The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [43]
Alan Eagleson was powerful because he was tight with NHL owners, especially Bill Wirtz of the Chicago Blackhawks. For a few years in the early 1970s, the player’s salaries increased, thanks to leverage from the WHA, no thanks to Eagleson.
Superstar Bobby Orr had a great season in 1975, at the age of twenty-six. The Boston Bruins made him an offer that included five years (at close to $300,000 per year) and either a $925,000 payment, or 18.5% ownership in the team. Eagleson turned down the offers, without informing his client.
Eagleson denied that he hadn’t kept Orr informed of his negotiations with the Bruins, and said that Boston’s offer was conditional on Orr’s passing a medical examination. Eagleson would later explain that Blackhawks owner Wirtz made a quality offer of $500,000 per year for Orr. Wirtz was accused of tampering with Orr when he was still under a Boston contract, and by 1979 Orr was essentially broke, and at odds with Eagleson.
Helene Elliott: How did Bobby Orr not wind up with a piece of the Bruins? I don’t want to say tragedy, it’s too strong a word . . . but it’s one of the saddest things in sports that Orr didn’t end up with the Bruins—as a general manager, or club executive even. And why didn’t he? Because his agent—whom he implicitly trusted—was in bed with the Wirtz, and delivered him to the Blackhawks.
In retrospect, it seems odd that Boston would make an offer to Eagleson that included an 18.5% stake in the team and that Orr would feel that the Bruins weren’t interested in keeping him. Eagleson had plenty of motive to deliver his player to the Blackhawks (where his longtime friend Pulford was by then the head coach). Wirtz felt that Boston had taken advantage of the Chicago franchise years earlier, when Phil Esposito was traded to the Bruins.
In 1957, the average annual salary in Major League Baseball was $20,000, while in hockey, it was only $8,000, 40% of the baseball figure. By 1979, with the WHA-NHL war still going on, the average hockey salary had increased $101,000, roughly on par with baseball’s $113,558. By 1979, Hockey salaries were 89% of baseball’s, but by 1989, three years after Eaglesons’ collective bargaining sessions, the average baseball salary had shot up to $497,254, while hockey salaries, with the WHA having long been disbanded, had regressed to 38% of baseball’s at $188,000.
Ed Garvey, a former executive director of the NFL Players Association, was retained by the growing number of disgruntled NHL players to investigate the NHLPA. In 1989, Garvey summarized his findings, saying, “The conflicts of interest are shocking, but even more shocking is a pattern of sweetheart agreements with the NHL over all these years.” Garvey called the NHL’s collective bargaining a charade.
Garvey’s findings in 1989—and Sports Illustrated’s 1989 article on Eagleson—pushed whistleblowers to stop Eagleson.
Helene Elliott: Who blew the whistle eventually? Carl Brewer, of course, who knew Eagleson as a friend and agent all those years, and also a Boston-area writer named Russ Conway, who did some incredible investigative work [were primarily responsible]. It was more of a natural progression with men like Conway and Orr becoming more assertive and telling people that this is just not right. Carl Brewer did an incredible job for the players, although most of today’s players don’t even recognize who he was and what he did.
Eagleson billed hundreds of thousands of dollars in sometimes questionable expenses to the players’ union, and union funds were put into high-risk real estate investments involving Eagleson, his friends, and his associates. He claimed that money from international tournaments went into the pension