What's Wrong With This Picture? Major League Sports (Gather 30 Day Countdown)

The good old hockey game, as Stompin' Tom Connors observed, is the best game you can name. Canadians always have difficulty defining their national identity and finding commonalities that unite them. Hockey has stood out as one of those few pan-cultural focal points.

When Team Canada won their dramatic, come-back victory over the surprising Soviets in 1972, every Canadian, French or English, East or West, cheered wildly and felt a swell of pride in their country. Similar feelings have accompanied other Canadian triumphs at World Junior Hockey Tournaments, Olympic games and the Canada Cup tournaments.

Yes, at their best, sports have united us and inspired Canadians to peaks of patriotic fervour that are otherwise rarely displayed.

Even when the athletes are not Canadians they can evoke such a response. The Blue Jay fever that gripped the country during two World Series championships had Canadians following a group of Dominicans and Americans as they carried our national pride onto the diamond.

The Toronto Raptors are also benefiting from being Canada's basketball team, though it will be a long haul before they inspire the flag-waving mania that a world title can bring.

Despite all of this popular delirium over sports, major league sports are in big, BIG trouble. So much trouble that it now seems very unlikely that the current profusion of major leagues and teams can possibly survive in their present form far into the 21st century.

The reasons: money and greed, for the most part.

Athletes have for many years commanded incredible salaries. The million dollar contract, a novelty in the 1960s, today is commonplace. In fact, fans expect their favourite players to be signed to contracts of ever increasing magnitude. A player's wealth can actually increase their popularity with the fans. There is also, however, an underlying resentment over these exorbitant pay rates, which usually boils to the surface when there is controversy.

Roberto Alomar, for example, had long been a popular player for the Blue Jays. Following a bizarre attempt on his life, Alomar let some of his frustration and tension out with less than loyal comments about being a Toronto Blue Jay. Some of the same fans who had previously idolized him became instantly resentful. How could this man who is earning so much money for playing a game express anything but overwhelming gratitude? was the common sentiment. (Alomar’s subsequent spitting incident made him a pariah to many fans.)

A greater strain on fan adulation is the occurrence of labour relations strife between millionaire players and multi-millionaire or billionaire owners. No one who works a 40 hour week for annual compensation about one-fifth the cost of a house can appreciate a disgruntled athlete who wants more than his seven figure salary for his talents. Justifications about the brief span of a professional career, the possibility of injury, the need to provide for the marginal talents who don't command top-dollar all fall on deaf ears. Fans are also hard pressed to sympathize with team owners who cry bankruptcy and claim multi-million dollar losses yet still line up to pay $100 million or more to buy the teams. Surely these successful business tycoons are not so stupid as to invest so heavily in a money losing venture. How did they get so wealthy in the first place? In a professional sports strike or lock-out, the public sees no good guys only bad guys.

Still, salaries continue to climb at astronomical rates while working class people see only a decline in their real earning power.

While salaries climb, of course, so do ticket prices. The cost for two people to go see a hockey game (including parking, concessions, etc) is well over $100. For a single game! Few working people can afford to go to many games at that price. Many tickets are held by corporations that use them as promotional devices to entertain their clients with. The cost of the ticket becomes a tax write-off for the corporate ticket-holder. In effect, the tax payer is paying to send people to sporting events, though few of the tax-payers will get to go to the game themselves.

In these days of government cut-backs, one must wonder how long the entertainment tax write-offs for corporations will survive. Can health care be whittled away to nothing to protect the right of profitable firms to wine and dine their customers gratis? Without the tax write-off, how many corporations will continue to buy tickets?

So, assuming corporate demand at the gate falls off with the removal of government subsidies, who will attend the games? Not the average Joe, that's for sure.

Baseball has already suffered big declines in attendance after the strike that ended the season and cancelled the World Series in 1994. Fans are ticked-off. Television contracts which were recently very lucrative for sports leagues are now dropping in value.

Sports teams are also displaying none of the loyalty that they need in return from fans. Popular athletes are traded or sold as fits the budget. Teams pick up and move to wherever they can get the most freebies from the public purse. Shrinking public purses suggest that this cannot go on for long. Small market cities are losing teams they have loyally supported for decades, even generations.

With escalating salaries, shrinking fan support and increasing alienation between athlete and fan, how can the current reality be maintained? The laws of supply and demand are against it.

If major league sports are doomed, as I have suggested, what will happen? Will the NHL disappear? Is the NFL soon to be a thing of the past? What about the NBA or Major League Baseball (MLB)? These are all multi-billion dollar organizations with product licensing deals, joint promotion ventures with fast-food chains, investments in dozens of major cities and employees numbering in the tens of thousands (when you consider all leagues and all personnel from the players and coaches and trainers through to the concession stand operators and ushers etc.). Can such a large industry vanish in a decade or two?

Yes, it can. This doesn't mean it will actually vanish. But, it is hard to imagine the current dynamic (basically endless escalation of costs and prices) lasting very long. Look at the CFL. Though still alive and functioning it has been writhing in death throes for more than a decade. The league has changed in fundamental ways, expanded to new markets, contracted back to old markets, changed marketing tactics numerous times and is still struggling. Its final collapse would surprise few observers. Its survival, on the other hand, may be a model for other leagues that have yet to suffer the contractions it has endured. While the CFL has tried expansion, it has met with little commercial success. One suggestion has been to take the opposite route and get smaller. By limiting itself to only Canadian cities and considering teams in smaller centres, restricting rosters to only Canadian athletes, perhaps even local athletes on each team, the league could create locally meaningful identities and lower costs (by giving up all expensive, big-name athletes). If this works it could be a prototype for a workable professional sports framework in the post glitz-glamour-and-sky-high-salaries era that may be coming.

Perhaps people still want professional sports organizations, but are just not able or willing to support them at the unrealistic heights they have currently obtained. Perhaps a smaller, less exclusive, less expensive, family priced league could restore sports to the status it once held securely: that of valued human entertainers, not demi-gods, cultural icons or paragons of human physical perfection.  And not multi-millionaire cry-babies, either.