It seems to me, anyone who ever has played in the NHL has the right to know whether he has been lied to about medical issues by his team or the league. If the only way to get such answers is through the legal system, actions such as the lawsuit filed early last week in Washington by a group of long-since retired players will serve a valuable purpose.
What did they know and when did they know it? Those have been the central generic questions key to unlocking the doors of cover-ups since Howard Baker applied the idiom to Richard Nixon during the Watergate hearings four decades ago.
What did the NHL know about the dangers of blows to the head? When did league medical and front office personnel know it? And what did they do with such knowledge when they acquired it?
Which means the questions are not what they should have known and when they should have known it, because in retrospect, we all should have known a lot of things before becoming a whole lot smarter about our health.
We should have known being exposed to cigarette smoke from a nearby table at a restaurant was harmful. We should have known driving in cars without seat belts was risky. We should have known about the danger of imbibing alcohol during pregnancy. Don and Betty Draper (and Megan Draper) should have been a whole smarter a whole lot sooner. Sally had to learn for herself.
I started covering the NHL in 1976. The players back then didn’t ask the kinds of questions that have been raised in the class-action lawsuit, and neither did I. We should have asked, we should have known. We didn’t. Did the league executives? Did the club physicians and medical trainers? If they did, for shame. If they did, if it is proven they did and colluded in a cover-up, they will pay.
I have spoken in the past week with a substantial number of players I have known for almost four decades. They all seem to have mixed feelings about the lawsuit, and few believe they were lied to by responsible parties. These guys bemoan their lousy pensions, but they don’t blame the league. They don’t think they were lied to, and they don’t even blame the Players’ Association for their plight.
If they blame anyone and anything, they blame themselves, they blame their culture, and they blame their time. They took blows to the head, they took an aspirin, and they got back on the ice.
By the late ’70s, after the advent of the WHA, the introduction of agents and the first explosion in salaries, they got back on the ice not so much because they feared for their jobs or were concerned about being sent to the minors, but because they didn’t want to let down their teammates.
If players didn’t ask the proper questions, if embedded reporters didn’t ask those questions — and those were the days, my friends, when writers traveled with teams, when writers socialized with players, before the wall between clubs and the media was erected, never to be torn down, only to be buttressed with each passing year to no one’s real benefit — then neither did the Players’ Association.
Players didn’t want to be told to wear helmets, and the NHLPA for the longest time supported their members’ right to be hard-headed and bare-headed. Players want the right to fight and slug each other in the head, and the NHLPA to this day supports that desire as if it’s part of the Second Amendment.
Changes to equipment that would make the game safer if not necessarily faster have taken years to get through the PA. Tell a player to wear a visor? Nope, not at the price of “personal choice.”
We know so much more now. But somehow fighting remains a part of the game. It’s the culture, we’re told. It’s the same culture that historically has celebrated players as “warriors.” No, they’re not; they’re hockey players.
Questions need to be asked. The players deserve answers. We all should have asked those questions before. We all should have been smarter.
Sally Draper’s children — or grandchildren — will know better.
* * *
For a league that shut down in part to limit the length of player contracts, the NHL sure loves to enter into its own long-term contracts with favored television networks, doesn’t it?
No hills on Sixth Avenue.
How is it every other league is able to leverage its inventory into contracts with multiple partners, but the NHL locks itself into deals with singular outlets — NBC in the U.S. and beginning next year, Rogers in Canada?
* * *
So Jeremy Roenick — or, as he is known fondly in this space, Jere-ME — was the first former player to ridicule the class-action lawsuit. Not surprising given his history as a union enemy within during the 2004-05 lockout.
Maybe Roenick is currying favor among Hall of Fame voters. Maybe it’s just a reflex. Regardless, he is living proof of the truism ascribed to both Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain that it is better to remain silent and be thought the fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.