If you are an older hockey collector or even a fan, you might have some memories of what was happening on the ice 30 years ago in early April.
Nothing.
The NHL Players Association went on strike for the first time in April, 1992. They walked out immediately after the end of the regular season, putting the playoffs in jeopardy. The timing was perfect for them. The players had already been fully paid for their season of work. The playoffs, which was when the owners made a substantial amount of their revenue, were put in limbo.
As the strike began, there were a few key issues that needed to be sorted out. Players’ pensions and the length of the NHL season were the most talked about, but then sneaking its way into the conversation was the players’ rights to their images and likenesses.
As the week went on, NHL hockey card royalties emerged as the stumbling block in getting the players back on the ice for the Stanley Cup playoffs.
At the time, I was the editor of Canadian Sportscard Collector, which for many years was Canada’s national sports collectibles magazine. Suddenly, my job became less and less about set reviews and features, and more about my roots as a journalist. Our magazine was based in St. Catharines, Ontario, on the south shore of Lake Ontario in the Niagara region, near Buffalo.
Everything was taking place from Toronto, which was about an hour away by car, so during that stretch trips up and down the QEW became part of the daily routine. Todd Gill, a friend from high school and a former football and basketball teammate, was the Toronto Maple Leafs’ players’ union rep. He was at most of the press conferences and announcements, and it was great to reconnect with him after 10 years even though the unusualness of the circumstances of our little high school reunion would only be eclipsed five years later with the release of Grosse Point Blank. But still, having Todd there helped make me feel more comfortable covering the story and also gave me some insight into just how important hockey card revenues were.
The Hockey Hobby In 1992
To really understand just how big the hobby was at that time, you have to take a trip back in time by 30 years. Sports card shops were everywhere. Cities may still have a card and collectibles shop now, but in 1992, those same towns may have had a dozen.
In downtown Toronto, the biggest sports card shop was Legends of the Game. I went into the shop almost every time I went to downtown Toronto whether it was on business or when I was going to a Blue Jays or Argos game. Our magazine followed the Jays very closely at the time, as they won back-to-back World Series in 1992 and 1993.
Richard Stadnicki was the manager at Legends of the Game at the time, and I will never forget a conversation we had about the sports card market on one of those trips to Toronto to cover the strike.
“We sell about 2,000 packs of cards a day, which is about three times what we were selling in 1989-90, before Upper Deck, Score and Pro Set Hockey all arrived on the market,” he said. “We do sell a lot of baseball, and there are football and basketball collectors that come in, too. But our primary market is hockey.”
As I walked around the store with Richard, he showed me a 1953 Topps Mickey Mantle card that they had on sale for $1,200. The price was ridiculous then, and it is ridiculous now, though for completely opposite reasons. Graded cards were not a thing yet. The internet hadn’t yet come to the masses, so there was no eBay. Auctions were things that happened mostly at big shows or by mail order proxy bids.
Despite the sales, the hobby was already starting to soften by the spring of 1992. The Upper Deck Company was starting to get returns on hockey cards – Upper Deck French Hockey from that time is another story for another day. Every product selling through was no longer automatic. Another factor was that retail could return their products but the hobby could not.
Ted Saskin, who would later become the head of the NHLPA, was the association’s legal counsel at the time. His aim was to pull $11 million out of the hockey card market in royalties for the association. According to the figures that were floating around in the mainstream media, the entire royalty pot that year for hockey cards was $16 million. While the optics look like player greed, that was not really the case. The royalties were going to help, among other things, player pensions. I remember that being a hot button for Todd in one of our off-the-record chats.
