Hockey Should Learn From Baseball’s Mistake

Are you ready for some football?

And some more football?

And some more football after that, as ESPN becomes the All-Gridiron Network, ESPN2 debuts “Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Game of the Week” (up next: the perennial Hamline-Gustavus Adolphus grudge match), Fox airs “Arena Football: The First 75 Months” and The Hockey News becomes a one-page insert with Pro Football Weekly?

Just think--all those delightfully entertaining Mighty Duck telecasts preempted and replaced with “Ram Rout In Review.”

Let me be the first to welcome you to Pigskin Nation, on the assumption that Gary Bettman carries out Thursday’s threat and postpones the regularly scheduled start of the NHL season, which was supposed to have been Oct. 1, to. . . .

Nov. 1?

Dec. 1?

2001?

You American sporting spectators had far too many choices as it was. Too much clutter on the airwaves, too many results to read in the newspaper. These distractions were no good for you, no good at all, because instead of getting to work early and greasing the wheels of American commerce, you were too busy fooling around at home with the directions to VCR Plus.

So Bettman, Bud Selig and the owners of 54 franchises in two major sports leagues have taken it upon themselves to act on your behalf and simplify life for you. “Streamline” things, to borrow a Bettman power-speak favorite.

Come October, there will be no baseball playoffs and no World Series.

Judging from the sneering, we’re taking-the-pucks-and-going-home tone of Bettman’s Thursday conference call, there will be no hockey, either.

With basketball season more than a month away, Paul Tagliabue becomes Mr. October and wistful hockey fans click away aimlessly on their remote controls, hoping, maybe, to see some sleet in Green Bay.

Throughout the ages, scientists have held that stupidity is not contagious, but what do they know? Bettman and his flock of BMW-owning sheep spent the last month-and-a-half watching baseball build a gallows, fasten the noose and yell “Geronimo!” Then they stared at each other, nodded in unison and declared, “Sounds like something for us.”

In theory, the baseball shutdown was the best thing that could have happened to hockey. The sudden lack of a World Series would create a mass media void, and hockey, overdue for a break for decades, would be there to fill it.

On this side of the border, hockey has never looked healthier. A team from New York won the Stanley Cup. While the NBA playoffs degenerated into five-on-five goonery, the NHL postseason won legions of new fans with sudden-death, hit-the-post dramatics. Sports Illustrated, with a cover story Bettman couldn’t have obtained had he sold his soul to Lucifer, proclaimed the NHL “hot” and the NBA “not.” Fox, billing itself as the sports network of the 21st Century, hustled to sign the league to a five-year broadcasting contract.

The hockey revolution has stormed the beach--you can tell by the roller-hockey pickup games at surfside--and baseball has laid down its arms. Now is the time to strike. Gain a foothold now and it is instant entrenchment.

Where the NHL is today, the NBA was 15 years ago. October 1994 is pro hockey’s Magic Johnson-Larry Bird moment.

And Bettman should know, because he was there at the time, the NBA never locked Magic and Bird out of the gym.

Sorry. Did I say lockout? There will be no lockout of NHL players if no new collective bargaining agreement is in place by Oct. 1, Bettman has asserted.

No, there will only be a “postponement.”

And that isn’t a salary cap the owners are demanding, Bettman insists. Just a “luxury tax” on teams that happen to spend “above a certain level,” thus “driving up the market for everybody else.”

Don’t you know your hockey jargon by now?

Bettman says he has stared into the abyss that is major league baseball ’94 and admits that “we have considered that there are a lot more positive reasons to be playing. The new TV contract. The new acceptance our sport has gained.

“But, you can’t use a short-term fix to deal with the future of this or any other enterprise . . . Two or three weeks with no competition from baseball, while it might be nice, won’t be the cure for what’s ailing right now.”

Bettman says that if he has learned anything from baseball’s brain seizure, it’s that “you can turn your season into a disaster if you don’t open it without a collective bargaining agreement in place.”

Yet the NHL did just that last year and enjoyed perhaps the most exciting and popular season in its history. Flushing that head of steam now, just to see if you can grind the players’ noses into the ice, and Bettman should be assigned to the same padded cell as Selig, flipping to see who gets the bottom bunk.

Baseball, even at its most self-destructive, still has a reservoir of goodwill from which to draw that hockey does not. For 120 years or so, baseball had been America’s Game, something of a birthright in this country. Hockey, as flavorful as it might be, remains an acquired taste. An import. A foreign delicacy, but not a staple.

In a culture where sports fans are raised to appreciate their beer on ice and not much else, pulling the plate away at this point is risky business.