by Sean Avery
• • •
I have to move house in the off-season, and I find a great two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a home a few hundred feet from the sands of Manhattan Beach. To help with the rent, my buddy Jeremy Taggart is taking the second bedroom because he’s making the next Our Lady Peace record with famed producer Bob Rock in his studio in Malibu, which should take them the better part of the coming year.
Now that I’m seeing Rachel I will not be going back to Ontario to live with my parents, which is the perfect illustration of what I meant about California offering me opportunities to broaden my horizons: inside of a year, I’ve gone from bunking in my family home to living with Rod Stewart’s ex. Crazy, but I’ll take it.
The LA summer address also means that I won’t get to work out with Kris Draper, as I’ve done for the past six years. This makes me nervous, but I set up a system to have my old trainer John Renzetti email the week’s workouts every Sunday evening. I told John that when I made the NHL I would give him $20,000 and I did, but during the summers both Drapes and I pay him $12,500 each for his services, which is a nice cash bump for a teacher.
I have full access to the Kings’ training facility and no possibility of a contract dispute this summer. This past season I made $440,000, and for the LA Kings to retain my rights they only need to pay me a ten percent raise, so in my next season I will make $532,000 (or a little less than half that when you shave off all the fees and taxes I mentioned earlier).
Even though I’m making great money by the standards of the world, it’s on the low end in the NHL, something that you’re reminded of all the time when you hang with massively paid superstars like Brendan Shanahan. And when he was at about the same stage in his career as I am in mine, he was pulling down nearly $1.4 million. He bought a lake house to live in during the summer months where he could relax and entertain family. Shanny’s cottage was on Ball Lake in the summer holiday mecca that is the Muskoka Lakes region of Ontario, and he invited me and my girlfriend to come for a visit. So I booked two airline tickets to Toronto for myself and Rachel.
Shanny is the closest thing to an older brother/mentor I have other than my father. He projects a slick and professional face to the world, with a hint of amusement creasing his eyes, but when he’s not in public, Shanny has a dark and cynical view of humanity. I do not, except when it comes to NHL execs, but Shanny’s willingness to question things matches my own genetic resistance to conforming, and so I learn from him not to take what I see at face value.
When we land in Toronto we take a taxi to a small airstrip to catch a seaplane that will fly us north, so we can avoid the four-hour car crawl to Muskoka on a Friday afternoon. The seaplane lands 300 feet out from Shanny’s dock and glides in nice and smooth to Clark Kent awaiting us with his famous fists on his hips.
He doesn’t look like he belongs in Muskoka, which is Toronto’s summer playground, a mix of discreet old money and noisy new money with Porsche SUVs and Jet Skis and lots of booze and BBQ. Shanny, in his crab-print shorts, is more of a Martha’s Vineyard kind of guy, with champagne cocktails in hand and a Great Gatsby vibe that makes it all so much more of a spectacle.
He’s trying to maintain his customary cool when Rachel steps out of the plane and onto the dock. He has this big smile on his face and gives me a subtle nod of approval. Rachel wastes no time in cementing his first impression by heading straight for the host to give him a big, warm New Zealand hug. Shanny rests his head on her shoulder and sticks his tongue out, teasing me. It took a lot to impress Shanny, because of his natural skepticism, but I could see that Mr. Miyagi was proud of the Karate Kid.
Shanny was up at the cabin on his own, and he took us out on his boat, which was a thirty-foot power cruiser. I was surprised he could even drive the thing, as he wasn’t an “outdoorsman” by any stretch. But he managed to keep us from sinking, and while we were drifting along on Ball Lake, Shanny talked to me about business. He said we were going to lose the negotiations with the NHL. It was the first time I heard a player say this, and it shocked me—even coming from Shanny, who usually expected the worst. I’d been drinking the NHLPA Kool-Aid and I knew little about how the real world works, so I just told him he was crazy. He laughed at me, but I was convinced I was right.
