Champions Are Made Not Born

Hockey as a second f*cking language

At its best professional sport is the peak of the sports industry that supports those organisations below it by generating financial resources and cultural cachet. At its worst, it is a rapacious commercial animal with an insatiable appetite for financial, cultural and social resources.

— SPORT MANAGEMENT: PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS BY HOYE, SMITH, NICHOLSON, STEWART, ROUTLEDGE, 2015.[1]

We must always take heed that we buy no more from strangers than we sell them, for so should we impoverish ourselves and enrich them.

— SIR THOMAS SMITH, ENGLISH SCHOLAR AND DIPLOMAT, 1549.[4]

Perhaps the most powerful lesson other brands can learn from Nike is the need to act in accordance with the reality of the world we live in. In a mutually dependant, intimately connected global community facing several major crises, brands need to operate with an expanded definition of self-interest that includes the greater good.

— SIMON MAINWARING, BRANDING CONSULTANT, ADVERTISING CREATIVE DIRECTOR, AND SOCIAL MEDIA SPECIALIST AND BLOGGER.[5]

Al Becken, National Men's Team, 1998. (GQ Magazine)

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a boy who loved a sport, and its mastery was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. Whatever the soul of hockey is made of, it and his were the same. People he met were never surprised to learn he was born in the driest continent, not the subarctic winter of central Quebec or Sweden, nor even Nuuk in Greenland, where there are twenty-three words for snow. He learned to skate at the age of ten, not five, lost for his State that same year and his country when he was seventeen. But this particular season, he was losing for a team in a league of its own, a lower one, the off-season having left it a train wreck, a smoking ruin, an empty carcass picked over by unsporting desperadoes. The secret, he told himself, is learning how to lose. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, week after week, and win just one game, you are going to be a champion someday, even if they take your players, take your coach, take away your only points. Which was just as well since the only things they did not take were all his losses and his soul because whatever his soul was made of, it and hockey were the same.

Who among us appreciate the disadvantage Australian-born ice hockey players experience internationally? Who among us even cares? I will tell you anyway because hockey is a second f*cking language. The disadvantage here is due not only to the tyranny of distance, the remote centres of excellence in Europe and North America or, for that matter, the nearest pro league half that distance north of here in East Asia. It is because we are too f*cking nice.

Since time immemorial, any overseas player who rolled up to an Australian ice hockey comp got a spot, while most overseas leagues are heavily protected. The main exceptions are a few leagues operating independently of the controlling authorities. The GMHL, for instance, a Junior A league based in Ontario, a pay-to-play League operating outside Hockey Canada. Up to a dozen young Australians are there this summer, paying for development or practice they cannot get at home. At the very least, they are buying overseas experience for their CV.

The Canadian Hockey League is a top-notch quality junior competition considered professional because its players earn a small stipend. Its three leagues and sixty teams represent nine Canadian provinces (fifty-two teams) and four American states (eight teams) with a limit of two imports. The amateur Canadian Junior Hockey League allows a maximum of eight imports a team, but they never lose their import status. Unlike the top men's league in Australia, a club can not naturalize imports. It cannot free up a spot to recruit another one and so import a whole team of overseas-born players.

In the 2015-16 season of Australian A-League football, organisers reduced a quota of five imports per club to four. They expected to further reduce to three imports from anywhere, and one from Asia. The football development community say this is a good thing because it will allow more spots for up and coming Australian players. But some like the Brisbane Roar prefer to import ready-made players to instantly improve their bottom line. Clubs have to work harder and smarter to develop locals through their academies and programs, and that can take years if neglected. After all, why wait when instant injections of imported sporting nous are available right now at bargain prices? There is no shortage of supply, plenty of competition, lots of price-cutting.

Reducing dependence on football imports and making more Australians available is in the national interest because it will help the Socceroos rebuild. It will create more pressure to fill every A-League slot with a top-quality local. The most self-serving clubs don't ever mention it, but it is good for the spectacle and all the things they like to attribute to imported "stars".

