., its players, on average, were paid more than players in the NFL—and not much less than those in Major League Baseball. In fact, their salaries had increased by a larger percentage the previous decade than those of players in all of the other leagues except basketball. The NHL also was the only league, other than MLB, that had no salary cap. To NHL team owners, this wasn’t the way things should be.

The existing collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) was set to expire in 2004. The owners were looking for greater revenues, higher franchise values, and lower expenditures. They wanted a big network TV contract in the U.S., and the wage certainty that a salary cap would bring. It was Bettman’s job to deliver this. These were office issues that fundamentally affected the on-ice game: how it is played; the playing life and non-playing lifestyle of the player; and, most crucially, who controls the game.

Bettman is a businessman with a lawyer’s training and instincts. This is who the league hired, it is what Bettman wanted to be, it is what the league got. In his new role as commissioner, he attended games and was visible in the seats. He watched; he listened; he learned. He learned enough to ask the right, probing, revealing questions. He weighed arguments; he applied logic. But he was not an expert in hockey. He hadn’t been a player. He wasn’t Canadian. He couldn’t pretend he was any of these things, and he knew how ridiculous it would be to try. Sports fans can detect poseurs light years away.

To the owners he would be businessman and lawyer, and to the fans he would surround himself with “real hockey guys.” Heart and soul ex-players, their pedigree displayed in stitches and limps earned in the trenches of the game. Canadians—maybe even those from small towns—who had lived the story of the game, who were authentic, who for Bettman would be the game’s institutional memory and its conscience. Bettman could learn the language of hockey, but they knew its idioms. Anything about the game itself went through them. This only made sense; it was also publicly defensible. If ever Bettman got too lawyerly or said something cringeworthy, he had people around him to bring him back to the real world: To how things are done. To how hockey players think. To how the game is played.

Meanwhile, hockey continued to change. The Russians had arrived in full force. Not only as solo acts—Sergei Makarov in Calgary, Alexander Mogilny in Buffalo, Pavel Bure in Vancouver—but also, in Detroit, the “Russian Five”—Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov, Vyacheslav Kozlov, Vladimir Konstantinov, Viacheslav Fetisov. This was a whole five-man unit that had grown up with passing, where players without the puck were more important than the player with it, where greater and greater speed could be realized. There the future was on display on NHL ice surfaces for players, coaches, fans, and the media to see—giving players and coaches the opportunity to do the same and to experience all of its possibilities themselves. That regular season, the Red Wings won an NHL record sixty-two games.

The speed of the game was picking up. Shifts got even shorter—about forty-five seconds long—and the game got faster still. Even the language of hockey changed. Goal calls changed: “He shoots, he scores!” became “Shoots, scores!” or just “Scores!” There was no time to say more. Phrases like “ragging the puck” and “second wind” all but disappeared. With so many players chasing the puck carrier, there was no time to “rag” it, and players, moving at a sprint, had to get off the ice before their first wind expired. A new phrase appeared in the mainstream hockey lexicon: “finishing your check.” After a puck carrier makes a pass, a checker continues towards him and runs into him, finishing the check. The phrase didn’t even exist in the 1950s—nor even during much of the 1960s. The players, still playing two-minute shifts, coasting, circling, weren’t close enough to each other to finish their checks.

And one telltale story from the 1940s: of the great Bill Durnan, hockey’s first and only ambidextrous goalie. On a play coming at him from an angle, he liked to hold his stick on the short side, the side nearest to the shooter, to enable him to catch shots with his other hand to the long side. The game moved slowly enough that when the puck was passed from side to side, he had time to switch his stick from hand to hand.

Fighters also changed. The heavyweights arrived—Bob Probert, Mike Peluso, Stu Grimson, Gino Odjick, Todd Ewen, Donald Brashear, Krzysztof Oliwa, Georges Laraque. Even fighters shorter in stature—Tie Domi, Rob Ray, Kelly Chase, Paul Laus (who had thirty-nine fights in the 1996–97 season)—were heavyweights. Most still tried to contribute fully as players, to get more ice time, to help their teammates in other ways, and after practice and in the summer they worked to build up their skills. But they also trained to become better fighters. By the 1990s, it was hard to pretend anymore that fights were the inevitable result of a game that moved superhumanly fast inside an enclosed ice surface, where collisions were unavoidable, where anger resulted, where wrongs had to be righted, where a fight was a release of potentially dangerous pent-up emotion.