We stayed with him for a day, then we made our way back over to the Yzerman compound to stay for our final night. This was really so that Rachel could meet Stevie Y’s wife, Lisa, who was around the same age and had similar tastes. Lisa was a down-to-earth lady from Ottawa, and a reflection of Steve: calm, cool, collected, and beautiful. Rachel fell in love with Muskoka, and actually has a girlfriend who lives in the area during the summers, one she knew from her rock ’n’ roll days. This is Kelly Van Halen, the ex-wife of Alex Van Halen. I have a feeling we will be back in Muskoka. But like many things I felt sure about that summer, I was wrong.
12
LOCKED OUT OF MY LIFE
In the summer of 2004, the NHL and the NHL Players Association (NHLPA) are in negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). We’ve known this was coming since the last CBA was signed, and at the start of the past season the NHLPA recommended that each player put a portion of their 2003–04 paychecks aside just in case a lockout or strike actually happened during the 2004–05 season. We think that’s overly cautious, but I do it anyway.
The NHL wants to impose a hard salary cap because they say that increasingly lavish salaries will destroy the smaller-market teams. A hard cap means each NHL team will have an upper limit on what they can spend on players’ salaries. Unlike baseball, where you can overspend and pay a penalty, the NHL wants to make the cap a hard number that no one can exceed.
By July the NHL is aggressively pushing for it and I’m with the NHLPA in pushing back: I say no way will the players ever accept a hard cap system because that means the top players will still get paid the big dollars while the rest of us will have to split the smaller pie that’s left over.
Bob Goodenow leads the NHLPA. He was captain of the hockey team at Harvard University, where he earned a degree in economics and government. He later received a law degree from the University of Detroit, and as a labor lawyer there, became an agent for several players, including my buddy Brett Hull, who was then with St. Louis. Goodenow got everyone’s attention when he increased Hully’s salary from $125,000 a year to $7.3 million over three years.
In 1992 he led the NHLPA in a ten-day strike, the first time this had ever happened in NHL hockey, and he won the players some concessions. The NHL struck back by hiring Gary Bettman as its first commissioner (before then the title was president). Bettman is also a lawyer, and he’d come from the NBA, where he was the guy who invented the salary cap, the first in modern-day sports.
You could see where this showdown was heading from that moment on.
It’s the worst-kept secret in hockey that Goodenow and Bettman despise each other. Bob would tell us in NHLPA meetings how much he disliked Bettman, and how this was a war we were in. Neither guy is the type you’d want to sit next to on a long plane ride, but I know that Goodenow’s desire to crush Bettman—who serves the guys who sign our checks—is going to hurt us in the long run because if this is war, the owners have a bigger war chest.
Every team has an NHLPA union rep, whose usual task is to hand out the swag at Christmas. I’m an assistant rep on the Kings, and now the NHLPA is asking us to take time during the summer to educate the players on a decision that will cost us, personally, millions of dollars, and the NHLPA hundreds of millions of dollars.
Some NHLPA reps, including myself, do not have high school educations, and while education in no way guarantees that you’re smart, the fact that we aren’t as well-educated as the guys leading us, and the guys opposing us, stokes our insecurities. I can think, and I’m not afraid to ask questions when I don’t know something, but these lawyers can unleash floods of tricky legalese at us, and it’s sometimes as if
you’re being spoken to in Martian. At a certain point, we have to trust the union. And that turns out to be a problem.
At first we’d get emails from the NHLPA informing us of what was going on or not going on in the negotiations, but after some of those emails were leaked to the media, they changed the system. All information would now come from the “players only” website, which was password protected. But that information got leaked as well, so now we’d have conference calls that involved two reps from each team, so sixty guys, along with Bob Goodenow and his staff, and good luck to anyone who wanted to eavesdrop on those things.
