Former Boston Pride owner Miles Arnone says the recent purchase of the PHF by the Mark Walter Group and investors in the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association led by former tennis great Billie Jean King has led to a bad deal for players, a raw deal for former employees of the dissolved league, and a great deal of one-way animosity, in an extensive interview with Ian Kennedy of The Hockey News.
Arnone, who led a group that purchased the Pride in 2019, told Kennedy the sale of the PHF appeared unavoidable, as a single league was always necessary for women’s hockey to succeed. But the much-publicized goal of the PWHPA of improving working conditions for female hockey players was false, he says, because the collective bargaining agreement that the PWHPA agreed to with the new owners will pay them less and lock them into those earnings for eight years.
Try as they might, the PHF could not get representatives of the PWHPA to work with them, despite an offer from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to broker a deal, Arnone said.
The PWHPA rose from the collapse of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) in 2019 after a dozen years of operation. Members refused to join the PHF and its predecessor, the NWHL, because it didn’t meet their threshold for a pro league.
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A few highlights from Arnone’s comments:
• “What this was really about was a small number of U.S. and Canadian national team players wanting to control their own destiny, period. It would have been a lot easier for everyone if they’d just been up front about that instead of hiding that motivation and asserting it was all about justice, and working conditions and rights, which it just wasn’t.”
• “The principal feature of the CBA is that player salaries start about 16 per cent lower than where we were going to be this season in the PHF and as far as what they’re paid relative to the work done, it’s about 37 per cent less as they’re being required to play more games for less money. On top of that, they’re locked into three per cent per year pay increase across the board in terms of their effective cap for the next eight years.”
• “The NHL will come in, there will be increases in revenue from broadcast, there will be substantial increases in sponsorships, likely increases in ticket prices and revenues — more games at higher prices — but all of these things that are captured by the league are not going to flow down to the players for nearly a decade, so it’s a real loss in terms of what the PWHPA purportedly stood for and where they ended up.”
• “If I had known what the CBA would have looked like, I would have thought twice about the deal because if a new league formed with that CBA, [the PHF] would have easily won over even more PWHPA players than it had, and likely sponsors who were concerned about equitable pay and working conditions for women, on account of our better compensation and demonstrated quality working conditions, fanbase, etc.”
• “[King] wouldn’t give us the time of day or really allow any kind of constructive engagement at all. I find that very ironic, in particular given that during the last couple of weeks there’s been some reporting about her statements that the professional women’s tennis tour should consider playing in and engaging with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the government has disembodied a U.S. journalist and supports laws that are extremely misogynistic and homophobic.”
• “At one junction (King) turned on her mic (during a meeting) and said, ‘How come you didn’t bring any players to this meeting?’ as if to say that if we weren’t bringing players to the meeting then clearly we didn’t have the interest of the players in mind, when in fact it was our view that engaging our players in a discussion where they’re likely to be essentially denigrated as they had been continuously by the PWHPA was probably not productive. … So she denigrated us for this and whether that was a reasonable criticism or not, she thought she had subsequently turned her mic off and said ‘that will shut them up for a while,’ and so she appeared more interested in just throwing barbs than any kind of constructive dialogue whatsoever.”
• “(I)n general they, didn’t like any of our branding or logos, except maybe the Riveters. The Pride logo and branding (Stan Kasten of the Mark Walter Group) described as being ‘too controversial.’ He didn’t like the double entendre that ‘Pride’ represented. If they do in fact shelve the Pride brand, which Mark Walter Group now owns, I think that’s short-sighted. A large proportion of the Boston Pride’s fans, and women’s hockey fans overall are members of the LGBTQ+ community and the fact that the PHF was welcoming and embraced people from all walks of life was a great source of, no pun intended, pride, not to mention revenue.”
• “A lot of the goals the PWHPA purported to support they’ve not reached. Really the only goal that they’ve definitively achieved was to eliminate the competition and they did that very effectively in the end.”
— With files from The Canadian Press
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