Gordie Howe Enters The Equation
During this strike gave me the opportunity to meet and interview Gordie Howe for the first time. It would be obnoxious to say that we became friends. I got to know him because of his heavy involvement in the hobby at the time, specifically with Upper Deck and through card show appearances. When I would run into him, he remembered my name and he even remembered that I was from the little town of Prescott, Ontario along the St. Lawrence River south of Ottawa. I would sometimes sit in church and wonder if Jesus knew who I was or if Santa Claus knew where I lived. It no longer mattered. Gordie Howe knew. And in my own mental rock-paper-scissors, Gordie Howe beat both Jesus and Santa.
Gordie may have been the most underpaid professional athlete in history. His old friend and line mate, Ted Lindsay, tried to start a players’ union in the 1960s but was shut down. Howe did not make a lot of money playing hockey, but had no idea that average players on other teams were making more money than he was. In that first conversation I had with him, he told me that his annual pension for playing professional hockey for 26 years was “almost $20,000.”
Lindsay was dealt to Chicago for stirring things up, and it sledge-hammered his close friendship with Howe. Lindsay knew what was going on years before his teammates realized it. Just a few months before the 1992 NHLPA strike, Howe, Bobby Hull and Carl Brewer filed a lawsuit in the Province of Ontario charging NHL owners with misappropriation of pension funds. Brewer spent 17 years investigating former NHLPA President Alan Eagleson, and played a major role in sending him to prison for racketeering, fraud and embezzlement.
NHLPA Gets Royalties
Saskin negotiated a deal that saved the 1992 Stanley Cup playoffs, but it also played a role in crushing the hobby.
The deal that put teams back on the ice for the playoffs included a 20 per cent royalty on NHL hockey card sales. Trading card companies would have to acquire a license from the NHLPA for an 11 per cent royalty with a minimum guarantee. They would also have to land an NHL license for nine per cent. There was also a steep minimum guarantee put in place, which would later be crippling to the hockey card manufacturers.
The royalty and minimum guarantee numbers seemed like a slam dunk based on 1990 and 1991 sales. But things softened in 1992. The answer from the NHLPA was to allow hockey card companies to produce more sets rather than lower their guarantee. This resulted in the emergence of products like Pinnacle, Upper Deck SP, Collector’s Choice, Topps Stadium Club, O-Pee-Chee Premier and Pro Set Platinum. The NHLPA also granted licenses to Donruss-Leaf and Fleer, and Action Packed was very close to landing an NHLPA deal.
The NHL lockout of 1994, which many analysts said came as a direct result of the 1992 deal, crushed the hockey card market in Canada and the United States, and it never truly rebounded. Eventually, Topps walked away from its license, but Pacific was waiting in the wings.
Ten years later, it happened again. This time, the NHL lockout would result in the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season. The hockey card industry, which fueled the 1992 strike, was now collateral damage. I was the VP of Marketing at Pacific by this time.
I will never forget the day in late May, 2004, when Pacific President and CEO Mike Cramer and CAO Phil Roth broke the news to me that the NHLPA was basically shutting us down. We had worked hard with Mike McCarthy of the NHL, one of the greatest people in professional sports licensing, on a plan to get us through the year. We already knew there would be no season.
The NHLPA had different plans. They pulled the plug on the hobby and Saskin awarded Upper Deck an exclusive hockey license. It was hard to digest. In two days, I was heading home from Seattle to Ottawa to visit my father, who was dying of lung and brain cancer. Then-Beckett head man Mark Harwell offered me a job, but Mark was in the process of being shown the door at Beckett and the company was not interested in paying an immigration lawyer for a work visa for me. Because of 9/11, my green card had been delayed and I could no longer work in the United States. It didn’t matter how good I was at my job or how well I knew the hobby. No one was hiring. We sold our home and moved back to Canada, where I ran our family publishing business and bought Canadian Sports Collector.
When play resumed in 1992, the Pittsburgh Penguins went on to win the Stanley Cup, sweeping the Chicago Blackhawks in four straight games. As soon as the puck dropped for Game 1, everyone seemed to forget about the strike.
But the lasting legacy of the 1992 strike will be the role the hobby played in the first work stoppage in NHL history.
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