Posted: 24 July 2012 at 13:09 | IP Logged

T his came to mind again recently, because a couple of our major leagues are behaving like idiots. First, the National Hockey League comes before its cheap soccer jerseys   players with so hilariously weighted on the management side that it might as well have included a cover sheet that read: "If you want to move right to the lockout, check here." Right now, the NHL never has been in better shape. It's not the most popular sport in America, cheap soccer jerseys   but it has a TV contract with NBC that is, frankly, far better than its national ratings deserve. Its teams in major U.S. media markets are thriving; the last three Stanley Cups have been won, in succession, by Chicago, Boston, and Los cheap soccer jerseys   Angeles, and the New York Rangers and Philadelphia Flyers are both solid contenders. Management won the last confrontation by a knockout. Everybody involved in the NHL should be holding hands and dancing down Rue Ste.-Catherine together.

So, naturally, management came to the table with an opening offer best summed up as, cheap jerseys for sale   "More us too, yes?" They want to claw back 11 percent of hockey-related revenues, reducing labor's share to 46 percent. They want to make it harder for players to reach free agency and they want to eliminate salary arbitration entirely. I suspect that, at one point whilecheap jerseys free shipping   formulating the offer, someone proposed to have the players pay to launder their own gear on a rock in the Niagara River, but that the "moderates" among the owners managed to shoot that proposal down. This is an opening offer, to be sure, but it's a signifying one. That same day, cheap jerseys online    the National Football League announced that it was planning to, since negotiations with the union representing the real referees had broken down. I am looking forward to seeing some schlub fresh up from Division III trying to call interference from 10 yards behind the play. In neither of these cases, though, do    cheap jerseys wholesaleeither of these proposals have anything to do with how much money the leagues in question are making, or how much they are pretending to lose. Both of them are about power. Both of them are about control. 'Twas always thus.