POKER

We play poker at my house once a month:


January 28, 2005

SKIING

Really enjoyed my ski trip to Sun Peaks. Tried out some new Atomic Metrons and Langes while I was there. It honestly seemed like a new sport. Excellent snow, excellent sunshine.




BOOKS

I finished Saturday, by Ian McEwan, yesterday, and it didn't disappoint. It has a languid pace until 2/3 of the way through, when the plot explodes. McEwan will speak in Toronto on April 4th. Tickets are available at Nicholas Hoare Books. Another review from the Times Literary Supplement:

"The irruption of dream-like horror into ordinary, ordered lives has long been Ian McEwan’s beat. In his novels, children are snatched and never seen again, women are attacked by feral dogs; characters witness freak monstrosities – fatal balloon accidents, country-house rapes or hideous, protracted murders. From the very first page, readers usually find themselves, like the narrator of Enduring Love (1997), “running towards a catastrophe . . . a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes”. One of McEwan’s great strengths is that he writes equally well about both sides of the coin: not just about sinister, chaotic, violent forces, but about unremarkable domestic contentment too. His books are often at their best when they trace the shadow-line between the two: riding the tension of the coming disaster; or, as in this passage from The Child in Time (1987), conveying the shock of the immediate aftermath:

The traffic slowed reluctantly and stopped. He crossed with the other shoppers and tried to absorb the insult of the world’s normality. He saw how rigorously simple it was – he had gone shopping with his daughter, lost her, and was now returning without her to tell his wife. The bikers were still there, and so too, further on, was the Coca-Cola can and its straw. Even the dog was under the same tree.

In the past, McEwan’s problem has been with what happens next. As John Lanchester points out, his longer novels tend to “begin in a nightmare, and then set out to explain the nightmare, to control and rationalise it”. His catastrophes are always fascinating; but the “new shapes” produced afterwards are sometimes less impressive, as he struggles to make sense of the private nightmares, to give them a wider significance. Enduring Love goes down with the terrific opening balloon accident and never quite gets up again. Nothing in The Child in Time matches the stark horror of the little girl’s disappearance, despite the brave forays into time-warp physics and Thatcherite dystopia. But since “the September attacks”, which provide the backdrop to everything that happens in his excellent new novel, the nightmare doesn’t really need explaining. His
constant preoccupation – in a word, security – has become the great obsession. The prevailing public mood has come to resemble closely that of an Ian McEwan novel. Constant menace, punctuated with nightmarish atrocities; the insult of the world’s continuing normality: these are things we all understand very well.

“Most of us have no active role to play in these terrible events. We simply watch the television, read the papers, turn on the radio again.” This was McEwan reporting, on September 15, 2001, on the front page of the Guardian. Saturday dramatizes the same condition, in a way that is both simple and suggestive. “Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet.” So the novel begins: with no awareness of having made a decision, the man of science finds himself at the window of his London house, looking at the night sky, with a spooky sense of foreboding. It is not misplaced. In the sky above, he sees something that seems at first to be a comet, but he soon realizes it must be a burning aeroplane on the flight path above the capital. What should he do? Call the emergency services? Wake his wife, Rosalind? Action seems pointless. Even so, he feels a definite sense of guilt. “His crime was to stand in the safety of his bedroom, wrapped in a woollen dressing-gown, without moving or making a sound, half dreaming as he watched people die.” So he walks to the kitchen, talks to his son, who has just returned home, and watches the News.

Later that morning, when Perowne wakes for a second time, crowds are massing near his house around Tottenham Court Road. It is Saturday, February 15, 2003, and millions of protesters are preparing to join the march against the coming invasion of Iraq. And so the novel moves from the defensive to the aggressive aspect of the post-9/11 predicament; from the incoming planes to the War on Terror. As we follow Perowne through to the following dawn, his nerves, “like tautened strings, vibrate obediently with each news ‘release’”, and McEwan uses his intelligently ambivalent protagonist to rehearse the familiar dilemmas: for or against the invasion; a great humanitarian opportunity or an historic blunder? Perowne plays the dove to a bullish hospital colleague, and the hawk to his right-thinking, left-leaning daughter. He is equally unsure about the overall significance of the 9/11 attacks: a clash of civilizations, or a footnote to the Cold War? But Saturday is not just concerned with the arguments, it is also a judiciously scathing meditation on the whole game of political opinions: “And how luxurious, to work it all out at home in the kitchen, the geopolitical moves and military strategy, and not be held to account, by voters, newspapers, friends, history”. Among other things, it is a fictional treatise on spectator politics and media atrocity – “Catastrophe observed from a safe distance. Watching death on a large scale, but seeing no one die”. There have been smarter, more imposing recent novels on the subject: the oracular pronouncements of Don DeLillo’s Mao II come to mind. (“News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before – what? I don’t know.”) But it is hard to think of any that are as honest and humane.