These calls quickly turned into circuses, with certain guys rambling on and on about how they felt, and absolutely no one managing the show. Sometimes we could hear crying babies in the background, or the sound of a busy hockey player playing Halo. Athletes do not have the ability to sit on an hour-long conference call in June and July and August. We’re built to keep moving, and while we have the discipline and desire to push our bodies to the breaking point for five or six days straight, we don’t have the discipline to sit on the phone for an hour to talk about revenue sharing. This is why we had no chance in the CBA negotiation.
I got my NHLPA education from Chris Chelios, who had a very realistic view of what was going to happen. He thought Goodenow was going down the wrong path, and while he didn’t say anything publicly, he made it known in our conference call meetings, or when Bob would come and meet with teams individually. Bob would listen, and then stick to his own plan.
Goodenow had too much authority in the negotiations, and if any player went rogue, he had ways to drag the guy back in. He was a lawyer, and very persuasive. He dazzled us with great PowerPoint presentations, and if he couldn’t persuade a guy, he’d call him personally or he’d suddenly be in Detroit for some meetings and want to take Cheli out for lunch.
Out of the thirty to forty calls I was on during those negotiations, I remember only a handful of times when a player making more than $8 million a season was on the line. NHL superstars didn’t get very involved during the 2004–05 CBA negotiations, unless they were doing it behind closed doors. And for some, that also meant going behind the players’ backs and helping the league. This came out later on down the road.
As negotiations go on and seemingly nowhere, I start to spend more time at Rachel’s Hollywood Hills home and less time at the beach house that I’ve rented with Jeremy. We’re not seeing much of each other, because he heads to the studio around 4 P.M. each day and they record into the night, and I’m lying in bed with Rachel, wide awake and wondering: what the hell am I going to do if we don’t start the season on time?
Things are not looking good. Thursday, September 16, 2004, should have had me putting on my hockey equipment for the first day of training camp. Instead I was sitting on the patio of Café Med in Sunset Plaza with the wind knocked out of me. The day before, the CBA had expired, and we were officially “locked out” of work by the NHL.
Despite this chest-thumping, I cannot believe this lockout is going to go on longer than two weeks. There’s too much money at stake. That said, and even though I was on all the calls that the NHLPA had with its players, I was still twenty-four years old and had no idea what was really happening. It could last ten years for all I knew.
I had no calls from my agent, Pat Morris, throughout the negotiation, and certainly not on that dark day, though I longed for one, where I would hear him tell me that he’d found a team in Europe that wanted me. I would have said, “Thanks for that, Pat. When do I leave?” I guess Pat had more important things to do.
I’ve decided to set myself a two-week deadline to see how this lockout plays out before I do something else, like look for a team in Europe. In the meantime, the NHLPA has authorized a $5,000 per month stipend to all players who played on an NHL roster the previous year. To players making more than a million dollars a season, it wasn’t going to turn them into raving union supporters, manning the barricades and calling for Bettman’s head, but for me it’s a big help. I made $440,000 the year before. After paying taxes and agent fees and living in one city during the season and another during the summer, even a shrewd saver could only hang on to $50,000–$75,000 at most. So after only playing a couple of years in the league, it’s not like I am rolling in dough.
One negative aspect about living in LA and not in Canada during the off-season is that the cost of living is more expensive in SoCal, so the money goes faster. The upside is that Rachel is there and I’m in love with her.
My self-imposed two-week deadline comes and goes and we have no agreement. This is the first time in sixteen years that I’m not playing hockey in October. I should be getting paid $20,000 every two weeks after tax, but instead I’m heading to the Beverly Hills sports club every morning to train—pushing myself so I’m ready. Part of the lockout’s collateral damage was that we were also locked out of the Kings’ training facilities.
A lockout is like a bad acid trip: one minute you’re loving it, with your feet in the sand while you’re sipping a cold blended fruit drink and your favorite song plays, and the next minute you’re struggling to find the words when someone at a party asks, “So what do you do?”
