The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [44]
In 1992, a Canadian judge ruled that more than 1,300 former NHL players were owed more than $20 million in pension money. Due to mounting interest during the appeals process, the judgment swelled to $41 million after the Canadian Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 1995.
Former NHL players Dave Forbes, Rick Middleton, Brad Park, Ulf Nilsson, and Doug Smail filed a class-action lawsuit against the NHL and most of its individual teams in 1995 on behalf of about 1,000 NHL players who were employed during Eagleson’s tenure. They were hoping to sue for hundreds of millions of dollars, and they should have received it—or close to it. Instead, the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia dismissed the players’ lawsuit in August of 1998, saying that the retirees should have known by at least 1991 about the allegations against Eagleson (which they certainly should have), and that the four-year statute of limitations in civil racketeering cases had run out by their 1995 filing date.
Here’s the reason those owners and team executives did not go directly to jail: Bill Wirtz and former NHL Commissioner John Ziegler cut a deal with the government to turn on Eagleson (and eventually, they testified against him). Ziegler and Wirtz were co-defendants in the civil racketeering and conspiracy lawsuit filed in 1995 by a group of former players. That suit could have buried the entire National Hockey League.
The defense argued that the players should have known about Eagleson’s abuses long before the suit was filed. They argued that the statue of limitations had expired. Eagleson tried to argue that the U.S. court had no jurisdiction over him. He tried to argue that player reps all backed him, pretty much unanimously.
Finally, in 1998, Eagleson pled guilty (to fraud and theft) in both the United States and Canada, and was sentenced to an eighteen-month prison term in Canada. He was paroled after six months.
The scope of the abuses that went on is unbelievable. The president of the player’s union in the mid-1970s, Flyers great Bobby Clarke, was never elected—he was appointed by Eagleson. Clarke had a personal services contract with his owner, guaranteeing him an income long after his playing days were over. Is it any wonder that the owners loved Eagleson? Hockey gave Eagleson control of the players’ disability insurance and the international hockey tournaments. In return, the NHL had labor peace and salaries were kept artificially low.
Eagleson wasn’t the only head of a player’s union that also represented individual players. (For example, in the late 1980s, Charles Grantham was not only the head of the NBA players union, he also represented players like Michael Ray Richardson.) But Eagleson was the only one that conspired to betray the players’ interests in collective bargaining. Eagleson was the one who agreed to a merger (the 1979 merger of the NHL and WHA) which caused salaries to plummet, without attempting to gain concessions. Eagleson was the one that gave in on inadequate minimum salaries, free agency, the removal of player representation from the board of the players’ pension funds, and the owners’ practice of offsetting pension contributions by the amount the players contributed with international hockey.
Eagleson repressed salaries for a tremendously long time, but he didn’t do it alone. He needed co-conspirators in the form of the owners. The National Hockey League players are still paying for the crimes that Eagleson and those co-conspirators committed.
CONCLUSION:
#10
Gamblers attempt to fix the 1946 NFL Championship Game
Even the biggest NFL fans seem surprised to learn that one of the NFL Championship Games was the subject of a conspiracy. This tale of point-shaving