Framing the NHL Lockout: More Thoughts Following My Twitter Spat with Jeremy White

10/17/2012

14 Comments

 
The Barrister

Yesterday, following a night where I got little sleep due to fatherly duties and an ill-conceived desire to bait racist Obama-haters on the internets at 4 am, I awoke to a familiar theme in my Twitter feed from a familiar source.  Jeremy White, WGR morning show pocket rocket, was criticizing the NHLPA and players for their (alleged) insistence on portraying themselves as victims. He doesn't think fans - not most fans, but ANY fans - buy that kind of meme, and he thinks fans - not some fans, but ALL fans - will eventually turn on the players as a result.  In a stunning bit of word gymnastics, he criticized the NHLPA for a PR strategy while, in a subsequent response, claiming that PR is irrelevant. 
This wasn't the first time I heard something similar from him about how stupid the players are to whine about their situation and about how their "playing the victim" routine is bound to backfire. I haven't seen much about the owners "whining" (as if a forced work stoppage was anything other than a petulant tantrum in grownup terms) in his critiques, of course, so you're definitely right, before we continue, to question whether I chose a nonstarter and whether an employee at the "Radio Home of the Buffalo Sabres" would bother conceding any points about the quality of the players' position in this whole fiasco. (More on that in the future, I'm sure...)

Though, perhaps stupidly, I chose to engage. I had points to make, what with White's consistent anti-labor diatribes and my general sympathy for those wishing to adhere to contractual principles of fairness. Out of character for me, I had enough restraint to make my points without calling Mr. White a douchebag or fascist or idiot or any number of things that I thought then and have thought since. I'm a documented asshole, and these are the kinds of things I think sometimes.  I went to law school, in part, to channel my energy more constructively so people would like me more.  So, I tried to be nice, tried to be persuasive, and generally found myself colliding with a brick wall of contrarian nonsense in consistent support of NHL ownership's power grab. Huh. #StateSponsoredRadio

Using my conversation with White as a point of reference, Outlander talked yesterday about how disappointing WGR and the Buffalo News tend to be with their lockout coverage - something not exclusive to WNY - and how it's especially disappointing given the general sophistication (meaning attention to details, not necessarily expertise or general intelligence) of Buffalo hockey fans. Outlander made the point, long obvious, but no less true, that we deserve better.

Outlander also left the door open for future debate. And since the lockout may or may not be close to ending, and since my conversation with Mr. White, by it's nature on twitter, was character limited and, perhaps more importantly, unavailable to fans of the Deeg not on Twitter, I wanted to take an opportunity to flesh a few things out. 

And since I (and others) already did the polite discussion routine to no avail, I can't promise I'm not about to be a huge dick right now. You've been warned.
My first gripe with White as the morning started was his claim to be speaking to the opinions of all fans. When friend of the Deeg, Dave Kelly, opined that most fans side with the players, White made the blanket claim that, well, no they don't. 
To be fair in a way that White was not today, it bears mentioning that I can't be sure of the answer here. I know what I think. I know what my friends think, generally. I know what Dave Kelly thinks, and that he, apparently, thinks that most agree: the players are being wronged here. But maybe our small sample sizes make us unreliable on the issue of what the "majority of fans" believe. However, does Jeremy White - employee at small market sports radio who would, presumably, have almost exclusive exposure to a small market fan base (and, even more limited, the portion of the fan base that chooses to engage with WGR) - have a real sense of fan opinion? Well, maybe he does. Maybe he's got facts I don't. 
Oh. Or not.

So, you're saying you know more than us because you associate with more fans than us? And you're willing to use the impossible to disprove, but still looks bullshit on its face, "I'm different than 99.9% of everyone else, so don't bother trying to disagree, since there's no way you could understand" rebuttal. Well done. Though, that may be the last compliment you get, you milquetoast pile of obfuscation, so don't get used to it.

