As President Obama takes to the podium tonight to discuss the problems of declining social mobility and rising inequality, it’s worth asking what do the NHL and its players do to give back and is it enough?
We make them millionaires, and while hockey players are often known for not publicizing their charitable acts, it is important for the league to understand that as the gap between the richest and the poorest grows, people will become increasingly frustrated with parting with their hard earned money to give it to corporations and athletes.
But should they become frustrated?
The common fan might lament the exorbitant salaries paid to today’s players but most don’t ever really think about it.
People with the talent capable of playing in the NHL are extremely rare. The fact is that there are less than a thousand jobs in the NHL and there are over seven billion people on earth. Adjust for the fact that it’s a men’s league and your odds of making the NHL are something like 333 in a billion. Close enough – I’m no mathematician, and obviously you could eliminate some people and make better odds, but you get the point – that they (the players) possess an uber rare skill for which there is massive demand and are as such entitled to earn a significant portion of the revenue created by this skill.
Consider also that being a professional athlete is one of the only ways to climb the social stratosphere. Bad news: unless your parents are rich, you have similar odds to making the NHL as you do to ever becoming rich. American Dream aside, there are so many checks and balances in the system to prevent you from ascending it, that we ought maybe to be happy for athletes for their being essentially normal guys who have found a way to game the system.
Consider also that the cost of tickets, TV deals, and merchandise is strictly beholden to the supply and demand chart. Networks pay billions for TV rights and Corporations buy hockey teams because the supply is minimal and the demand massive. In a world that is increasingly depressing – crime is down, but unemployment and poverty are up as the recession rolls into its what fifth, sixth, seventh year? – the diversion of professional sports becomes more, not less important. Besides the NHL and its brethren, can you name any other businesses that have increased revenues since 2008? I am sure there are a few, but not many. Diversion is recession proof, obviously.
So what this means is that the demand for hockey is crazy. That means it’s profitable, which means that corporations and people who are already well-off use the NHL to become even wealthier and thus contribute to the growing gap between the rich and poor. Since that is an inevitable byproduct of a successful league, perhaps we shouldn’t begrudge the players their gigantic salaries – if the money isn’t going to the players then it is just going to go corporations and guys who already have so much money that they were able to buy a 100 million dollar toy called a hockey team in the first place.
My point here is that there is a very real chance that as people become more cognizant of the gap between the rich and the poor, as frustration builds towards the inevitable backlash against greed, that millionaire athletes will make an easy but unfair target. People want to watch and follow sports – it’s a distraction from day to day life and a way to live vicariously through people who are living the dreams they had to give up as real life set in. But they have to keep in mind that if the players don’t get this money, people who are already rich will get it. They need to remember that athletes – unlike the majority of other rich people – weren’t born that way and that even if you give five million per year to a guy like Mike Ribeiro, it’s still better than having it go to corporation.
You think this would be common sense, but I seem to remember the last lockout had a lot of people on the side of ownership. Those people completely miss the point that it’s not that the players NEED more money, it’s that no money can be made without them and they deserve more of it than the owning corporations do.
I think it is important that when the income equality gap has become so wide that the richest 88 people have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion (half the world), when it has become so wide that the President is forced to address it in the State of the Union Address – that it then becomes vital for leagues like the NHL and their players take steps to address the issue as well. Not just because politically it is the smart decision, but also because it’s the right thing to do.
The majority – the vast, vast majority – of fans of the NHL, NFL, NBA and MLB cannot afford to attend the games of the teams they love in the cities they live in. My family has a house and food and we aren’t doing too badly, but I can’t afford to attend an NHL game and I am not even living in poverty. In the United States one in five children live in abject poverty – they don’t know where they will get their next meal. Why doesn’t the NHL have a campaign to lower this number in each city they play in? Just for starters.
I know that athletes do a lot in their communities. Whether it is visiting hospitals or giving out money to charities or even just making themselves available, NHL athletes are probably the best athletes that there are. Don’t get me wrong here. I know they do a lot of good. But they could do more.
Maybe don’t have your players taped playing credit card roulette, maybe ask them not to drive around in Bentleys. No one is saying that they shouldn’t enjoy the rewards that come with making it to the NHL, but why doesn’t anyone talk about the fact that the players on the Coyotes, Suns, Diamondbacks and Cardinals are all basically millionaires who make their living in a city with over half a million people living in poverty?
In the future, greed is going to be looked down upon the same way that people now look at drunk driving. There is going to be a backlash to towards professional athletes. I am not saying there should be, but it’s bound to happen. I guarantee it. The league and its players would do well to get out in front of it. Do more for the communities, not the bare minimum, and publicize it better. As the NHL has been the first and best league at addressing the rights or feelings of homosexual players, it should also be the league at the forefront of the fight against poverty.
Individual players should also do more to appear less greedy and more generous. It is simply not possible for the government to meet all the needs of the people. The people who are rich though – they can if they want to. There’s no reason the athletes of Phoenix couldn’t, for instance, chip in ten million to give to a hospital, or buy houses for all the single mothers in the worst spots in town etc. They do a lot. Don’t get me wrong. But every single one of them who drives a Bentley or a Porsche could do more.
------ Game Preview
Tonight’s game sees the Kings visit the Coyotes. The Kings are one of the league’s best teams but have lost five of their last six. They did though shutout the Sharks 1-0 on Monday.
The Coyotes look to get back in the win common after a strange and undisciplined game Sunday vs. the Canucks. Jordan Szwarz is back in Portland and Connor Murphy is back in Phoenix. This is good news for the Coyotes because Murphy has been solid this year and is better than both Stone or Schlemko and is only not on the team due to his being able to go to the AHL without clearing waivers. He did look kind of weak in his last two games before being sent down, so hopefully he can regain the form he showed in the rest of his games.
Thomas Greiss gets the start.
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