I’m Not Talking About the NHL Lockout
Over the past couple of years, I’ve made a conscious effort not to consume celebrity news. I mostly don’t care about celebrities, and know that I shouldn’t. The exception is when an artist is talking about their craft. I’ll watch Inside the Actors Studio (though why Jay Leno was on recently, I’ll never know), but not Entertainment Tonight.
I have extended the same logic to sports. If Markus Naslund is going to discuss the neutral zone trap, I might listen (athletes are, of course, notoriously lousy interviews), but I couldn’t care less about his labour negotiations. To me, it’s just a bunch of millionaires quibbling over how to divide their billions.
This is a long preamble to Colby Cosh’s post about NHL players in Europe and advertising on uniforms:
Here in North America we have a horror of letting uniforms be despoiled by corporate emblems (though I think Ziggy looks pretty cool, myself). It seems like a curious inversion of the usual response to capitalism on the two sides of the ocean. Perhaps our eyes, over here, are in greater need of that ad-free expanse of space.
I remember my shock at noting the prominent Carlsberg logo on the front of my recently-adopted Premiership team’s jersey. When I was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, I saw a news item on the fact that the Premiership had approved expansion of advertising to the player’s shorts (they didn’t specify front or back).
Mr. Cosh proposes that “Corporate sponsorship on NHL uniforms seems like a relatively small concession to make for the existence of hockey”. I’m not sure that what the NHL and NHLPA need are new revenue streams. What they need to do is get their houses in order and practice some fiscal restraint. There’s plenty of cash kicking around for them–they just need to decide how to manage it. It pains me to picture a big Labatts logo on the shoulder of, say, a Habs jersey. So much of the game has become counterfeit and shoddy–can’t we at least hold on to the uniforms?