This is, of course, a dumbfuckingly stupid argument from White, and is sort of tangential to my thoughts on the lockout. But, if you work for sports radio and think that the folks that call in are a representative sampling of sports fans in your market, you are (a) completely delusional as to the importance of your craft, and (b) completely delusional as to the quality of your audience. Or, as more aptly summed up by The Yachtsman, 
So, yeah, forgive me if I don't buy that ANYONE at WGR - or anyone who hasn't polled a representative sampling of the world of hockey fans in a fucking scientific way - has a complete and accurate sense of what all hockey fans think about the lockout and whether it makes any sense for the players to, from time to time, remind us that the owners chose this mess and chose these absurd contracts and chose to tell us all that the last CBA was a fair deal that would prevent further work stoppages. 

But, dry hump us on the pants, Jeremy White knows what's what because he works in sports radio, and he's here to set the record straight.

Don't mind me, though. I'm just the guy that can't get in lockstep with the supposed majority opinion on overpaid players being big whining babies. White could smell blood in the water, and he was about to out me for the player-sympathetic pussy I am.
Uh oh. He's got me. Maybe he's right. Maybe he really DOES have a better sense of the opinions of all fans, including MY OPINION. DO I EVEN HAVE CONTROL OVER MY OWN THOUGHTS? DID GOD NOT GIVE ME FREE WILL AND REASON AND ... oh shit. Maybe I am Borg and J. White is my Alice Krige.  

Mind. (controlled by hapless sports radio personality). Blown. 

Seriously, though, this is probably the first time I had to suppress the instinct to just call White a dickbag and pack it in. My better angels prevailed, so instead of freaking out at the insinuation that my well-thought opinion was too worthless to be held by anyone on Earth, I responded calmly.
I chose this as my line of attack, first, because (a) it seemed a waste of time to point out to White that his sampling of fans was so incredibly fucked that his view couldn't help but be incredibly distorted (though I did point that out at some point, receiving no substantive response), and (b) it genuinely seemed that there might have been some semantical disconnect between White and me. Maybe it was the use of the word victim that we were getting hung up on. Maybe White understood, as I do, that the players have been wronged in a sense, but that their PR strategy was, perhaps, pushing too far and crying foul a little too much considering they're generally millionaires. THAT is a point I can probably get behind, in the end, as the real breakdown is more accurately described here:
As suggested in my initial response to White, I think the use of such a loaded word is unnecessary to still have sympathy for the players' position. In fact, since we're talking about sports, use of the word "victim" is probably inappropriate altogether. 

But, let's be clear -- the owners signed deals that they're now trying to get out of - both the CBA and individual player contracts - and they're doing it while putting the season under the knife and pressuring fans to throw their hands up and demand a deal be done for the fans' sake. This is a smart strategy - many casual fans choose not to learn about or care about the intricacies of the labor dispute and are likely to just see a bunch of rich folks arguing over how to split a big fucking pie. Compared to the pleb NHL fans, the whole lot of them seem to be a bunch of douchebags. 

There are those among us who choose a nuanced view, however, maybe because we think someone shouldn't get publicly fucked just because they happen to make a buttload of money, or maybe because we have an affinity with the players who bleed and sweat for us rather than the owners who charge us our ticket prices. After all, the truth of the lockout exists between the two bargaining sides - whether they're stupid rich or not - and it doesn't do me any good in understanding the dispute to just assume that everyone involves sucks a mean dick because they make more money than I do. Closing myself off to that kind of understanding is willful ignorance. I choose a different path.

White, on the other hand, sees the players' insistence on moral and ethical standards to be a petty nuisance within the context of what really matters.
Some bastardized view of right and wrong? What in the fuck? 

This is where I realized that I might be fighting an uphill battle against someone who simply doesn't believe right and wrong have any place in a debate about who to sympathize with. This struck me as mind-boggling - if we're all sitting here, trying to decide who to side with (since we have to side with SOMEONE, and blame SOMEONE), shouldn't right and wrong come into it? Not just the woefully inadequate position of "he seems like a dick because he's whining too much about his millions and won't just shut his mouth and play hockey for my enetertainment?" Especially because, when it comes to contracts and business, right and wrong isn't some nebulous concept but actually laid out in law?
To make a simple point about fairness, I simplified the issues at hand with the lockout. Despite my burgeoning career as an unpaid sports blogger with no real desire to do this as a career even though I'm convinced I would rule at it, I will concede that I have never seen a player contract before, though I assume there is some basic, boilerplate provision that ties an individual contract to the CBA. In other words, in a technical sense, the owners have every right to craft a new status quo vis a vis a new CBA. But, since they're the same dipshits who signed these player deals - many of them just this past summer... I'm looking at you, Craig Leipold! - forgive me if I think they're being a little disingenuous when they push for a new agreement under the knife of a lockout.

