Detachment darkens Bettman regime
Posted: Monday January 25, 1999 03:18 PM
TAMPA, Fla. -- Commissioner Gary Bettman is sitting at a table on a stage in the atrium of the Ice Palace, with Canadiens great Maurice "Rocket" Richard beside him. The league is about to unveil the Rocket Richard Trophy, which will go each year to the player who leads the league in goals. Bettman is doing some pre-ambling to the media about the trophy and about Richard and when it is over he has given you a window into what is most disturbing about the Bettman regime.
This is Saturday afternoon and not much of anything has happened at All-Star weekend, except that some North American All-Stars have gone out Friday night and eaten solid slabs of cow at high-falutin Bern's Steakhouse -- a dimly lit, red-velvet-curtain joint with an 80,000-bottle wine cellar even a collector as passionate as Mario Lemieux could love.
It's Saturday afternoon, getting on evening, and Bettman is sitting there with Richard at his right. Richard played for the Canadiens in the 1940s and 50s and he is as great a goal scorer as has ever played in the National Hockey League. This is how revered he is by those in the game.
When he sent Luc Robitaille a letter a couple of weeks ago, congratulating him on his 500th goal, Robitaille fairly broke into a sweat. This is what Lucky Luc told me last week: "I wanted to thank him, but I was nervous, you know? Finally I called him and said, "Uh, Mr. Richard? It was really an honor to get your letter.'"
That's who Bettman's sitting next to, Rocket Richard, and the problem is that Bettman can't seem to muster any emotion at all in his introduction. He says that Richard was the first to score 50 in a season, the first to score 500 in a career, and it all comes off as if Bettman were reading a shopping list. Then Bettman goes to the video tape. On a bunch of TV screens set up in the atrium, the league runs a 45-second video with a couple of Richard highlights on it and a voiceover. Nobody but the narrator says anything on this tape, and the whole quick thing is patently insipid and not up to the standard that Rocket Richard deserves.
The next person to talk is Ronald Corey, who is also sitting up there at the podium, on the other side of Richard. Corey is president of the Canadiens and he feels some kind of love for Rocket Richard, you can tell. Corey gives a wonderful, impassioned half ad-libbed homage to Richard, talking about games 50 years ago when Richard scored several goals. Corey can remember this stuff like yesterday and he keeps putting a hand on Richard and you can see he's getting the chills up there. Corey actually says, "I am so glad I am 60 years old," because that meant he was able to watch Richard play when he was a boy.
Now you can't expect Bettman to invent a past that isn't his own, but when somebody like Corey talks with that kind of passion it points up what's missing in the Bettman regime. Each year under Bettman, whatever other advances or setbacks -- and to the commissioner's credit, the advancements have been many -- the NHL seems to add another layer of insulation, of corporate sterility, to its operations. You can feel it at the All-Star game, where so many marketers mill, and the individual blue suits merge into an indistinguishable sea.
Bettman is imparting a deeply p.r.-conscious mentality, where sweet smiling, blow-sunshine-up-your-assets equivocating is too often the league's m.o. Bettman rarely looks a questioner, or an audience, in the eye and he can spin rugged rope into cotton candy. He would have all his minions follow suit.
Hockey, though, is fueled by the passion not just of its players but by its shapers and organizers. Passion and honesty and forthrightness is so at the heart of the league and is its great strength and appeal. No one should ever diminish that. The players play on broken bones because that's what they do and general managers and league execs wear their hearts on their sleeves because that's what THEY do. It's part of the palpable culture of this league. It's part of what will make people fall in love with the game and want to bring it into their homes.
So it's scary at times the model Bettman sets, so carefully packaged, so thick with a sugar coat. Bettman up there saying customarily little -- the most revealing moment of his state of the league briefing, for example, came when he said "there's nothing new to report" on the NHL's Olympic involvement -- and introducing Rocket Richard politely, and respectfully but utterly without soul, is symbolic of a dangerous detachment. And detachment is something the NHL has too much of in the Bettman regime.
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