NLL Insider

As Yogi Berra once so eloquently put it, for me it was like “deja vu all over again.”

I’d just heard the announcement that the NLL had decided to cancel the 2008 season due to the inability to reach a labor agreement with the PLPA. The news dragged up memories of a similar lacrosse news thunderbolt I listened to 32 years ago. Then, I had just completed my first season as a player with the Boston Bolts of the original professional National Lacrosse League. I was home, eating breakfast and listening to the sports news on the radio before heading out to my off season employment, digging drainage trenches in the rain in a tree nursery. The story startled me. The NLL had announced it was folding operations.

I remember a multitude of thoughts instantly racing through my mind. How could this be? I had spent my entire youth dreaming of one day playing in the big arenas in front of large, screaming crowds and that past summer the dream had come true. And to make things even better, I just happened to have been a longtime Celtics fan and spent the spring watching their games gratis from the press box and attending their practices. I’d had the honor of talking to the great Bobby Orr (who used to watch our practices and attended our games) and watched the Bruins play. I’d had the incredible experience of playing in the venerable Boston Garden for not just one game but an entire season of over 20 home games. We’d go to Fenway Park to watch Yastrzemski and Fisk and eat Fenway Franks. We’d go to Martha’s Vineyard and Woods Hole and swim and eat fresh lobster and fresh fish bought right from the boats. Life couldn’t be better, could it?

After that fateful morning, I never thought anything like that league would come back in my lifetime. It was time to move on, find a career, play and coach amateur lacrosse and enjoy the memories of that one special season. But the vision of Chris Fritz and Russ Cline changed all that. The dream came back and evolved into what we now know as the current version of the National Lacrosse League. I hope this time the dream stays alive for a long time, which brings me to some thoughts on the last couple of Collective Bargaining Agreements.

There is no question the current NLL is still somewhat of a fragile entity. One only needs to review the history of franchises to reach that conclusion. It’s still very much a work in progress that has seen its share of wonderful success stories as well as its share of failures. What the league needs more than anything is a stable labor agreement as one of a number of foundation pillars so it can spend much-needed time and energy to work on the pillars of sponsorship and media support (print, internet, radio and television) at the local franchise and league level so it can continue to grow and achieve the “major sport” label.

In my opinion, the players have to realize they still must be willing to make sacrifices to enable the completion of the bigger picture. In September of 2004, the league was on the verge of a labor stoppage that could have crippled the vision again. Disaster was averted when a three-year agreement was reached. Although both sides were to be commended for resolving the dispute, the length of that agreement proved to be limiting to the league in its ability to concentrate its efforts on the other pillars. So, when that agreement expired this past year, the league and its franchise owners once again found themselves expending most of their resources on attempting to resolve yet another labor dispute, leading them to the eventual exasperating penultimate decision to cancel the 2008 season. Could that decision ultimately have led to the demise of this iteration of pro lacrosse in North America? In this writer’s opinion, I think it would have and that would have been a tragedy for the game.

Fortunately, there was a contingent of both players and owners who found a way to open talks again and reach a long-term agreement that not only keeps the dream alive for current and future players, but also gives the league and its owners the much-needed freedom to allocate considerable resources to attend to the neglected construction of the other necessary foundation pillars. With a seven-year labor agreement in place, the onus is now on ownership and league management to work diligently to achieve big league status.

Let us all hope they succeed. The dream is alive.

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