Gary Bettman--pro hockey's Jewish handler
06/20/2022
He undressed the goalkeepers and forbade everyone to fight. And even if Gary Bettman knew nothing about hockey - and infuriated everyone, but now no one can imagine the NHL without him.
"It's just awful. The puck hits the ribs, shoulders, elbows, and it hurts a lot. I'm covered in bruises, ”said Sergey Bobrovsky, the goalkeeper of the Florida Panthers NHL club, in 2018. Other league goaltenders joined in, all protesting the downsizing, an innovation pioneered by NHL commissioner and Jewish Sports Hall of Famer Gary Bettman. “If the goalkeeper's uniform becomes more compact, it will make the game brighter. The league will fight with the “square” goalkeepers who wear mattress pads and fill all the gates,” Bettman objected without changing his face.
It was not the first time for him to be under the gun of criticism. The sports media called Bettman "the man who pisses everyone off." But he himself always preferred to define himself differently. "I am a warrior. I want to understand how the world around is changing, and respond to changes,” he said.
Bettman took over as NHL commissioner, the hockey league's top management position, in 1993. It was an incredible journey for the son of a Jewish family whose father and grandfather spent their whole lives selling nuts under the brand name of their own small company. Gary was born in New York in 1952. Relatives invested in his education and saved up enough money to pay for education at Cornell University - one of the eight institutions of higher education that are part of the Ivy League. Bettman studied industry and labor relations. He then received his Juris Doctor from New York University. But while the parents dreamed of how their son would lead the family "nut" company to success, he chose a different path for himself.
In 1981, Bettman began working for the NBA, the National Basketball Association. As a native New Yorker, he has been playing basketball since he was a child, but admitted that "the game interested him less than what happened behind the scenes of the playground." In the NBA, Bettman took over as an attorney and marketing manager. One of his most notorious innovations was the introduction of a salary cap in the league, a predetermined amount that league teams can spend on the salaries of their players. This measure equalized the opportunities of "rich" and "poor" clubs: now a limit prevailed over everyone, and the "rich" could not outbid promising players from the "poor", promising them fabulous profits. Not everyone in the NBA liked this, but it quickly became clear:
Talk that Bettman was trying to be lured from the NBA to the NHL - that is, from basketball to hockey - went in 1992. The New York Times published an anonymous interview with the owner of one of the local clubs, and he claimed that the issue had already been decided at a secret meeting of directors. “Many people came to this meeting with great skepticism. Like: what does this person know about hockey? – said the insider. - And it really was like this: Bettman knew little about the game itself. But he was the god of marketing, licensing, salary caps. And this is exactly what the NHL needed, watching with envy as basketball turnovers grow, and counting their losses from half-empty stands. In the winter of 1993, the decision was officially announced. Gary Bettman became the chief executive of the NHL, although many club owners immediately called him "a lawyer who craves money."
Bettman began with a radical transformation. By analogy with the NBA, the league introduced salary caps, improved the quality of the picture in broadcasts - among other things, in our time, the NHL was one of the first to test GoPro cameras installed on players' helmets: the viewer received not just a picture, but almost complete immersion in the game. In addition, we have acquired websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and upgraded the system of paid subscriptions.
The next target for Bettman were fights on the site. The fans hated him because the fights were part of the spectacle. But the new commissioner of the league was adamant: “There will be less rudeness on the ice, and they will stop it more strictly. Hockey needs a new format." This did not completely rule out fights and unreasonably harsh power moves, but now players are less likely to do this, knowing about penalties - including monetary ones.
But finally the man "who infuriates everyone," Bettman became when he launched an attack on the uniform of goalkeepers. At the beginning of the 2000s, it became common practice among goalkeepers to increase the pads on their legs: the media wrote about cases when they were specially rolled out under pressure to make them wider. In the 2003 playoffs, the “mattresses” on the legs of Jean-Sebastien Giguere, the goaltender of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, surprised even experienced spectators: they left a minimum of free space in the gate. In addition, Giguere, and others after him, began to use XL panties and bibs that were much larger than their own proportions. Goalkeepers were nicknamed "chests". Due to the extremely large equipment, they were unable to move much, as a result of which the performance and entertainment of the game dropped sharply.
At Bettman's insistence, the shields were cut twice, in 2004 and 2011. The shields on the legs were narrowed up to 28 cm in width - before they could reach 40 cm or more, and their length was limited to the middle of the thigh - in the past, the shields were so huge that they almost reached the waist. A third wave of cuts in goalie equipment followed in 2018. Goalkeepers have had their bibs and handguards reduced in size, making them, in Bettman's words, "more anatomically proportioned."
Angry letters poured into his office. "Sooner or later, someone will get injured - a real one, in the form of broken bones," said Braden Holtby, the Dallas goaltender. “The goalkeeper is forced to expose himself to the blows. And when it hurts every time, doubts arise - these seconds are worth the missed goals, ”said Sergey Bobrovsky. But as time went on, injury statistics did not grow, and other leagues, for example, in the Russian KHL, began to cut shields, following the example of the NHL. At the same time, most goalkeepers not only put up with the new uniform, but also found it useful. “I am small in size, I need to be fast. “Lightweight” equipment is what you need, ”admitted Marc-Andre Fleury, the goalkeeper of Minnesota.
The statistics clearly speak in favor of Bettman's innovations. During his tenure, the league's revenue has grown more than tenfold, from $400 million to $4.5 billion. Increased the annual average salary of players - from 467 thousand to three million dollars. The league has signed a number of lucrative contracts with television networks, and the number of its teams has increased from 24 to 32.
But when he came to hockey, he could not even pronounce the names of the clubs correctly - back in the 90s, in an interview with reporters, he confused the New York Rangers and New York Islanders. But having gone through the fire of criticism, today it receives completely different reviews. “This guy knows the problems of our business better than we know them ourselves,” one NHL board member told Sportsnet. The merits of Bettman were appreciated not only within the league, but also in the diaspora: in 2016, he was included in the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.