Ice Hockey: The Puck Stops Here

When the National Hockey League season in North America was cancelled last week as a dispute between players and owners reached an impasse at Niagara Falls, the consequences of putting a $2.1billion industry into deep freeze were felt in some unlikely places.

An argument over capping players' salaries, which has dragged on since September, has reached the worst possible conclusion. The players, who earn an average of $1.3m a year, are either resting or are among the 350 who are playing in Europe for $40,000 wages. The owners, accused of being greedy by expanding the league into American cities where the sport comes a poor fifth behind basketball, American football, baseball and Nascar, are, ironically, saving money because they could not make the business pay, despite sell-out crowds.

A few pessimists in the Canadian media, so disturbed by the perceived gravity of having their national sport cancelled, even speculated that the management lock-out would cause a 3 per cent dip in Canada's gross domestic product. Calmer analysis suggests the country's $847bn economy would take a relatively minor $170m hit - a blip of more manageable proportions, just 0.016 per cent, but considerable none the less.

What the episode illustrates is that, whatever the sums, a sport reaches deeper into the fabric of society than the mere sale of shirts or hotdogs, and any disturbance of its structure has repercussions beyond the wages of players and the seemingly fragile finances of clubs and their governing body.

Such crises inspire sub-editors to write headlines like this one from the Toronto Globe and Mail : 'Hockey lock-out hits GDP, economic growth put on ice'.

Not quite. But there are consequences none the less - and maybe a lesson for Britain, where football is so hooked into the national psyche and the economy of clubs' immediate, national and international communities that a similar upheaval here would generate panic on an even grander scale.

As the reality of the mess in Canada and the United States becomes apparent, people are finally doing their sums. And into the cockeyed mess are thrown a myriad of bit players, from ticket touts to bar owners to the people who make the pucks.

Anecdotal evidence across Canada suggests the malaise is deep and will not quickly disappear. In Montreal, Ziggy Eichenbaum says business in his bar near the stadium is down 25 per cent; Labatt, the big Canadian brewers, have cut 20 per cent of their white-collar workforce.

TV commentators are idle, journalists who cover the sport have only the dispute to write about, sponsors have switched millions in other directions and fans, ominously, have grown weary of the discord.

A recent poll showed that 40 per cent of Canadians have stopped caring. They are bored with the dispute and have turned their attention to basketball. Or, as one commentator observed, even talking to their families.

'You never want to give a fan a chance to find out whether it was passion or a habit,' Ken Dryden, the minister of social development, told reporters recently. Dryden should know; he was a star goaltender for the Canadiens in the 1970s.

Merchandising has slumped, with NHL shirts that once fetched $90 going now for $50. 'One more season like this,' the proprietor of a Quebec sports shop said, 'and we can't survive.'

Culturally, Canada has been hit harder than franchises in the United States. It is north of the border where ice hockey reigns. On national broadcaster CBC, a programme called Movie Night in Canada has replaced Hockey Night in Canada , their version of Match of the Day for as long as anyone can remember.

Where airtime was once saturated with the flying puck and padded behemoths being barrelled into the hoardings, TV is now showing Nascar and lacrosse, with occasional minor league ice hockey.

Touts - or scalpers as they are known there - confident that a sport in which games are sold out years in advance would sustain them for ever, are suddenly out of work. And nobody's crying.

But the makers of pucks for the NHL are desperate. 'The business has been down since September,' says Denis Drolet, president of the company that makes them on licence for the league. 'We haven't shipped anything to any NHL teams, no souvenir or licensed products.'

In January, more than 100 days into the management lock-out, the company laid off 20 employees, most of whom earned about £5 an hour. As the season is now dead, more job losses will follow. Latest estimates put the figure in the thousands across the industry.

It might be hard to judge from this distance what an impact this has had on a sport that has dominated Canadian winters since 1917. Only the 1919 flu epidemic has stopped a season before. But the voice of fans is loud and angry. 'Hockey is in our blood,' one fan at a bar in Montreal near the home of the Canadiens said. 'It's part of our heritage, and we miss it very much.'

Pat Moscaritolo, who runs the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, reckons cancellation of Bruins games there will cost the city $30m.

In Canada, unemployment last month rose by 5,700 - and much of it was blamed on lay-offs at bars and restaurants near hockey stadiums. Sports bars, a bigger part of city culture in North America than Europe, are shut down in Montreal. When they reopen, they will welcome back a seriously disillusioned clientele.

Even in the depths of winter, tens of thousands of fans would crowd the sports bars of Montreal to watch their team. Now the streets are empty, staff have been laid off and it will take some doing to persuade people to come back next season if they have subsequently been both distracted and angered.

How did they get themselves in such an awful mess? The dispute has reached this ugly climax because of the one thing that binds both parties: greed.

The owners are culpable according to Bob Goodenow, who heads the National Hockey League Players Association, because they have spread playing resources too thinly. Most Canadians, particularly, would prefer a league of 24 teams to the current 30. They see little merit in ice hockey being taken to such exotic climes as Tampa in Florida, Phoenix in Arizona and Los Angeles and San Jose in California and, perhaps most incongruously of all, Nashville in Tennessee.

Ultimately, the dispute will go to the Labour Relations Board in the United States. Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner who cut his administra tive teeth as deputy commissioner of the National Basketball Association, was upbeat last week, predicting the league would be back next season. But he is realistic, too. 'Nobody knows what the damage to the sport will be,' he said, when announcing the closure of the game for the current season.

Could it happen here? Ian Smith, vice president of the Professional Cricketers Association, cannot imagine it. 'We have had threats of industrial action in cricket, but we have never gone so far as having a ballot,' Smith says. 'But we have been close. The disputes have normally been over emotive issues, such as the number of overseas players permitted, rather than money. First-class cricket and the ECB would have to be impossibly intransigent for us to resort to strike action. Work to rule, staging a go-slow or being uncooperative with TV broadcasters are strategies we would use before withdrawing our labour.'

There has been a concerted effort in cricket to marry the interests of players, the governing body and television in recent seasons, each giving up a little for the common good.

Smith rightly identifies the cultural differences between British and American sports. 'In the States, sport is based on a meritocracy,' says Smith. 'Opportunities to carry on in sport after college are very limited and making it to the professional leagues is seen as a tremendous honour that the public don't begrudge.

'The leagues are closed shops and the owners own the sports, a situation that the fans accept. There is no concept in America of the "people's game" in the way football is viewed over here. As far as football fans are concerned in Britain, they own the game.

'Fans in America will gripe about disputes between players and owners. Given the propensity to random violence in this country, if the football season was called off over here, there would be riots.'

Flirtation with strike action in British sport has been rare. Members of the England rugby team, led by their then captain Martin Johnson, did threaten to pull out of a game against Argentina when negotiations over a collective pay agreement reached a stalemate. But they quickly returned to work when the equally stubborn Clive Woodward stepped in. 'They'll never play for England again,' the England coach said, 'if they don't turn up for training this week.'

Rio Ferdinand found his England team-mates staunch supporters over his extended suspension for failing to take a drugs test but that protest disintegrated, too, as England prepared for the European championships last year.

For now, there seems little chance of sport here self- destructing over internal disputes. But the template for disaster has been graphically on show across the water. It would be foolish to ignore it.

In Canada and the United States, meanwhile, there is little sympathy for the players, some of whom earn as much as $12m a year.