Contract law, as a general principle, is built upon the idea that a contract creates certainty. Party A agrees to pay Party B, and Party B agrees to perform some task, whether it be service over a period of time or delivery of goods or playing center for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Time for performance and payment can be specified, to increase certainty, and the law exists to enforce the contract where one party shirks his duty to pay or to perform. What the NHL owners have chosen to do, seemingly because they just couldn't help themselves from signing a bunch of crazy ass deals, is throw certainty out the window and demand a change in the contractual terms they already agreed to. 

Thing is, as another aspect of contract law, parties are generally not permitted to change the terms of a prior contract without giving something up. In other words, the consideration (a legal term of art) already on the table - money in exchange for goods or services - applies to the deal already made. A change in the deal - say, an alteration to the money paid for the performance or the length of the deal - would require additional consideration, not because the party to the contract says it needs something extra, but because contract law demands it.  No consideration, no contract.

These rules, of course, don't apply so uniformly in the sports world. As I already mentioned, the collective bargaining agreements alter the rules a little bit. But, as an observer of this labor dispute who knows a little bit (and that's not an understatement, really) about contract law, I find the whole thing absurd. I find it absurd that owners can alter their own obligations under their players' contracts by creating duress for those players by locking them out. I find it absurd that they choose this tactic of duress at a time when the league was doing so well. I find it absurd that, just because they have the power, they get to make the rules, in contravention of the principles that apply consistently to the rest of us. 

Of course there's another side to the debate. And OF COURSE I get that people are angry. But, laws are laws, and the whole concept that laws don't apply to a set of people because they're in power is fucking offensive to me. And it should, on some level, be offensive to us all. 

But, apparently, not Jeremy White. At least not that he would admit on #StateSponsoredRadio.
This is the part of the discussion where I really started to lose hope and started earnestly trolling a guy increasingly showing himself to be a corporate shill who would be fine with undoing OSHA because employees sometimes get injured and if they don't like it fuck them they can just peace out. "America. Better get used to it." Oh, you mean the America I went to law school to learn the fundamentals of, and the America built on the contract laws you seem so willing to piss on between pounding the latest bottle of GSeries? Or, as Yachtsman again pointed out:
Perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. Surely, White's opinion would be more nuanced than that? Surely he would cave when presented with the logical outgrowth of his "owner's have all the power so they make the rules" meme?

Not so much. 
And this is where Jeremy White goes, and where he has gone before on the twitters. "If the players don't like it, they can quit." He makes this argument A LOT when faced with a fan who defends the players' position (funny that this happens so often when NO ONE likes the players at all here), and argues that this is the same for everyone. Don't like it, find a new job.  As Yachtsman just pointed out in a drunken 1:40 am phone call, this motherfucker, with a straight face and his local reputation at stake, has the gall to argue against laborers and unions in a blue collar town.  Owners have all the cards, so don't you dare bitch about the fact that you - you worthless piece of shit laborer - don't have any of the cards.

The fucking balls on this guy. I'll give him that.

No matter that some powerful Americans (and NHL owners) got their wealth through inheritance, not merit, or through environmental exploitation, not virtuous pursuits. Remember: right and wrong don't matter to Buffalo's modern day Jeremiah Rusk. 
Except, asshole, they are entitled to something under their current contracts. And the NHL is denying them that entitlement via the lockout. Hence my earlier points about your point being viciously narrow-minded. 

White liked to pat himself on the back, over the course of our conversation, that he was concentrating on "reality"; on the "way things are." In a sense, he's absolutely right. It is true that the NHLPA must walk a fine line in PR or else risk losing fan support. It is true that they can easily overstate their position and, in the process, sour many fans. 

But, this isn't the whole story.  And Mr. White has to know that. Right?

