With the succession settled, happily or otherwise, Smythe was able to concentrate on defeating the upstart new players’ organization. He had a number of tools to work with, as there were glaring flaws in Lindsay’s project for the owners to exploit.
Support for the association was broad, but shallow. It’s one of hockey’s oldest clichés, but in this case it happened to be true: most of the players just wanted to play hockey. They had, for generations, accepted the autocratic nature of the NHL and willingly delegated control to the handful of men who owned the teams. They knew careers were short, and once their skills diminished they would be cut loose with little more than a handshake and whatever memories they’d managed to store up. Many – probably most – looked on it as a price worth paying for the privilege they’d been given.
“They were going to make us heroes across Canada,” remembers Dick Duff, who carried the Leafs through some of their worst years just to be traded when the rewards started coming in. “They’re not going to pay us much, and we’re not going to play very long. At thirty we’re gone … You borrowed some of Canada’s kids for a few years to run your business.”1
The pension plan, focus of most complaints, was only dimly understood. Once a year, Clarence Campbell visited each team to extoll the plan and update players on its activities. Those who asked questions were treated with withering condescension. Frank Mahovlich remembers his first pension meeting as a pro, held at Ted Reeve Arena. “I decided to ask a question. I didn’t think our pension was that great. And Campbell says: ‘What are you asking questions for, you just got here.’ He really put me down. He was serious, he didn’t want some young hockey player asking questions.”2
Bob Baun had a similar experience. “I must have drove Clarence Campbell crazy because I put my hand up all the time. I knew a little bit about the insurance business, but not very much, and I could never figure out how this token of money – and it was all our money to start with – was going to turn into a big amount of money that was going to keep my family and me going until I die. They’d try to explain that to me and I’d say, ‘It seems to me the only people who are getting rich are the insurance companies.’ I said, ‘Actuarially we have to see what’s going on.’ Well, everybody wondered where I got that word.”3
But Baun, Mahovlich, and the few others who took an active interest were a small minority, and the owners had plenty of room to work on the others, who were eager to get more benefits but didn’t want to endanger their careers. In August, before he got the axe, Meeker had spoken to Tim Horton who, like Baun, was a big proponent of better pensions. But when Meeker filled him in on the details of Milton Mound’s demands for Jim Thomson, Horton was offended. “It is Horton’s opinion that the two players, Harvey and Lindsay, are the only ones that had any working knowledge of what the Association’s lawyers are doing,” Meeker informed Smythe. “It is now Horton’s opinion that the Association is a bad thing for the Players.”4
The owners skillfully exploited the players’ fear of being labelled a union. Although many were from working-class homes where fathers toiled at low-paying jobs and appreciated the benefits unionization could bring, there was a pride and individuality that came with being a big-league hockey player and a sense that fans wouldn’t stick by them if they became the hockey affiliate of organized labour. In a letter to Mound, the players’ attorney, Smythe drove home that point:
I do not believe in threats in a relationship between hockey players and their club where the success of all parties depends on mutual loyalties. May I, however, be permitted … to suggest that if the players are seriously considering becoming trade unionists, it is a worthy and nowadays often exciting occupation but with little spectator interest. I should consider it impossible to sell tickets to the public to watch players in the same trade union going about their trade with due respect not only to seniority ratings but to officers of the union who happened to be on the opposing club.5
Lindsay had also made a tactical error in his choice of vice-president. Montreal’s Doug Harvey was the pre-eminent defenceman in the NHL, admired for his skill and popular for his enthusiasm and camaraderie. But he was a kid who couldn’t grow up, irresponsible and careless with his money, and already well down the road to the alcoholism that turned his life into a tragedy. The thought of putting Harvey in charge of a pension fund on which hundreds of players were counting made Frank Selke as firm an opponent as Smythe was in Toronto.
Association members were also handicapped by a lack of comparative information. Players on opposing clubs rarely fraternized, and even within teams discussing salaries was taboo. They had no way to judge how they stood versus one another and even less means to assess their income against the profitability of the teams. Year after year the owners insisted they were barely scraping by and that more than a token pay raise could push them into the poorhouse.
In Toronto’s case, of course, it was baloney. In the year of the Players’ Association appearance, Smythe’s salary had been raised to $35,000. His 50,000 Gardens’ shares were eligible for a regular dividend of $1.20 each, plus a 30-cent bonus declared in January. Profit was $214,000, not the best year the Gardens ever had, but satisfying nonetheless. Gardens’ dividends had tripled since 1950, bringing Smythe an extra $50,000 a year.
The highest-paid Leaf at the time was George Armstrong, whose $1,000 bonus as the new captain put him at $11,500, $500 ahead of Dick Duff. Frank Mahovlich was making $10,000, the same as Ron Stewart. The league minimum for full-time players was $100 a game, or $7,000 for the season. Toronto had three players at that level, tied with the Rangers for most in the league. In response to a request from Smythe, Clarence Campbell investigated and discovered there were nineteen players on the six teams making less than $8,000.