The anticipated A-League quota of one Asian import strengthens links to markets in neighbouring Asia, where the "economic centre of gravity" continues to move. Australian football is drifting away from its centres of excellence in Europe and toward Asia where there is potential income from a kaleidoscopic explosion of new sponsors seeking television exposure in its rapidly growing broadcast markets.

Australian basketball is pointed there too, away from North America. Most NBL teams historically featured only one or two American imports, before the flood which led to its collapse. Now the League is rebuilding in a completely different way. Teams are once again limited to having two non-Australasians on the roster at any one time. A new marquee system permits one player a salary paid outside the cap, room enough to attract a real gun import. After years of absence from Australian TV, all NBL games are broadcast in primetime, cashing in on the rising demand for broadcasting rights with Australian stars.

Australian sports are not always winners in the rise of Asian markets. Some like tennis are now losing big sponsors to the athletes of promising Asian leagues who are relatively unknown here. Australian ice hockey has a problem of underdeveloped players compared to most other participating countries which could leave it dependent on others. The sport is expensive. Players pay a premium for imported hockey equipment. Add geographic isolation to the mix, the cost of overseas training and tournaments, and we have a recipe for making local top-level ice hockey players particularly vulnerable. They are seriously disadvantaged with a cherry on top.

The New Zealand Ice Hockey League permit their teams to dress four import players per game like Australia. But they allow only two assimilated (naturalised) players who either intend to play for New Zealand or live there long-term. The problems across the ditch in Australia include a short-term profit orientation. A tendency to produce a disparity of income for the wrong pockets. A failure to reinvest in the sport. A drive to neglect the sporting infrastructure and social justice in favour of profits. Not surprising in a country where the wealth of its 47 billionaires doubled to $255 billion over two years (2020-1).

Trading on the dreams of teenage players, the world hockey market is heavily regulated. Exploitative practices have tarnished it and there is a legitimate underlying concern about the development of new local talent in sports everywhere. Re-engineered, it could be a motor of positive transformation, a better sport. It does not matter if you are from Canada or Jamaica. There must be a balance between developing local players and importing talent to raise league quality so that the local sport and National Team succeed. Not one or the other. Not import quantity, but quality.

One or two imported players are enough for many sports worldwide, yet there are now more overseas players in elite Australian ice hockey than ever before. Some clubs in the Australian Ice Hockey League exploit loopholes in the quota of four imports to such an extent half their roster is born and developed overseas and brought here to play. In other teams, the total of local players sees less ice time than those born overseas.[3] Historical antecedents, such as the Raiders club in Melbourne and the Prague Bombers in Sydney, were built from natural immigrants or legitimate refugees who just happened to play hockey. They were not imported.

A National League should be a given in a country where amateur ice hockey has been played for almost one hundred and twenty years. It is an IIHF prerequisite for international competition, but the national association here delegate it to a private not-for-profit operating a business model borrowed from the NHL, the world's top professional league.

AIHL clubs make money from sponsors via broadcasting and gate takings. They have more incentive to import and naturalise overseas players than to develop locals. The national association is not promoting a top-level local game with this arrangement. It promotes imported overseas "stars" for entertainment appeal and income. It could cap the importing and playing of naturalised overseas players, but it does not. It could play 20-minute periods like everywhere else in the competition, but it does not. It could shorten the 7-month gap between national and international competitions. But it does not.

A century of Australian ice hockey brought us to the point where we can cannibalize teams and pout about how clever we are to have all the benefits of pro clubs without the restrictions. But the ongoing League collapses are not the fault of the disadvantaged locals who pay to play at this level. Nor the majority of fans who don't want to watch an increasing number of imported "stars". The same fans, dammit, who will not pay for a subscription to watch replays of the same "stars" during working hours! The ongoing League collapses are the fault of the national controlling authority, the League and the rising number of imported players.

