| Deals. Deals made. Deals broken. It’s been quite the week or two for doing and undoing deals.
Deal No. 1 – Royal Flush. The announcement that Prince Charles is to marry longtime flame Camilla Parker Bowles on April 8 was hardly newsworthy in itself. After all, the divorced couple has been shacked up in one of the royal palaces for some time now. However, the proposed union did raise some interesting problems.
First, even though the Church of England has recently softened its formerly strict policy on divorce, it was never likely to openly condone the marriage of two high-profile and self-confessed adulterers. Yet the Queen – the mother of one of those adulterers – is also the head of the Anglican Church and therefore, I’d assume, able to pull a string or two if need be. Hence the deal: Charles and Camilla to wed in a civil ceremony at Windsor town hall (the castle was pre-booked, it appears), followed by a private church blessing of the union.
The royal deal-making did not end there, however. Notwithstanding official approval for the marriage from Buckingham Palace, neither the Queen nor the British public at large has ever particularly warmed to Parker Bowles. A recent opinion poll revealed that while a third of Britons supported the idea of Charles remarrying, two-thirds were either opposed or completely indifferent to the prospect. The English tabloids echoed such coolness, with the Daily Star running the headline "Boring Old Gits to Wed." In the face of such sentiment, perhaps, it’s been further agreed that Camilla would acquire neither the title "Princess of Wales" upon marriage nor "Queen of England" should her husband actually ever become King.
In itself, such deal-making is a sign of the monarchy’s ever-declining relevance and authority. Certainly it’s a far cry from the days of Henry VIII. Back in the 1500s, when the Papacy refused to annul Henry’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the king simply split from Rome and unilaterally declared himself to be the "Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England." Thus was born the Anglican Church, the same church that recently nixed Charles’s hopes of a religious ceremony.
Deal No. 2 – A Pair of Jokers. Finally (and mercifully), the long, drawn-out and ultimately fruitless "negotiations" between the National Hockey League (NHL) and the NHL Players’ Association came to an end last week. I use the word "negotiations" reluctantly, as the whole five-month affair was characterized by a singular lack of negotiating. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA president Bob Goodenow appeared from their holes occasionally, but only to proclaim six more weeks of stoppage….
Indeed, it strikes me that the media’s coverage of the lockout largely misread the nature of the impasse. Casting it in terms of a "labour relations" story – a struggle between "management" and "the workers" – was fanciful at best, plain insulting at worst. With the poorest paid player in the NHL receiving $350,000 last season, it was always difficult to view the locked-out men as being particularly oppressed or hard done by.
At the same time, however, it was hard to credit the NHL’s argument that it simply couldn’t afford to meet the players’ demands. In the end, the gap between the league’s proposed cap per team ($42.5 million) and the union’s ($49 million) was just $6.5 million. At most, if multiplied by the 30 teams playing, this represents a difference of less than $200 million; if a compromise of $45 million had been reached, as many commentators believed possible, this figure falls to $75 million. League revenues from games played in 2003-04 were over $2 billion. In monetary terms, then, a deal was a no-brainer.
But that’s the point. This dispute was never about making a deal. If nothing else, the simple process of either arbitration or mediation – the grease of modern labour relations – would quickly have provided a compromise. No, the deal in question here is not the one that failed to materialize last week, but the one made more than a decade ago when Bettman was appointed NHL commissioner.
Bettman’s mandate at the time was to revamp and resell the NHL as a mainstream sport across the breadth of America, especially in previously untapped southern markets. If he could do it with basketball, the thinking went, why not hockey? Financially, this experiment appeared to pay dividends. Yet the league’s rapid expansion in the early years of Bettman’s reign outpaced (a) the development of community support for new teams and (b) the available talent to prevent a dilution of the on-ice spectacle. The empire continued to grow, but its base was ever more shaky.
Enter free agency. The owners’ concession to players to seek (and secure) whatever salary a bloated free market might bear was great news for them in the short run, creating a new league of millionaires overnight. In the long run, however, the upward surge of wage demands threatened to spiral out of control.
And so to Bettman. The deal that fell apart last week was not really about this or that specific salary cap. It was about who was calling the shots. An unforeseen – though in hindsight highly predictable – consequence of expansion under Bettman was to shift power to the players, thereby (artificially or not) inflating the price they could claim. Bettman’s rejection of all union counter-offers in recent weeks reflects his determination to reverse this shift.
As such, Bettman is much more like Henry VIII than Prince Charles. Not for Bettman any abdication of authority to secure a timid compromise agreement. Instead, don’t be surprised if, like Henry, he forms his own church – sorry, league – to get what he wants.
The only trouble, of course, is that Henry never managed to settle on just what it was he wanted, going through six wives, two of whom he divorced and another pair he had beheaded. Mind you, the last wife, Catherine Parr, outlived the old king.
Might be a lesson there for Gary…. |
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