Fans are allowed to have nuanced views on topics; to agree with White's point about PR but also see the broader truth that, in the end, the owners chose contracts and are now choosing to undo them at the expense of NHL fan experience. This is just as much "reality" as anything Jeremy White tweeted today, and I would argue that it's actually a more fundamental reality than his claim that owners have, and somehow deserve, carte blanche just because they have a financially advantageous position.  They signed away that complete power when they signed a bunch of athletes to professional contracts.  They GAVE the players certain rights at that point.  Now they want to make changes and it's not insane to want to call bulllshit.  It's fucking necessary unless we all want to be back here in another seven years griping about how Girgensons is missing a season in his prime.

Maybe I'm overly sympathetic to the players. As alluded to earlier, I have an affinity to their position because they're the handsome jacks out there on the ice on the other end of my cheers.  And I like cheering for them. 

But I also like cheering for predictable outcomes and fairness and the operation of law that I spent three years of my life learning and the last four years (and counting) practicing.  These are things that matter to me.  And, because they are also the things that provide the true backbone of this country - unlike rollbacks and outsourcing and whatever else Jeremy White wants to argue is the reality of this country - I feel like it's not asking too much to have those kinds of concepts be valued components of the debate about this lockout. 

In choosing his tunnel-visioned "no one buys what the players are selling" conclusion today, and many recent days, White values a hollow version of the truth about the lockout. He values a conversation focused on appearances and accepting the arguably unjust imbalance of power held by owners - because, as he argues, that's just the way things work - rather than one concerned with fairness and the substance of the underlying negotiations going on between the NHL and the NHLPA.  By choosing such a shallow value, he also allows those more fundamental questions about ownerships' culpability to go unacknowledged - even going so far as to say it "doesn't matter."

Well, and maybe it's just me, but I think it does matter. And, Mr. White, I think you're a hack for your adamant refusal to admit it.



Follow me on Twitter @theycallmedubs. 
 


Comments

Peter
10/17/2012 09:09

Someone should tell Jeremy White the difference between at-will employment and a league with a collective bargaining agreement.

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Heather B. link
10/17/2012 09:31

The one thing I miss about blogging is media take-downs. Awesome post. I don't even have the words to describe the many levels on which Jeremy White has proven himself to be stupid here.

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The Boner In The Shorts link
10/17/2012 09:36

I've come to two theories about why Mr. White holds so dearly on to the opinion he does.

1. He's too rock dumb to grasp this level of nuance. Like, maybe he's the kind of guy who when discussing politics throws out the same "AMURICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT YOU FUCKIN F%%GOT!!" when he can't grasp how healthcare does need reform and that things are rarely in black and white (see what I did there?). I actually imagined him reading this blog and getting a third of the way through and having his eyes glaze over with the whole Homer Simpson "nah-nah-nah-nah-HEY! nah-nah-nah..." going on. Guys who end up in AM radio generally didn't take classes in deductive logic in college.

2. He's career whoring to the Sabres. I personally don't get the impression that Pegula & co. are in the business of dictating what gets talked about day to day on WGR. Maybe that is naive of me, but up here in Boston people on the radio trash the Bruins, Patriots (I swear it does happen), etc. on the stations that broadcast the games. But maybe what's happening here is that White is banking on being able to tell ownership "I had your back in 2012." Let's face it - in the next 5 years, RJ, Roby, and Neale are on the way out. Sylvester and Ray are pretty entrenched and fans love them. But make no mistake, there's slots that will be opening up in those booths and broadcast team at the Effin' Center in the next few years that you just *know* White wants in on it (and who can blame him?).

So, I guess what I am saying here is that he's either not particularly smart (or unwilling to concede a point - see: Talk Radio 101 Host Must Remain The Authority On Any Subject), or a giant kiss ass banking that this will earn him some favor in the not so distant future. Or both.

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Joe Buffalo Wins link
10/17/2012 10:24

I have never been a White fan. I'm happy he's my age and has a voice within the Buffalo Sports community that tends to have people in their 50s who have been there since the 90s, but other than that, he's always been a shill. When the Sabres were owned by Golisano, he did everything in his power to shill for them to the point that they actually put him on the Sabres payroll to promote them. Which is a complete conflict of interest. What was even more disturbing was that after Pegula bought the team, he started trashing Golisano for not caring about winning and losing. He's taking the owners side because either A) All of his arguments happen to be contrarian. B) He is shilling for ownership.