Day-in-the-life novels, from Ulysses to Lanchester’s Mr Phillips, tend to cram an awful lot of life in. Saturday is no exception. Osten-sibly, the plot is very simple. Perowne wakes up, drives through the protesters to play squash with the consultant anaesthetist from his hospital, goes shopping, visits his senile mother in an old people’s home, listens to his son’s band, and cooks dinner for the family gathering that will take place in the evening. But through the pauses and digressions in the basic story, McEwan builds up an astonishingly detailed
picture of “ambitious middle life” in 2003. We hear about the satisfactions of Perowne’s career as a brain surgeon. We learn how he met his wife, Rosalind, a busy newspaper lawyer; that his daughter Daisy is about to have her first volume of poetry published; that his son, Theo, is a talented Blues guitarist. Perowne is almost maniacally interested in everything around him, and given to slightly batty rhapsodies about iPods, modern shaving technology, or “the humble kettle”. We are also made party to his incidental thoughts on consciousness and shopping, progress and traffic jams, in a constant stream of unflashy felicities. Even Tony Blair is marched onstage at one point, for a very perceptive cameo. It is all very impressive: McEwan gives the lie to the view that novels can no longer encapsulate the present, and shows that being topical does not mean being merely gossipy.

There are, however, hazards to the detail-heavy method – what the narrator of Atonement (2001) calls “the pointillist approach to verisimilitude”. “Like policemen in a search team”, she says, “we go on hands and knees and crawl towards truth” – and here, the journey is sometimes laborious. Perowne describes his work in undiluted, uncompromising medical English – not just aneurysms and biopsies but craniotomies and astrocytomas and vestibular schwannomas. He is also dismayingly well informed about nearly everything from the Ba’athist regime’s torture methods to Blues progressions and the nervous system of fish. The reader begins to dread the heavily researched passages which start with some version of the formula: “Perowne is familiar with some of the current literature on . . . ”. And, as in all of McEwan’s work since 1978, humour is stringently rationed (by my reckoning, his novels fall into two categories: those featuring one joke per book, and those featuring none; Saturday is in the second group). Still, all this suits Perowne’s view of the world – what he calls the “droning, pedestrian diagnostician” inside him. Besides, being an Ian McEwan novel, Saturday is much less boring than it sounds. It is executed with his customary skill, intelligence and seriousness: the structure is minutely planned; the individual scenes have a cinematic, brightly lit clarity; the prose is clean, sharp and watchful. And, inevit-ably, there is a constant undercurrent of menace to keep readers on their toes.

To a certain extent, McEwan has set out to write an extraordinary drama of ordinary life and opinions, set only inches beyond the real. Perhaps at the back of his mind was the model of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, which tend
to be set against well-known episodes in recent history (Saturday is also written in a Rabbit-style historic present tense that McEwan has not used in a novel before). But old habits die hard, and the twenty-four hours that the author designs for Perowne are far from everyday. The burning plane turns out to be a red herring, but a less spectacular threat is building, inexorably, throughout the story. Not only does he play a viciously bad-tempered game of squash, face his mother’s descent into oblivion, and argue violently with his daughter, but Perowne also narrowly escapes a road-rage beating, after an aggressive, erratic young man in a battered red BMW broadsides his luxury Mercedes in a side street. The real model for Saturday, it becomes clear, is Mrs Dalloway, also set over one London day. As in Virginia Woolf’s novel, the juxtaposition of a wealthy insider and a desperate outsider creates a nasty and violent climax; ominously, Perowne finds himself humming “We’ll meet again”, and catching flashes of a red BMW in his rear view mirror.

