the 4th star

I love the team, but as a long, longtime fan of the Vancouver Canucks, I have to say that the way they’re acting regarding this CBC this is pretty ridiculous. The network and the club are going to meet before Saturday’s game in Toronto, to clear the air on the injustice that took place against Alex Burrows last week. Apparently they showed some clips of him diving. Alex Burrows. Diving? Who knew?

The Canucks have solidly backed Burrows and refused CBC interview requests during Saturday night’s 5-1 win over the Chicago Blackhawks as a form of protest.

His victim act — both on and off the ice — is getting a little tired. Frankly, I’m getting tired of this story. Period. Player gets skewered by the CBC, the CBC gets the cold shoulder from the Canucks. Let’s move the fuck on already.

Seriously. The Canucks are the only one keeping this story afloat. Imagine if the club was this upset about the original allegations of referee bias…

I understand why painting National Hockey League players with the same brush as all the other Maple Leaf athletes at the Winter Olympics is important to the Canadian national team. If we’re going to do that, though, then have the NHL guys scramble for sponsorship funding each year, figure out how to train and work at the same time, and do it all with little to no public attention or admiration.

This story surfaced last night. It seems the Own the Podium payouts — a system that gives athletes a monetary incentive to finish in the top three — will also include the Canadian men’s hockey team. If they win gold, each member of the 23-man squad will get $20,000 for their efforts. A sliver will fetch $15,000 and a bronze pulls in $10,000. If Canada finishes second or third (or worse) in the tournament, the players might not have to worry about the money — they’ll be lucky to get out of Vancouver alive.

According to the story, three players on the team earn less than US$3.5-million and the combined salary of the team reaches over US$120-million for this season.

Considering how every other athlete participating at the games survives through modest means and have no national funding to speak of (the story says that Sidney Crosby’s US$9-million salary this year is “more than three times what the OTP program spent on biathlon IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS”), one has to wonder why we’re going to pretend that professional hockey players are on the same level as amateur athletes. Wouldn’t the OTP program be better served to take that hockey money and divide it up into bigger pools for the athletes who really need it? Most would say yes.

Not Bob Nicholson, though.

The president of Hockey Canada, an organization that pulls in millions each year for selling hockey to a hockey-crazy country, says he lobbied for the players to get paid. His reasons are mind-blowing:

“We certainly understand how much money NHL players get, but they’re going to spend a heck of a lot of money on getting their families and that there to watch them. More importantly, they play at world juniors and men’s worlds and we don’t pay them any money for that.”

First off, Bob. NHL players can afford to set their families up in Vancouver over the duration of the hockey tournament. This isn’t the Glenlee community club pee wee team trying to raise funds for a trip to Saskatchewan — these are multi-millionaires you’re talking about. That comment is an insult to the other athletes on the Canadian team — the ones whose families have to scrape together enough dough just to be there for a day or two. That ‘heck of a lot of money’ you casually throw out there? Yeah, that would be roughly $20,000 for the figure skater who has to practice at the crappy, local rink at six in the morning each day, not for some NHL player who needs to drop $20,000 to set his family up in Yale Town for a week.

Players who play for Canada at world championships and the highly lucrative world juniors do not get paid to be there — even if they win gold. When you think about the machine that is Hockey Canada, it almost boggles the mind that they don’t provide some payment to the players. They get a trip to Austria, or wherever it is the games are being held. Hockey Canada does not get off their wallet to offer any financial incentive to play for this country but the instant another national program (like the OTP) pulls out the credit card to order another round and help fund athletes participating at the Olympics, Nicholson wants his charges to jump on that tab.

Nicholson said the players will have the option to take the money, not take the money, or give it to charity if they wind up with a medal. That’s a very good thing. But why even give them the choice in the first place? The charitable angle is important, I guess. The fact that they are being granted the option underlines why they are different than the other Canadian athletes in Vancouver.