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Alex
10/17/2012 11:11

AWESOME read. I don't like that guy. Rubs me the wrong way. Kudos to you. I had my fill of White and unfollowed him when he was adamant that the Leafs "won" the Kessel trade despite the fact that A)Seguin (at the time) was a 2nd year player still getting his feet wet )Dougie Hamilton has yet to play a game and C) Most importantly BOSTON WON THE CUP! Why do you make trades? To better your team. Why do you better your team? TO WIN THE CUP. That fact was lost on Mr. White and since he is god's gift to sports talk, my (and Mike Harrington, whose convo with White compelled me to jump in) means nothing. He will always be the guy who thinks he's right no matter what. I get better sports talk from Shredd and Regan.

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Dave
10/17/2012 11:23

I don't get it.

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Alex link
10/17/2012 12:25

I think this is my favorite article ever, even moreso than Ralph Wilson is an Odious Taint. This is an argument that hits home with me as I've seen how large corporations treat their employees like crap at every turn.

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sba
10/17/2012 13:20

This is brilliant. Nice work.

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Adam link
10/17/2012 15:35

Wait just a minute. There's such a thing as right and wrong? As in absolute truth, the opposite o relative truth? STFU!!!

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Tom
10/17/2012 16:00

I love you guys a lot because of the simple fact that you're all intelligent individuals who have the ability to discuss complicated topics in between dick jokes, but these last two days you've really taken the cake. Phenomenal analysis.

I hate his 'So what, they can quit' position with the fire of 1000 suns. If his boss walked in and wanted to cut his salary by 25%, he could in fact quit, and have thousands of media outlets on the east coast alone that he could gain meaningful employment at.

NHL players have no such luxury. There are no other hockey leagues in North America that players could go get another job at. They have specialized skills in a specialized industry, and deserve contractual and collective bargaining protections.

I'm glad you guys are continuing to expose WGR for their idiocy. I saw his comment about agreeing to a podcast. In the words of Bart Scott : Can't wait.

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Scott Michalak link
10/17/2012 19:12

JW's angle (should) have started and ended with the "PR war." That's crap, from both sides.

But hell.

Internet tells me fans aren't confined to the radio. Internet has Deadspin. Internet has Twitter. Fans can't be pigeon holed by the MSM anymore - the proof is all out there, constantly updating. Internet tells us about each other.

Don't ask me why I just went fragment crazy. Felt right at the time. Moving on.

Again, this whole thing should have stopped with the PR point - Twitter tends to drag tangential arguments out of one simple idea. Also, Rodney King.

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Curtis
10/17/2012 20:55

Great read, I owe you a beer!

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Tom
10/18/2012 13:37

Throw this one at Whitey. :

James Mirtle ‏@mirtle
Our poll results: Who do you side with in the NHL lockout? 32% chose players, 29% chose owners and 39% chose neither. Pretty even.

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Dan link
10/19/2012 10:52

From the horse's mouth: the end justifies the means. What he may or may not be doing behind the scenes can always be up to speculation. But his public view is that the owners are going to win, so just give in and give them what they want.

At this point, the players are making it pretty obvious that they're trying to stop the bleeding. Yes, it's stupid that they want more than 50% of the HRR, since no other sports league gets anywhere near that. The sticking point right now is that the owners want to roll back salaries, salaries they PROMISED IN FUCKING JULY, AUGUST, AND SEPTEMBER, and the players want what they're contractually obligated to.

That's a big stick in the craw. Because if the owners can reneg on contracts where the ink isn't even dry (the Minnesota owner doesn't want to pay Parise and Suter their contract money, and they haven't even played a game yet) then why the fuck should anyone expect them to honor a CBA?

White's public stance is: give the owners what they want, because they're going to win anyway. What he's missing here is if we gave the owners what they *truly* wanted, the salary cap would be a moot point because players would pay them for the honor of skating,

Don't just gave and give billionaires what they want. That's what ruined the league in the first place.

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