This is not putting a knock on Jarome Iginla of Calgary’s Flames but, instead, to wonder how the National Hockey League got into the pickle it’s in today.
Jarome is just being used as an example of the stupidity of the owners.
Iginla, who I would say is easily the most popular of the Flames, and also, give or take a Miikka Kiprusoff, is the most talented player in the group.
But if the two sides were to settle their differences and start playing hockey again, “Iggy” would draw a salary in excess of $7 million buckaroonies.
To break it into simple terms, if a hard-working electrician or plumber out there was to make a good salary of, say, $70,000 a year, it would take him more than 112 years to earn what Iginla will make in one season or over maybe 90 or so games.
Heck, if a mechanic was to make $70,000 a year it would take him 15 years to make a measly $1 million dollars.
The numbers are true and simply unrealistic. No man should make the kind of money Iginla makes playing a game that most would play for free.
But to further make a point on stupid salaries, Jarome Iginla will make twice as much, if they do ever play again, than the whole Calgary Stampeder football team makes. And that involves more than 50 players, at least, 10 coaches and the support staff.
We are not saying that Iginla is the cause of the current mess that the players and owners are in but are, in fact, wondering how they got themselves into such a mess.
Players deserve to be paid for their services because they are professionals. But does any one man deserve $7 million a year for doing so?
And, remember, Iginla is not even the highest-paid player in the league.
Players deserve a cut of the action. But I can remember when I worked for CKXL Radio and we blew the doors off of every other radio station in the ratings department and the station was making big-time dollars in advertising.
But while I knew the profits were big and accepted the fact that I was a part of a most successful team, I never even thought of going to management and saying I wanted a bigger piece of the money pie.
Management would have laughed at me, in fact.
So why can’t the two sides simply put it all on the table and split things right down the middle?
I’ll tell you why. Because that would be too simple.
An interesting happening in Alberta golf recently kind of shook me up with the reaction.
We’ll not go into any names, but a long-time director of golf at a prestigious southern Alberta layout lost his job for whatever reason.
The reaction, I think, is mind-boggling.
When these things happen in any business, the word gets around quickly. But nowhere as fast as in the golf game, for use of a better term.
A rare head professional’s job was open. The reaction, I’m told, was disturbing to course management, although they accept it as being part of the business or just human nature. Within hours of the dismissal, the telephone calls, emails and texts were burning up the lines into the clubhouse. And with each of the calls the reason for the man losing his job were embellished beyond belief.
I found out two days after the incident occurred and, on checking it out, could not believe the flood of names trying to get in line to fill the opening, even though it was said from the start that a new person would not be in place until next year considering the golf season is quickly drawing to a close.
What management described it to me as was “vultures on road kill.”
Someone once told me that if someone dies during probably the world’s most famous auto race, the Indy 500, the next year’s race is sold out on race day. If the race goes without a fatality it takes until noon the next day to sell the last of the tickets.
They call it human nature.
My joke of the day comes from one of those handouts at restaurants which had a line under the heading of humorous things to note, which read: You never see a U-haul following a funeral procession which just proves that you can’t take it with you.”
A buddy of mine is writing a book on golf and he sent me a list of the chapter names just this week.
One will be entitled: “How to hit a Callaway out of the bush after hitting a Top-Flite in.”