The players were right to be suspicious of the pension plan. Of the six members of the Players’ Association executive, the expected pensions at age sixty ranged from $2,369 for Harvey to $2,669 for Thomson. Harvey’s anticipated return after a decade as the league’s premier defenceman was approximately double that of Smythe’s office secretary. Mahovlich says his pension from the NHL is “embarrassing.” Meeker paid $900 a year for five years, which was invested for forty years and pays him less than $200 a month.6
The players weren’t even allowed to keep the income from their own endorsements. Personal appearances were dictated by the team, with the player getting a flat $10. The 1957–58 contract for Parkhurst Products, which produced bubble gum with hockey cards, was worth $5,000 a year. St. Lawrence Starch paid $4,300 for its Beehive Corn Syrup trading cards and personal endorsements. Of the total, the players were allowed to split $2,000, or about $100 each. Foster Hewitt got $2,433, apparently as negotiating agent, while the Gardens kept $4,866.7
When Smythe asked Meeker to estimate the cost of the association’s demands, the bill was modest. All told – including improved moving expenses, compensation for income lost due to injuries, higher training allowances, a bigger playoff split, and a $450 per player contribution to the pension fund, it came to less than $20,000 a year for the entire team. Nonetheless, in September Smythe invited four Toronto sportswriters to his office and handed them details of the pension fund. He told them they could do with the information what they wanted, but offered a broad suggestion: “It could be that this whole thing is a smokescreen to enable a small group to get control of the NHL pension fund, which now amounts to about $1,750,000 – and this group might be more interested in its own welfare than that of the players.”8
In November, Smythe made a special address to Gardens shareholders. When launched, he said, the association had insisted it meant no harm to the game and had no plans to “make trouble” for the owners. “Since that time every Owner, every Club has been sued as a monopoly and has also been charged under the Labour Relations Board of the U.S. with unfair labour practices, and we have been subjected to a certification problem under the Ontario Labour Relations laws,” he said.
All this was the doing of Ted Lindsay and Milton Mound, the New York lawyer who “has absolutely no knowledge of hockey” but was smart enough to be making $100,000 a year off clients like the NHL players. Although “a great how-do-you-do” was being made about the pension fund, both Lindsay and Harvey had been on its board for two years without raising a single complaint or opposing a single motion.
“So the record of the Association in nearly a year is that they are causing a good deal of trouble and that no one can point out one thing that has been done which is helpful for hockey or for our team or for our individual players.”
Smythe’s position got a boost when Syl Apps, who had been instrumental in setting up the pension, announced he and other retirees were “entirely satisfied with the present status and management of this Fund” and expressed “alarm” at reports that current players were trying to seize control. There were as many retirees as there were active players, yet they were unrepresented by the new association. In addition, he said, he had studied the organization’s constitution and discovered it put inordinate decision-making power in the hands of members of the executive, as few as four of whom could make binding decisions. In a letter to Clarence Campbell, quickly released to the press, he appealed to the NHL president to block Lindsay.
All this, and similar efforts, enabled Smythe, Campbell, and the other owners to chip away successfully at the commitment of the players. And while Smythe was a leading party to the opposition, he was not the decisive figure, or the most ruthless. For all his efforts, the Leafs players voted overwhelmingly to ratify their support for the association and ignored a fevered locker-room pitch in which Smythe, accompanied by Campbell, spelled out the full horrors of what they were about to do. The events that killed Lindsay’s project took place in Detroit, where Jack Adams lied about Lindsay’s salary, produced phoney financial records to convince the players the team was in financial peril, and orchestrated a newspaper smear campaign accusing Lindsay of manipulating and duping his teammates for his own benefit. Lindsay wasn’t there to challenge the falsehoods, having been shipped to the Black Hawks, where Smythe had similarly dumped Jimmy Thomson and would send fellow conspirator Tod Sloan. It was crude and effective. Nervous NHLers began to defect and Lindsay was forced to negotiate for what he could get.
The result wasn’t a total failure for the players. At a conference with the owners in February 1958 they got most of what they wanted – the clubs would match contributions to the pension and there would be improvements in a range of payments, from moving expenses to exhibition games and the playoff pool. Fines would be deposited in an “emergency fund” for players and former players in need. The association itself, however, was largely neutralized. Henceforth differences with the owners would be thrashed out at an “owner-players council,” which quickly became moribund.
The bigger issues would be left for another decade of growing discontent until expansion came along and changed the dynamic – though then again the players would eventually find themselves holding the short straw. Smythe, for one, considered the concessions made by the owners in 1958 a small price to pay and a clear victory over troublesome agitators like Lindsay. A year after his special address to shareholders he was able to attend the NHL’s annual meeting and detail the extent to which the threat had been vanquished: “No concessions of any kind were made which would impinge on the right and authority with respect to the conduct of the management of a club, or which acknowledged in any manner a right to share in the revenues of the club except by salary, bonus or incentive money,” he stated proudly. “No recognition was given to the NHL Players’ Association in any respect.”9