To most observers, the National League has pleaded its case for attracting and retaining big sponsors without any explanation of how the income will be used. It has admonished fans for not boosting their broadcast ratings throughout several seasons. Some have legitimate concerns. Imported "stars" certainly attracted more fans in the past, such as when Canada exported hockey to Britain in the 1930s, but fewer people took up the game, preferring to watch it instead. It was manna from heaven for the first television broadcasters but it took a great deal of time and effort for the British sport to wean itself off its dependence on overseas countries, [2] and it will take time here.

The AIHL brand of "pro" sport looks like it targets a broadcast audience far away. It looks made for an audience who will not mind collapsing rinks and empty stands because they can watch their local players Down Under from the comfort of their own homes during their off-season when hockey is scarce. The AIHL should address the question of low broadcast ratings to North Americans, not locals. When they get a fair go, the game Australians play can be astonishingly entertaining.

Might it be that we as a nation prefer to play sports, attend games and participate in ways other than watching foreigners play on TV? Historically, the organisers here in the thirties, fifties and eighties have been vehemently opposed to each new attempt at commercialization, preferring instead to keep the sport on an amateur footing like Canada. From the ice hockey community of today comes a creeping cynicism to be taken with a good dose of irony: the only constant in the Australian game is that governance is not to blame.

We peer across the great expanse of oceans and see the leagues there protecting spots for their local players. We see they avoid cannibalizing their teams as a matter of course with import drafts and picks in reverse order of team standings. We even see well-managed associations doing that simply for competitive balance. In Victoria, local leagues have operated a player draft for many years, but the "balance of trade" of some AIHL teams is already an unfavourable deficit. How can they sustain that when their gate and merchandising income is purportedly barely adequate to keep the team afloat?

The League built up their overseas audience through social media and live-streamed games. But the true-blue supporters of homegrown ice hockey are more often found rink-side on game days. One is a worldwide broadcast market that generates income for the AIHL commission. The other is a local game day market that keeps the wolf from the door of most clubs. Local fans support local content to ensure that our players, spectators and volunteer workers have a sport at the top level. A sport that keeps profits in Australia, supports local jobs and reinvests in our economy. We have a viable TV and film industry thanks to people like that.

Australians support programs like Australian Made or AusBuy. For every $1 million of new or retained manufacturing business in Australia, there is $334k worth of tax revenue generated, $985k worth of value-added generated, $95k worth of welfare spending saved, and ten full-time jobs created. It makes economic sense to develop our sportsmen and women at home, to have them entertain us. We do okay with national teams full of homegrown champions, even in a few minor North American sports like basketball and baseball.

Economists may tell you we benefit more from international trade. Buy some of theirs and get them to buy some of ours. But "they" do not buy anywhere near as many of our ice hockey players as they export to us. The truth is they  have produced far too many of their own and now only want the world's best from everywhere.

Australian ice hockey bleeds money. It loses the resources Australians spend training overseas, including the spectator and volunteer resources around them, directly impacting the Australian game. Think AJIHL with top juniors absent overseas. These losses increase as more locals struggle to access scarce resources, such as ice time or training and development. Our committed top players have no practical alternative but to be pushed overseas at their expense. How else are they expected to compete against an increasing number of exports from better foreign development leagues?

A lot of that is displacement attributable to importation. Countless escape expenditures rob the sport of its resources. Add it all up, and there is enough to run better development programs here, perhaps even off-season practice leagues or regional tournaments. A national junior league is meant to be a part of that, but our controlling authority had to be pushed by the IIHF to set up a fundamental prerequisite of international participation. Privately-run schools like Next Level Hockey Australia are also attempting better junior development. The national league provides higher competition and little else.

Some AIHL clubs are already dependent on more imported players than locals, and others are certain to follow because nothing prevents the creation of whole teams of overseas players. The League is hardly protected, least of all from itself. That is not normal because quotas on this kind of thing have been enforced overseas for a very long time.