Narrative tension is an absolutely fundamental part of McEwan’s technique. The stop-start method – whereby he announces or hints that something terrible will happen, and then delays disclosure – is one of his most characteristic manoeuvres. It certainly works, driving the plot forward and ensuring the reader’s close attention. But sometimes it seems that suspense is used to mask some fundamental thinness. Certainly, rereading the final section without the benefit of adrenalin, it seems much less good, and much less interesting than the rest of the novel. Thematically, it doesn’t provide a close fit with what precedes it, except in the general sense that it is about security – the earlier nuances about the balance of threat and paranoia are lost. And, as in any television drama where the hero’s family is threatened, it provides a fairly generic catharsis: with the dream of righteous violence used against the invader. Again, you sense the unresolved conflict between nightmare and reason. The kinky cruelty of the early stories and novellas is still lurking, and the grown-up McEwan, rational and concerned, doesn’t quite know how to exorcize it. As a result, there are thematic resolutions which seem forced, episodes and ethical dilemmas which are not quite believable: a violent stand-off, for instance, in which a reading of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” plays a pivotal role . . . .

McEwan takes a lot of risks with Saturday. By setting the action so close to the present, he risks political arguments, as well as more general disagreements about how the world is. By trying to describe the world of daily work (without, like so many others, describing the work of writing), he risks being boring. The
Perowne family, with their Hampstead-ish names and attitudes, may simply irritate some readers. All of these risks are well worth taking. The result may be not as grand or as even as his last novel, Atonement – but it is also less
archival and less pastiche-laden, more honest and more personal. McEwan has become the most admired English writer of his generation not just because of his talents, but also because of his seriousness, and the sheer effort he puts in. Saturday is a great vindication of all that: a resonant evocation of middle-class London life in the first years of the twenty-first century – busy, wealthy and safe, but lived in the permanent shadow of atrocity."



DEATH OF A SALESMAN

On Arthur Miller:

"For anyone who has ever spent an evening absorbed in "Death of a Salesman," watching Willy Loman's ineffably sad decline, there should be little doubt about Arthur Miller's genius. Still, when the mourning ends for Mr. Miller, who died Thursday, the question of the timelessness of his work will remain. Mr. Miller's career had its share of misfires, but on the strength of his best plays, he seems as destined for immortality as his most famous character was for obscurity.

Mr. Miller's plays are entrenched in the American canon, and in high school curriculums, but there have always been skeptics. Part of the problem is that Mr. Miller's private life, notably his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, often overshadowed his literary work. The story of the romance between the egghead playwright and the Hollywood bombshell was so captivating that the stories Mr. Miller was writing for the stage could not always compete.

I heard Mr. Miller give a public address, when he was well into his 80's, at which members of the audience were told before the question-and-answer period that they could ask about anything but Monroe. "How do you remember Marilyn Monroe?" a woman asked from the balcony. The audience let out a collective groan. Mr. Miller paused for a moment, smiled ruefully, and said simply, "It's easy."

More significant, perhaps, are the reservations critics have about political art. A child of the Depression, Mr. Miller wrote drama that took social class seriously, and that unabashedly did battle with villains like corporate malfeasance - the subject of "All My Sons," in which a military manufacturer knowingly sells defective parts, causing the deaths of American pilots.

To critics who equate politically minded theater with agitprop, Mr. Miller's moral passion always made him suspect. But his best works arise out of their time, and transcend it. "The Crucible" may have been an allegory of McCarthyism, but new generations have eagerly adopted it, sometimes blithely unaware of its provenance, because of what it says about the human heart.

Mr. Miller himself appreciated the way in which different generations related to his work. I had the good fortune to be invited to a small dinner with Mr. Miller in 2002, when he was awarded The Chicago Tribune's literary prize. Someone asked him if any of his plays were especially popular just then. Mr. Miller had a grin on his face when he said he was flooded with requests to revive "All My Sons." The news had been full of Enron and WorldCom, and, Mr. Miller said, people could smell the corporate mendacity in the air."" - New York Times

CUSTOMERS AS KINGS AND QUEENS
New Yorker

THE CUSTOMER IS KING
by James Surowiecki
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07
Over the years, Wal-Mart has been given credit or blame for many things: the productivity boom of the late nineties, the destruction of American downtowns, the migration of jobs to China, the popularity of Toby Keith. Now, according to the financial press, it’s responsible for one of the most important mergers in business history, Procter & Gamble’s fifty-seven-billion-dollar acquisition of Gillette. As the pundits tell it, the companies did the deal in order to create a manufacturing giant with enough bargaining clout to stand up to Wal-Mart.

The story goes something like this: once upon a time, companies that made things had the whip hand in the American economy. They could charge premium prices for their goods, and raise prices when costs went up, without losing their customers. In other words, they had pricing power. But in recent decades the rise of retailers like Wal-Mart and Target has changed all that. Today, the companies that sell things dictate the terms. The P. & G.-Gillette deal, in this rendering, is an attempt by a pair of manufacturers to take back a little of the power that they’ve lost.

It’s certainly true that manufacturers have a lot less pull in the marketplace than they used to. But they haven’t lost it to Wal-Mart and Target. They’ve lost it to you and me. The real transformation of the past thirty years is the rise not of the American retailer but of the American consumer. That’s why Wal-Mart is so tough to negotiate with, and so relentless in its quest for lower prices and lower costs. American consumers now consider it their due to have access to a wide variety of cheap, reliable goods. Their allegiances are fickle; brand loyalty is in fast decline. Wal-Mart is often spoken of as the most powerful company in the world, but it earns less than four cents on every dollar of sales, and its profit margins have stayed roughly the same year after year—which means that when it cuts costs with suppliers it passes along those savings to the customers, instead of padding its own bottom line. Wal-Mart can’t charge more; if it does, its customers will go elsewhere. The same is true of Target and Costco. In a sense, Wal-Mart is the elected representative of tens of millions of hard-bargaining shoppers, and, like any representative, it serves only at their pleasure.

Several developments in the past three decades have combined to increase consumer clout. The Federal Reserve’s war on inflation got people accustomed to stable prices. Laws changed—until the seventies, it was actually illegal in many states to sell goods for less than the manufacturer’s suggested price. A sharp rise in the quality of most products narrowed the difference between big brands and upstarts, and an influx of foreign products dramatically increased competition. Finally, the explosion in information available to shoppers—from Consumer Reports, in the beginning, to the Internet today—made it much harder for manufacturers to get away with selling junk.

Wal-Mart and other superstores contributed to the trend. They undercut their competitors, and forced the rest of the world to adapt. But now Wal-Mart is stuck; it has no choice but to keep selling things cheap. That’s what it does. Which means Procter & Gamble—even super-sized—is stuck, too. Few products are irreplaceable. So-called private-label products—the kind that, in the tradition of generics, are hardly advertised or marketed—are now big sellers at many stores. Ol’ Roy dog food, Wal-Mart’s house brand, is the best-selling dog food in the country. CyberHome, which makes DVD players for companies like Radio Shack, sold more of them last year than Sony. It’s getting harder and harder for manufacturers to charge premium prices for so-called premium brands. Of course, this is how it should be, according to the economics textbooks. In a genuinely competitive economy, the company that ends up selling a good is going to be the one that produces (and therefore sells) it at the lowest cost. This is a case where, as the Princeton economist Alan Blinder put it, “the economy came to resemble the model.”

The people who run Procter & Gamble (and Gillette) seem to understand this. A. G. Lafley, the C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble, denied that the acquisition had anything to do with the power of Wal-Mart. When he was pressed, he said, “The power has shifted to the consumer.” This may not be mere talk. In a world where brand names alone don’t confer power, the only way to prosper is to make products that genuinely improve (even if only marginally) on what came before. This is exactly what Gillette and P. & G. have done. Gillette’s razor line is one of the most lucrative businesses in history, mainly because the company has invested billions in technological innovation. This has allowed it to introduce a new razor every few years that costs considerably more than the one it’s replacing. And while historically P. & G. has focussed more on brand-building and marketing, in recent years it has invested heavily in innovation, too. The Swiffer mop and the SpinBrush electric toothbrush may not quite rank up there with penicillin or the Model T, but in the world of consumer products they count as real breakthroughs.

The P. & G.-Gillette deal, then, is about quality, not clout. It will work if, as Lafley promises, it makes the two companies do better what they already do well; that is, make people cleaner and neater, at prices they can bear. All the talk of muscling Wal-Mart is an anachronism, a legacy of an outmoded way of selling things. P. & G. and Gillette may propose, but the consumer disposes.

