It’s Not Hard to Find Bad Guys in This One

Hockey season was supposed to begin last October, right around baseball’s World Series. One season never started and the other one never ended.

Hockey and baseball, alias dumb and dumber.

Understandably but unfairly, many people have lumped the two together. It would take a pocket calculator to count the number of times someone over the past three months has said, erroneously, “Baseball and hockey players went on strike.” Hockey players did not go on strike. Hockey players got locked out of their jobs and were constrained from returning to work.

Much greater sympathy is due them. Not only were these icemen checked forcibly off the rink by their pigheaded employers, governed by the magisterial and self-righteous Gary Bettman, but the NHL’s management resisted, unyieldingly, attempt after face-saving attempt by the players to meet them halfway.

So, should you care to take sides, know which side to take. The commissioner and his obstinate cabal are not so much largely as solely responsible for what has become of the 1994-95 hockey season--or, more pertinent, to what remained Tuesday to salvage, the 1995 hockey season. They fiddled while the NHL burned.

Again and again, the league’s players made concessions and abandoned demands. Already they had played the entire 1993-94 season in good faith, without a formal contract. That is why last autumn they were fully prepared to not report for duty, or at least until, as is wont to happen in this particular sport, push came to shove.

Except management never quit shoving. No matter what the players said or did, no matter how much their resolve withered, Bettman’s bullies kept grabbing them by the suspenders and snapping. Even at the 13th hour, the czar and his presidium kept saying no, no, a thousand times no.

A case could be made (and has been) with baseball’s standoff that there are no victims, merely villains. This is a rhubarb between Richie Rich and Daddy Warbucks, more comic than tragic. Among the teams that remain on strike is the Detroit Tigers, a 40-man aggregate with a 1994 estimated payroll of $56,780,024. No wonder the poor dears felt shortchanged.

Although there has been little proof of baseball players’ solidarity crumbling, outstanding ones such as Julio Franco and Shane Mack have confirmed that they would rather go to Japan and cash paychecks than walk a picket line with their brothers. Others feeling a cash-flow pinch, among them Tom Candiotti and Candy Maldonado, have used legal means to have alimony and child-support payments lowered, which seems only fair.

Fewer than six weeks from today, pitchers and catchers are due to report to spring training. The ones who do report could be subjected to catcalls and thrown objects, but not the kinds normally associated with this game. It is not an unimaginable scenario that Florida and Arizona camps will be populated by marching pickets with very familiar faces, glaring at so-called replacement players while uttering that hated epithet of strikes gone by: “Scabs!”

Where these replacements would come from, no one knows. Maybe from the Long Beach Little League. The only thing that seems certain is that, in the box scores, right behind Hit by Pitch and Left on Base, room might need to be made for one more listing, Spat in Face.

As for the hockey season, it has been hanging by a thread throughout the winter. Tuesday was the “drop dead” day for everyone concerned, with the principals approaching a final faceoff the way that priest doing the exorcism once had to face Linda Blair.

Back and forth, back and forth, word came that the season was on, off, on, off, on. Players wondered what else they could give up--their shirts? They reacted with disbelief to management’s hard-line stances and unequivocal refusals to budge. Players appealed to the public for understanding, issuing reminders, as one Mighty Duck did, that “not all of us make millions.”

What an entertaining season it had figured to be, back when everybody but the recuperating Mario Lemieux was preparing to pick up a stick. But by mid- January, with the situation so bleak that propositions included confining teams to their geographical corners of the continent, one began to wonder if it was worth having any sort of season at all.

Because, what next? Playoffs pitting the New York champion against the Pennsylvania champion? With the winner meeting the Quebec champion?

Watching the hockey sides paw and claw at one another Tuesday was like watching squirrels fighting over nuts. After a while, you didn’t much care which got what. You only wished they would stop.