By Greg Buium
Vancouver Sun
October 2, 2004

RED LINE, BLUE LINE, BOTTOM LINE
How Push Came to Shove Between the National Hockey League and Its Players
BY MARC EDGE
New Star Books, 176 pages ($16)

NON-FICTION I It takes real bravery for a writer to wade into the National Hockey League's current labour woes. With acres of newsprint, hours of television coverage and nearly non-stop talk radio already devoted to the lockout, you'd think everything has been said before.
Yet for those of us who read about hockey just as much as we watch it, this may be the moment to stop and try to make sense of it all, to read a book that can give us the long view.
Enter Marc Edge's Red Line, Blue Line, Bottom Line: How Push Came to Shove Between the National Hockey League and Its Players. This timely little study tackles all of the important questions head-on: "How did it ever get to this?" he asks at the start. Who's right? Who's wrong? What will ultimately happen if the season is lost?
Edge, a former Province reporter who now teaches journalism at the University of Texas in Arlington, brings an outsider's eye to the debate. He isn't a sports writer any more (he was briefly, more than 20 years ago). He's a fan, drawn to the business of hockey.
As he did in his first book, Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver's Newspaper Monopoly, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, he borrows from his graduate work in labour and industrial relations.
And he aims high. Not only will he investigate the failed economics of professional hockey, he'll compare its story to those of major-league baseball, the NBA and the NFL. Most of the significant issues in this standoff -- salary caps, luxury taxes, disclosure -- have parallel lives in North America's other professional sports.
It's a compelling plan, with the ingredients for a rich, expansive study. Yet, for all its ambition, Red Line, Blue Line, Bottom Line never quite comes into focus. It feels as if it's been dashed off, just in time for the work stoppage.
Although Edge claims he hasn't written a "quickie," it sure reads that way: It's thin, based almost entirely on secondary sources and filled with odd autobiographical bits.
A pocket guide to the NHL shutdown has its place, but this is something entirely different.
Take Edge's method. His goal, he says, is to fuse theory and "more common-sense wisdom" to understand the business of sport. "For example," he writes, "pendulum theory states that first things swing one way, then they swing the other. In common-sense terms, 'What goes around, comes around.'"
Rigorous stuff.
Edge often seems fuzzy about his audience. He supplies plenty of data, but it's packed into dense paragraphs isolating each sport. Rarely does he draw the numbers together -- in, say, a table or graph -- to make the comparisons clear to a lay reader.
A few telling anecdotes would have given the book some spunk. But he hasn't conducted a single interview. Armed with observations trotted out many times before, he has simply revisited the turf of his superb predecessors (Russ Conway, in Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey, and Bruce Dowbiggin, in Money Players: How Hockey's Greatest Stars Beat the NHL at Its Own Game).
The timing of this book inevitably puts him in the crystal-ball business, too. Edge often appears hamstrung by what "might" happen, "if" there's no hockey "when" the players are locked out.
Guess what? They are.
Fittingly, he provides a number of doomsday scenarios, most of which revolve around the game's permanent shift to Europe. If the NHL's work stoppage extends past this year, he thinks tiny Ornskoldsvik, Sweden (hometown of Markus Naslund and the Sedins) could be at the centre of hockey's New World Order.
Trying to peg hockey's future is like nailing jelly to the wall. That's just one reason why Red Line, Blue Line, Bottom Line feels slightly dated from the start.
When a new collective bargaining agreement is signed and the NHL returns, a summing-up will be in order. Until then, follow your favourite hockey writers. That way, at least you'll be in the loop.
Greg Buium is a Vancouver freelance writer.