PROFILES IN JELLO-HEADEDNESS... OR, SAY, YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

(Part 1 in a two-part rant.)

Hell hath no fury like a media throng who played along.

If you have listened to sports radio, read the papers, watched the myriad hockey panels on Canadian cable networks in the past couple days, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is to blame for everything from hockey's lack of scoring to greenhouse gas to those people at the mall who persist in talking loudly about really personal stuff on their cellphones.

First off, as The Globe and Mail's Stephen Brunt pointed out the other day, it's not all Bettman. It's his bosses, the 30 owners (maybe 32, soon enough) who collectively act in their own interest instead of the fans they pretend to care about, and then throw up their hands and hold "Well, we tried our best" pity party. Go figure: The U.S. Congress can declare war with a simple majority, but NHL governors needs a two-thirds vote just to take a bloody bathroom break, let alone ensure that all Canadian teams play each other every season. How about getting back in that conference room and not leaving until you convince one team to change its vote and get a better schedule?

Of course, that would mean acknowledging the fans, especially the ones who are hopping mad in Vancouver, and get in way of the Lou Lamoriellos of the world who want to turn the NHL into a bus league. Again, that's not 100% on Bettman, but do you think NBA commissioner David Stern -- never mind David Stern, how about baseball commish Bud Selig -- lets his bosses get away with that?

Bettman has not actually hit a new low any more his kindred spirit in Jelloheadness, President George W. Bush, hit a new low when his party got royally slapped around in the midterm elections two months back. It's more a case that the media -- and to an extent a public -- who were willing to go along when the lockout was settled in July 2005, have seized on the double whammy of the scheduling vote and the dud of an all-star week as proof the Bettman Plan, or whatever you want to call it, is a massive failure. (Like it was any surprise the all-star game was boring.)

They feel duped, and now they're hitting back harder, if not hard -- much like the U.S. Congress and national media who were, wait for it, willing to go along in March 2003.

Let's not strain the Bettman-Bush parallels. Screwing up a hockey league is nowhere near on par with how the White House has handled Iraq, Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina, and no one's died on Bettman's watch, except maybe from laughing. And let's not get sidetracked into a blame-the-media rant. It's only human nature that people who care about hockey would try to help burnish the league's image on its long road back after the nuclear winter/non-season of '04-05. It's just that now they feel safe enough to come out and say that it's a horrible mess, completely fubarred. It's a bush league, pardon the pun.

What really makes you laugh like hell is the notion anyone would have expected the NHL to arrive anywhere else but at this point.

Like almost every other hockey fan who's been at heartsick at times over what's become of the NHL game over the past 12 years or so, I hoped against hope it wouldn't be the case. But ask yourself: When have you ever had a revolution -- or at least genuine change -- without changing the power structure?

On the day before the lockout was settled in July of '05, yours truly, plying his dubious craft as sports editor of the Simcoe (Ont.) Reformer, wrote a column titled "Why, oh why, won't my cynicism go away?" followed by a smaller headline ("kicker" in newspaperese), "The NHL is aiming to win us back, but it's easy to curb your enthusiasm." The gist of it was that for all this hoopla about a New Ice Age, there were enough "tells" that all this earnest talk about improving the game would evaporate into the ether. For example, no one talked about a shorter regular season, which would help the game immensely. It was still the same people in charge, the Bettmans, the Lamoriello types, so why would anyone have honestly though, even if they couldn't or wouldn't write it or say it for public consumption, that the NHL wouldn't regress to its greedhead, Jellohead ways soon enough?

The point here is that it's not that the all-star game sucked (which it did) and that it's boneheaded the western Canada teams won't play the eastern Canada teams next season (which it is), or a lot of games look like pre-lockout hockey, save for the endless string of ticky-tack penalty calls and power plays you get in some games.

It's mostly that this week was kind of a culmination of all the doubts about Bettman and Co.'s ability to save the game that the media and fans had buried deep down inside 18 months ago are out in the open. Those of us who were skeptical since July '05 are too sad to claim any sense of satisfaction.

You can't a revolution without replacing the leaders or the power structure, but that's for tomorrow's posting.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.