“I think I’m a hockey player” is your answer, which is hardly bursting with confidence, so you add, “I mean, I have an NHL contract, but I’m not really sure when or if I will ever go back to work . . .”
As the days go by you start to have more bad trips than good trips. I think that maybe if I’d been thirty-four years old it would have been easier because I’d have had a dozen NHL seasons behind me and perspective: I would have accomplished something. But having my career pulled out from under me at age twenty-four, just as I get a taste of how great it is, makes me realize that this is the hardest thing I have ever gone through in my life. I mean, hockey is my life and I have no hockey.
Looking back now, I can say with absolute certainty that the only way the NHLPA would have ever been able to beat the owners would be to always have an extension done fourteen months before the deal expires, and of course, if the CBA was that easy to extend, we’d have never lost a season. What I’m saying is that the players will never be able to win even if they’re still playing pro hockey a million years from now (which I doubt they will be, given the way the world is going).
When I look back on the lockout and the union telling its members to get ready to fight and promising us “We will not back down!” I can’t help but shake my head and say, “Sorry guys, but you will never win. The union will always break before the owners do and you will always get a worse deal the longer you wait. That’s why you need to always get a deal done.” But I don’t know that as 2004 slides into December, and the talk in the media is that we’re going to become the first professional sport to lose a season. That can’t happen. Can it?
Rachel is keeping me sane, or as sane as I can be, but one day bleeds into the next. A few days after New Year’s, I have a breakdown. I mean, I wasn’t sobbing naked in the street (nor am I making fun of those who break that way), but I realized that I couldn’t define my life without hockey and I needed to connect to it or I’d become unmoored and then anything could happen. So I called Pat Morris. This is the first time we’ve spoken since the lockout, and I tell him that I’m ready to go play somewhere, anywhere. I tell him that if he’s speaking to any teams overseas looking to sign some players, then I’d love him to drop my name into the conversation. What I really meant was please, throw me a lifeline, quick. If the league was trying to bring us to our knees, it was doing a pretty good job of it. Pat said he’d keep me in mind. I was even grateful for that pretty staggering shrug.
In early February 2005, the NHLPA summoned all its players to Toronto to vote on a proposal that the union was preparing to send in to the NHL as our “final offer.” Some European players actually flew over for this summit—for the “free” trip (we’d pay for it in the end) and a chance to get away
from home for a few days. There were other players who needed to be among friends to share their woes and try to release the anxiety and anger and identity issues that we were all feeling, as we were now staring down the prospect of losing an entire season.
Roughly 200 players rolled into Toronto on the first Friday in February, and we checked in to the Westin Harbour Castle, which is a nice, if generic, corporate hotel, with massive conference rooms. We were told to dump our bags with speed and get to a meeting in one of those conference caverns.
That was a difficult room for me to walk into because there were at least thirty guys in there who would not piss on me if I was on fire, and four or five who would curb-stomp me if they had the chance. The only person who was hated more was the little man with the nervous twitch from Madison Avenue, Mr. Gary Bettman.
But we were all on the same team now: locked out NHL players. Even so, I waited until almost everyone was seated, and because Chris Chelios was such a good friend, he saved me a seat beside him at the end of the last row. I think Cheli was the second-most hated guy in the room, or perhaps he was No. 1, because he was challenging guys like the NHLPA’s president, Trevor Linden, and calling foul play when decisions were being made that didn’t follow the constitution. Cheli thought the NHLPA leadership was too cozy with the NHL, and maybe he was right.
The NHLPA wanted to get us all into the same room and get it all done and dusted quickly for a few reasons. The official version is that they needed to present to us ASAP in case they needed to redline the fine print in hopes of hitting the deadline the NHL had set. But I’m guessing that they also rushed us because they knew the guys had all traveled that day, which would make it hard for them to sit in a conference room for a few hours. Plus most guys hadn’t seen their peers for months and now we were all together in Toronto. The boys couldn’t sit still, thinking about how hard they were going to hit the town that night.