For why were these fighters so angry? Because their team was behind and they needed to go out and “change the temperature of the game”? Because their talented teammates were angry at being hit, and as fighters they were angry on their behalf? These fighters weren’t on the ice long enough to be angry for any other reason. Fighting wasn’t a release of emotion for them—it was exactly the opposite. It was a fighter’s chance to add emotion to the game. But since fewer fighters fought more fights, since it was becoming undeniable their role was to be a goon, their role would need to be romanticized. If you weren’t fighting to right your own wrongs, you had to be fighting for your team, for your teammates. Literally. Risking life and limb for them. Literally. Fighters now mostly fought those who had committed the wrong to someone else, or fought other fighters. There was a code. If fighting wasn’t about anger, it had to be about honour.

Fighters of the 1950s and 1960s couldn’t lose a fight, because then they would have to prove themselves again and again, and fight more often. If they won routinely and devastatingly on the rare occasions they fought, they earned a reputation and others stayed away. Nobody, after all, wanted to mess with Gordie Howe. In the 1970s, the Flyers changed that. Dave Schultz didn’t win all of his fights, he just kept coming back at his opponents until they weren’t willing to fight anymore. It was the same with Bob Kelly, Don Saleski, Jack McIlhargey, and whoever the newest and toughest on Philadelphia’s roster was. But by the 1990s, a fighter had to win every fight again. There weren’t many fighters, and they were all very good at what they did. They could do serious damage, and be seriously hurt. It was gunfighter against gunfighter: a showdown. The fights weren’t emotional; they were circumstantial—if your team was behind by two goals but there was still time for a comeback, you fought; if your team was behind by more than two goals and the game was lost, you fought; if a star teammate was hit and that wrong needed to be righted, you fought—this was about pride, justice, or changing the tone of the game. For a fighter, if his team is down two goals and he is put on the ice, what is he going to do to help? Score two goals? Fighters fight and dancers dance. By the 1990s, fighters couldn’t lose, because winning fights was what they did.

For the fighter, everything continued to escalate too. He played less often; he had to make his mark faster and with more certainty; he had only one way to keep his place on the team. He had to fight guys as big and tough as he was. Six-foot-four, 230 pounds. Bare knuckles. Fighting hurt more than before. No matter the injury or fear or pain, a fighter had to be ready. He had twenty seconds to prove himself. Painkillers and anti-anxiety medications became parts of his life.

The names of former player-fighters who showed symptoms of brain injury, sometimes before, sometimes after retiring have started to appear—Bob Probert, Wade Belak, Derek Boogaard, Mike Peluso, Marc Potvin, Stu Grimson, Gino Odjick, Todd Ewen. Fewer concussions were reported in earlier decades. There were fewer doctors around a team to diagnose them. Players and coaches were less aware. Players continued to play because that’s what players do. But with the game moving more slowly in those days, with fewer collisions and collisions of less force, with fewer fights—maybe fewer concussions had been reported because there were fewer concussions.

Bettman wasn’t a hockey guy, so he depended on his hockey guys—who saw the much faster, more exciting, more dangerous present through the prism of a very different past. Through a past of legend and lore; through their own memories, like generals who fight the next war using the last war’s strategies, employing war horses against machine guns. Bettman had grown more confident about his upcoming collective bargaining agreement (CBA) showdown in 2004 with the players over a salary cap; but he was no more confident about the feel he needed for the game on the ice. When Bettman is not sure of himself, he retreats into his lawyer’s self. He listens to his critics to pick holes in their arguments; to create doubt, to keep them at bay, to avoid the larger issue about which he is less certain. A salary cap was where he should put his attention, he knew. It was the one big issue that would determine so many others—for the future operations of the game and for himself.

Other aspects of the game were becoming crucial, too. Players always give everything, and they will give whatever the everything is at any moment. Commitment, time, training off-ice and off-season, more hours, more months, shorter shifts, skating faster, colliding harder and more often, fighting more punishingly, blocking more shots, playing with more injury and more pain—whatever it takes. By the early 2000s, everything was a lot more than it used to be.

It was in this ever-escalating game, in this NHL, that Steve would play his career.