On Parenthood and Valentine's Day
New York Times

I Love Them, I Love Him Not
By JUDITH WARNER

Your young child shows up at your bedside five minutes before the alarm clock is set to ring. She climbs in. She is warm, her hair is silken, and she nestles perfectly into the curve of your torso. You experience something like plenitude - until the alarm clock rings and your spouse's arm stretches out to shut it off and comes to rest upon the two of you. That arm is bristly and heavy, and feels, somehow, laden with demand. What demand the poor thing carries is not clear, but whatever it is, it feels like too much on this particular school morning when, after the usual rites of teeth brushing and sneakers and mittens are through, you've got to plan how, on this day of all days, you will most adequately express to your little loved ones just how deeply - and how festively and chocolate-drenchedly - you love them.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The holiday of lovers has been transformed into something very different for many parents these days. That's little wonder: for many couples, love itself has been transformed by the passage into parenthood.

If you flip through the magazines aimed at moms this month, you'd be hard pressed to find much talk of romance, unless you count all the articles on modern marriage's lack of romance, which are legion: Working Mother pleads, "Make Time for Your Valentine." Good Housekeeping insists, "Men can be romantic." Child magazine offers tips on "Staying Lovers While Raising Kids." And Parents, acknowledging that marriage with children often feels "about as romantic as changing a dirty diaper," offers advice for getting "back in the groove," like establishing "no-sex nights." (Absence makes the heart grow fonder?)

In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called "the eros of parenthood." Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call "sexless marriages." Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children's touch to their husband's, without regret or shame. Where did our love go? Look no further than the adorable little girl on the cover of this month's Parents, clutching a huge, red-sequined heart in her chubby little hands. According to a recent report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, children are a "growing impediment" to a happy marriage. That's a sobering thought. And it raises an important question: Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages? It may well be. After all, in an era when Parents magazine can suggest, in its love issue, a "Second Honeymoon with Kids" under the rubric "Fun Time," it's clear that something is very much askew. In many households, the distinctions between married life and family life have all but disappeared.

With the widespread acceptance of "attachment parenting" - family beds, long-term breast feeding and all the rest - the physical boundaries between parents and children have worn away. Marital romance has dried up. Real intimacy has gone the way of bottle-feeding and playpens. In fact, the whole ideal of marriage as a union of soul mates, friends and lovers that's as essential to a happy family life as, say, unconditional love for the children, has taken a direct hit. And in its place has come the reality of a utilitarian relationship dedicated to staying afloat financially and child-rearing of a sort we tend to associate with frontier marriages, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience - marriages far removed, in time and place, from our lives, our parents' lives and even our grandparents' lives.

Some would say that's not a bad thing. After all, hard work and commitment are much better indicators of marital stability than are passion and that fickle thing, romantic love. The divorce rate is slightly down, to about 50 percent from a high of 52 percent in the early 1980's. Virtually no one believes anymore that the potential "self-fulfillment" that might come from leaving a less-than-satisfying marriage could in any way outweigh the harm that divorce does to children. Indeed, for many couples these days, staying married is not so much the definitive sign of their love for each other but the ultimate expression of their love for their children.

But does this virtuous child-centeredness equal family happiness? Apparently not. For although the divorce rate has gone down, the percentage of couples saying they're in less-than-happy marriages has gone up. According to the National Marriage Project, fewer children are growing up with happily married parents today than a generation ago. From 1973 to 1976, 51 percent of children under the age of 18 were living in a household in which the parents' marriage was rated as "very happy," the study found. From 1997 to 2002, only 37 percent were so fortunate.

Some of that, of course, reflects the declining number of children living in married households. But, according to the National Marriage Project's co-director, David Popenoe, a professor of sociology at Rutgers, there's another reason. Married couples today, he writes, report "significantly more work-related stress, more marital conflict and less marital interaction" than did those 20 or 30 years ago.

This gets to the crux of the problem: the culture of parenthood today is one in which marriages must fight to flourish. This is not because women naturally love their children more than their husbands. Nor is it because motherhood is naturally so exhausting and the world of work necessarily so draining that it's all but impossible for husbands and wives to find each other at the end of the day. It's because the roles we're playing - Supermom and Superdad - are love-killers.

So, this Valentine's Day, resist the temptation to download the directions for a cockscomb Valentine wreath. Throw out the glue gun and don't even think of trying to hand-stitch hearts on construction paper. Hire a sitter. Leave work early and go out on a date with your grown-up Valentine. Do it for the kids.

SPORTS

Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow will have nasty legacies to ponder when they retire. On a brighter note, Spring Training starts soon.

I agree with these analysts:

The NHL would further alienate its diminishing fan base by trying to salvage a season that's ruined beyond repair, and is better off canceling the season as it tries to solve its labor mess, according to some well-known sports economists.

