Hockey lovers should throw pucks at Bettman until he goes to hell or the NBA

Yes, there's no paucity of subject material today, what with Mitt and Al and Sandy all vying for our attention. But let us speak of something truly important: the ongoing, contemptible and suicidal lockout of the National Hockey League players by the rapacious, contemptible and incredibly stupid NHL owners and their front man, Gary "Wanna" Bettman.

Readers of WWW know that Walt is a hockey fan. Perhaps the proper tense is "was", not "is". And not because of the absence of hockey from North America's arenas and TV channels. Rather, I am (present tense) a fan of hockey as it was (past tense) in its glory days. I refer to the era from, say, 1945 through 1967, although a Montréal Canadiens fan (which I'm) would doubtless extend the period of glory to the end of the `78-`79 season.

Since then, the fastest, most manly, most exciting team sport in the world -- a sport of speed, grace and power -- has been "modernized" and "improved" to suit the tastes of the denizens of regions more suitable for beach volleyball -- the good ole boys who like NASCAR, arena football and roller derby. Hockey has been transmogrified into a cartoon-like spectacle that combines the sporting qualities of "professional" wrestling with the excitement of test cricket.

If you're a fan of real hockey, think of what you've had to endure to watch today's shoddy facsimile of the game you love:

• outlandishly exorbitant ticket prices
• months and months of virtually meaningless regular-season games
• the destruction of intimate, tradition-rich rinks
• their replacement with mall-like vanilla structures whose main function is to generate luxury-box revenue and put your seats a mile up in the rafters
• the proliferation of "sales points" and "food courts" to fleece you by peddling overpriced junk
• the high-decibel aural assault you must suffer with every visit to the rink
• the diminishment of the quality of every team via runaway expansion
• the cavalier tossing-off of the traditions you love via the "bringing up to date" of uniforms and the annual procession of pointless rule changes
• the creation of a legion of new teams in cities you don't care about
• the disappearance of teams from the cities you do care about
• the liquidation of age-old rivalries to accommodate the gigantism of a league grown too unmanageably huge
• hockey in June, and
• the dumbing down of the game as a whole to teach it to yet another new generation of potential fans in distant hot-weather climes.

Ah yes, the rantings of a Canadian pissed off that Americans control Canada's national winter sport. Walt hears you saying that. But those words were written by Americans, Jeff Z. Klein and Karl-Eric Reif, sometime residents of the great hockey town of Buffalo, who have written about the game they love for the New York Times, the Village Voice and the Hockey News. 

And get this! Messrs Klein and Reif wrote The Death of Hockey, from which that excerpt is taken, in 1998 -- 14 years before Bettman's latest lockout!

I call it "Bettman's" lockout because he ordered and orchestrated it, in a third attempt to get the NHL players to give up some of the share of revenue they wrung out of the owners after Bettman's previous attempts to break the National Hockey League Players Association (the players' union).

Bettman is not a hockey man, never was. He is a New York Jew labour lawyer, whose previous experience was in the management [obviously not playing! Ed.] of the NBA.  Of Bettman it was said, "Someone handed him a hockey puck once, and he spent two hours trying to figure out how to open it."

Klein and Reif quote an op-ed piece by Stu Hackel, a former NHL director of communications, written during the 1998 Stanley Cup final:

When the present regime [Bettman and his minions] came to power in 1993, they moved to "fix" the game and the business with an army of executives from other sports and fields. Their unspoken theme was that hockey people had made a mess of things and they were going to show how it was done.

Their modernization has included a damaging lockout [the first of three], an on-ice officials' strike, four franchise relocations, two realignments, a flattening of licensing growth, a merry-go-round of rule changes, an ill-conceived venture into the Winter Olympics [Klein and Reif -- and Walt -- disagree on this point], unmanageably soaring salaries, escalating ticket prices, too many empty seats, the specter of four more diluting expansion franchises, lots of red ink, and now a drop in television viewership on both sides of the border.

One trusts that these are all temporary conditions or problems of growth, but if this were politics, an incumbent with that record might have trouble getting reelected.

That was in 1998. But hockey is evidently not politics -- not by a long shot -- and things just got worse and worse and worse. And now the National Hockey League is out of business. Is this a temporary condition? The removal of Mr. Bettman -- not just from the negotiating table but from any position whatsoever in organized hockey anywhere in the world -- would be a good way to begin the resuscitation of the best of all sports.