Some international sports bodies require clubs to produce a set quota of players when national teams perform poorly or foreign players dominate national leagues. A few highly-skilled imports benefit the game, but the sport here has held its own with and without them. There is a crisis of confidence in our talented kids today, but five thousand people once crushed into St Moritz St Kilda to watch only locals play ice hockey. The AIHL has not achieved that even with imported "stars".

An ordinary overseas player occupies a spot in the sport that a promising local could fill. A national team has only twenty or so top players, but it requires a much larger pool to be successful. Competition for roster spots is needed to motivate players, and others drop out due to injury or poor performance. Predicting who will be the real deal next tournament is more art than science. A naturalized import player or two might be okay if they were exceptional, not just the equal or lesser of a local, and not at the expense of a promising local with a long career ahead. But a national team of overseas players under the cloak of nationals is an admission of defeat when they are deliberately imported or poached from other teams. They are not natural emigrants at all. They came to play hockey.

Pressure to commercialize occurs here once each generation, every twenty or thirty years. That can be a good thing, but it must be sustainable, with global thinking and local action. An amateur sport has a local economy, and there is a point where importing goods and services impacts local content. Champions are made, not born. Australia should play its part in building a healthy and sustainable global ice hockey culture. It should make local players and address the other local resource shortages, such as officials and rinks. The AIHL is disinterested. It now sees itself as a national entertainment league. Its original aspirations published in a mid-season 2002 report above have long been buried and forgotten. The League attracts people wanting to profit and promote themselves instead of looking after players and volunteers. Amateurs and professionals make strange bedfellows, and we have all grown up with the idea that people chasing profits do not like quotas or restrictions.

AIHL organisers will need a lot of luck with another league of imports like the NIHL in the 1980s. The national association shut it down after just two seasons. It was not Australian ice hockey, just the North American game exported to Australia like the International Ice Hockey Australian Tour or the Australian International Ice Hockey Cup based at Sydney Ice Arena.

After sixteen seasons, the AIHL has succeeded where others did not, despite considerable criticism. But it does not need the Australian player development system to continue, nor the priceless trophy Australian amateurs have aspired to for over a century. The League that challenged a volunteer-run controlling authority to meet its demand for world-class players, officials and rinks did more to exasperate the problems. Voluntary associations alone are not capable of all that. A replacement men's national league is all that is needed to meet its commitment to international competition.

Both organizations still operate as if they don't depend on the other, when the reverse is true. They don't confront their common enemies together—the resource shortages in the sport and the tyranny of distance. Had they been capable of that, a few generations of players would not have paid to wait in vain for twenty years.

The AIHL is the national ice hockey league for the time being. But there is a bitter irony in any national team playing a spectator sport that no one watches. As with any speculative venture, invest if it entertains you. Support it if you think it is well managed in realising its growth potential. Ask yourself: is it mining its market opportunity and using the proceeds to add value for players and fans? Make sure you get your money's worth and stop when you are not. Perhaps the League and the national association will get the message. That would be better than beating to death the thing you love.

Citations

[1] Sport Management: Principles and Applications, Hoye, Smith, Nicholson, Stewart, Routledge, 4th ed., 2015, p 57

[2] Constructing the Hockey Family, Home, Community, Bureaucracy and Marketplace. Proceedings of the "Putting it on ice" Hockey Conference, 2012, Lori Dithurbide and Colin Howell eds. St Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada. Chapter "The Skaters of Sydney and Streatham: Exporting Hockey to the British Empire between the Wars". Daryl Leeworthy, Huddersfield University, p 315.

[3] 2015 AIHL Year in Review: where in the world did they come from, 6 Oct 2015, Sean Lopes. Online

[4] The Wheels of Commerce, vol. II of Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, 1979:204, Jose Rizal

[5] How Nike Defines Leadership in a Global, Social Community, Simon Mainwaring, 2011, from SimonMainwaring.com

Greg Oddy, last AIHL season, 2018. 18 AIHL seasons, 383 games, 615 points, and 3 Goodall Cups. (Adelaide Adrenaline)