Negotiations between the league and its locked-out players union ended Thursday with no progress reported, creating speculation NHL commissioner Gary Bettman will cancel the 2004-05 season as early as Monday. Bettman said a labor deal was needed by this weekend so each team could play a 28-game schedule -- about one-third as long as normal -- before the playoffs.

The league will find it difficult enough to win back fans that have seemed disinterested at best during the five-month lockout, the economists said, so asking them to support a shortened season played mostly in the springtime with watered-down rosters would be a huge mistake.

Some NHL players already have committed to playing full seasons with European teams and thus won't play in North America even if there is a season.

``They (NHL franchises) are going to be hurting when they come back -- they were hurting before the lockout, with a fan base that is thinning out,'' said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who studies economic trends in American sports. ``They're alienating a large part of the small fan base they already have.

Neither side has budged from the positions they've long held, with team owners insisting they must have ``cost certainty'' -- a cap on player salaries -- and players strongly opposing it.

``They're playing with fire, which isn't a good idea for a sport that skates on ice,'' Zimbalist said.

Even if the NHL emerges from what would be the first full-season shutdown of a major North American pro sports league with a more favorable owner-friendly labor agreement, the analysts warn hockey will need years to repair the damage.

Franchise values, already the lowest of the four major pro team sports, will be appreciably diminished, they warn, and revenues likely will be lower because ticket prices may have to be lowered to win fans back. Last fall, Forbes Magazine valued six franchises -- the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, Atlanta Thrashers, Edmonton Oilers, Buffalo Sabres, Pittsburgh Penguins and Carolina Hurricanes -- at barely one-tenth as much as the NFL's Washington Redskins, which are worth an estimated $1.1 billion.

``When you have labor strife like this, certainly that impacts value,'' said Jackie Dal Santo, a Chicago-based executive who evaluates franchises for Willamette Management Associates. ``It's difficult to say it's a certain percentage, but it does have an overall impact on the whole league. A lot of NHL teams already filed for or were close to filing for bankruptcy.''

The Pittsburgh Penguins, Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators have declared bankruptcy since 1999, although all were later acquired by new owners who kept the clubs operating.

Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies sports business issues, questions if some small-market and Sun Belt franchises will survive longterm. Within 10 years, he envisions a North American super league stripped of perhaps a dozen current franchises, which would fold or become minor-league clubs.

``The notion that the NHL can solve its problems with a salary cap is ludicrous,'' Noll said. ``It will increase profits for the best teams, but it doesn't make the small-market teams viable. The disparity of revenues across the league is greater than in any other sport, and there's no salary solution to that problem. Some teams have 25 times (the local TV revenue) of other teams. The only solution is to get rid of the small-market teams or subsidize them.

``Even if salaries were zero dollars per year, I question if some small-market teams would have enough revenue to cover costs. Blowing up the league is the likely outcome because the big-market teams don't see revenue sharing as being in their best interest,'' Noll said.

Noll said the NHL's business model doesn't work because it was designed in the mid-1990s around increasing national TV rights and licensing fees. Instead, the league's latest network TV deal with NBC guarantees no money.

``They're basically giving away their games,'' Noll said. ``The NHL hasn't built a sufficient market outside of the northeast quadrant of the United States and southeast Canada. They're stuck with expansion franchises that aren't viable and there is no solution to it. It's just crazy. You can't operate a league the way they're currently operating.''

Neal Pilson, the former CBS Sports president who now runs a consulting firm, disagrees with Noll that the league must contract to survive but warns it will take time and considerable effort to win back fans.

``Eventually the league will play hockey again, and the spectators and the viewers will come back,'' Pilson said. ``It (attendance) might not be as strong as before, and there will be a dropoff in viewership -- it took baseball 5-6 years to get back the levels it had before the 1994-95 strike. To the NHL, whatever damage they're sustaining now is less than the longterm damage done if they don't restructure their labor agreement.''

Pilson thinks NHL players are making ``one of the most dramatic miscalculations in labor management history'' by refusing to consider a cap.

``The sad thing is the players don't seem to understand that if the season is canceled, their deal is going to be diminished. They're not going to get a better deal a year from now,'' Pilson said. ``The league is going to be in a weaker position, so it's a huge miscalculation on their part that they can increase their bargaining position by refusing any discussion on a hard salary cap.''