Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.SO WHERE are the precedents for strikes in sport? Tour de France riders are great complainers but usually take their threats no further than riding slowly; some back-up grand prix drivers take out their grudges by going faster than their team leaders; unhappy athletes just don't turn up. In Britain, the only sport to suffer a significant dispute was tennis at Wimbledon in 1972 when everyone said a boycott was terribly un-British, attendances boomed and the All England Club simply ignored the new breed of militant promoters and agents.
In the early Seventies, most of the top players had joined Lamar Hunt's World Championship Tennis group, which lived uneasily with the International Lawn Tennis Federation. Then Donald Dell, a tennis-playing lawyer and agent, became the main influence within the Association of Tennis Professionals. "Player power" entered the sports vocabulary and the 1972 championships were deprived of Rod Laver, John Newcombe and Ken Rosewall. Wimbledon had followed the ILTF's line and banned players under contract to anyone else.
The crux of the problem was that prize money was only available to independent players. Contract professionals were banned from open competition. But Wimbledon fans were defiant and huge crowds saw Stan Smith beat Ilie Nastase in the men's final and Billie-Jean King beat Evonne Goolagong in the women's. The attitude in Britain was that the dispute was an unwanted import from the United States.
Certainly, examples of militancy are more common in American sport. In 1987, the 1,500 members of the National Football League went on strike over "free agency", or the drafting of players from one club to another without their consent. But there was little public support for highly paid players and the dispute collapsed after 24 days.
In Britain, football has twice had votes in place for players to withdraw their labour, but on both occasions a dispute was averted. Hard to think that back in the late Fifties and early Sixties Jimmy Hill was a proper little Arthur Scargill of football's rank and file. Thanks to him, players got improved conditions, leading to the end of the maximum wage and eventually the retain and transfer system.
Some club owners and chairmen blame Hill for setting the game on a course that would lead to absurdly high wages, but at the time players regularly attracting crowds of 50,000 were earning less that £20 a week and were shackled by clubs retaining their registration, which effectively stopped them moving on, even at the end of their contracts. Hill, leader of the Professional Footballers' Association, took his members to the edge of a strike in 1961. In June the previous year, the government were told that a dispute existed. The League later came up with pay rises but no change to the maximum wage or transfer system. The PFA gave warning of a strike to take effect from January 1961. Eventually, the two sides met andagreement was reached.
When Hill resigned from the Management Committee to become manager of Coventry City, the militancy ebbed and it took a High Court court case involving George Eastham finally to resolve the issue of players' freedom.
Football came similarly close to all-out strike in 1992 when the Premier League was moving towards autonomy, apparently without reference to the players. Their representative, Gordon Taylor, threatened that if the players were not involved in the decision making he would ballot for strike action. Taylor was particularly keen to restore a previous agreement with the Football League whereby the PFA got 10 per cent of television money, which he said was essential if players in the lower divisions were not to suffer financially. Ballot papers were sent out early in 1992 and the players voted to boycott televised matches. The Premier League eventually gave in.
Speedway has had more than its share of disputes, mostly over pay, and last year riders at Ipswich and Reading threatened action over track dirt deflectors which they considered dangerous. That problem was resolved, but in 1954 all of the riders in the second division went on strike for a fortnight over pay and conditions. Their timing was bad since, attendance- wise, the sport was already in a decline from which it was never to recover.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments