Letter: Class struggle in sport (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class struggle in sport

Mention the term “class struggle" to someone and they are most likely to recoil in terror or perhaps conclude that you are slightly mad. The John Majors of this world would, of course, have you believe that we now live in a classless society; and if you don't believe him there are always plenty of sociologists around to assure you that yes, there are classes—but it’s OK because everybody's “middle class" nowadays.

On 1 April last members of Canada's National Ice-Hockey League voted 560 to 4 in favour of calling the first ever strike by players in the NHL's 75-year history, and in doing so stuck two fingers up at those academics and politicians who are proclaiming the “death of the working class" and of socialism in general.

Now I'm not pretending that hockey players have spent the past few weeks skating around with copies of Marx’s Capital in their hands, but nevertheless there is a profound sense of awareness on the part of the players that, in the words of one of the ex-stars Tiger Williams. “we have rights just like any other worker”.

The fans in Vancouver, however. are up in arms over the strike especially in a year when their beloved team has a great chance of winning the revered Stanley Cup. How, they argue, can players whose average yearly earnings top $350,000 (about £175.000) choose to go on strike at a time when ordinary fans are struggling to make ends meet?

The facts, though, paint a different picture. The average salary is misleading in that there are a handful of players who earn an amount well into seven figures, thereby pushing the average up. The players were told recently by the owners of the NHL franchises that there would be no money available for increased wages despite a turnaround last year of over $43 million.

On top of this the average pro hockey player can expect his career to last about four years during which he will be subjected to constant media pressure, long-distance travel, niggling injuries, and the physical and psychological grind of playing and training day in and day out. a fact which is reflected in the abnormally low life-span of many professional athletes. Added to this, after his career is over he has little to fall back on in terms of “marketable skills”.

Yet perhaps more than this the strike is about “free agency", or, as described by Pat Quinn. the Vancouver Canucks General Manager, “the right for players to sell their talent to another club— which is at the moment being denied to them by the owners”.

The bottom line being, of course:

that this is entertainment, that tickets are sold for a product, that the value of that product is found in the talent of the players.(Globe and Mail, 2 April).

And summed up nicely by the CBC reporter:

This is not a sport—it is a business, built around one point—the raw talent of the hockey player.

All this goes to show that under capitalism, there exists a fundamental social antagonism between those who own the means of living and those who don’t. The exploitation of wage labour exists regardless of whether one is a factory worker, a working mother, a university professor or a professional ice-hockey player.

What all these people have in common is an interest in getting rid of a social system that has long since outlived its purpose and in establishing instead a way of living in which human talents from whatever walk of life can finally be expressed to the full.

Julian Prior, 

Vancouver