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September 14, 2004
ICE CAPADES
Having grown up in Minnesota, I have a real appreciation for hockey. In a lot of cases, the old line is true: kids learn to skate almost before they can walk. Some of the best memories I have from childhood involve heading down to the rink in the park behind our house, and playing hockey with my friends until we couldn't drag ourselves around on the ice anymore. The Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament draws more than a quarter million fans every year, and even eighteen years after I last went to one, it still ranks as among the most exciting sporting events I have ever attended.
(By the way, I strongly recommend the Sports Illustrated article on the tournament that I linked to above... it may seem a little bucolic to my northeastern friends, but the whole thing is laced with touches of life in the prairie midwest, such as this gem paragraph:
The tournament is void of thuggery and features wide-open play and unstaged fun and drama. School officials estimated that almost half of Moorhead High's 1,274 students made the 250-mile journey to watch their team win its Class AA quarterfinal against Elk River, many of them sporting orange hunting vests (the Spuds' colors are orange and black) and screaming for Moorhead's mascot, a skating potato that circled the ice before the game.
This ain't made up, kids. It's real. You can't make this stuff up. Not even Jimmy Buffett could invent a school with a potato mascot. Y'all can have your lacrosse teams and rich kid class trips. You never had a skating potato.)
Anyway, I am digressing... my point is that I love hockey. I still take great pride in the fact that I received my B.A. and M.S. from two of the greatest college hockey schools in the country -- the University of Minnesota and Boston University, respectively. BU vs. BC hockey is the best sporting event I'll ever see (only in part because the #1 chant from fans of both teams at the games, even in the middle of January, is "Yan-kees Suck!"). I was a huge fan of the Minnesota North Stars as a kid, and once I moved east I adopted the Boston Bruins, like I pretty much adopted all the sports teams from the beloved home of my grad school... Bruins, Pats, and especially the Sox. I'd consider moving just over the border to Connecticut, if for no other reason than that their cable systems get NESN (New England Sports Network), and I'd be able to see all the Sox and Bruin games, not to mention updates on the great college hockey scene in Boston and New England (BU, BC, Harvard, Maine, New Hampshire and UMass-Lowell have all won national titles or been in the Frozen Four). I'd be in heaven - I love hockey.
And that's why I am so disappointed that the NHL is shooting itself -- not in the foot, but in the head -- by beginning a lockout tomorrow that threatens to not only delay the 2004-2005 season, but eliminate it altogether.
It's just the latest in a series of missteps by the NHL. There were a dozen ill-advised expansions or franchise moves in the 90s to try and widen the game's American fan base, for example. This was stupid; San Jose, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Nashville, Atlanta, Miami, Tampa, and Charlotte all have teams, but Winnipeg, Quebec, Hartford, Cleveland, and Milwaukee do not? There oughta be a law: if the ice machine inside the arean broke down and you couldn't just go outside to play the game in the winter cold with naturally occuring ice, your city should not have a hockey team. Period. End of sentence.
Next, they tried an ill-advised national TV contract. This was also foolish; Fox or ABC affiliates south of the Mason Dixon line couldn't possibly be expected to get an audience for a winter sport. National ratings were doomed from the start. They should have just signed a series of mini-deals with the regional sports networks (NESN, FoxSports New York, Chicago, Detroit, etc.) in the northern areas, where there was an established fan base that actually cared about the game and the teams. Some sports are regional by nature; you'll never have a NASCAR race track in Manhattan, you won't see anyone playing lacrosse west of the Appalachians, and no one outside of Florida even knows what the hell jai alai is. And hockey does not have a non-winter area audience. It's okay. Not everything has to be national.
On top of this, like in many pro sports, salaries for the top players reached ridiculous and un-maintainable levels. The problem is that baseball, football and basketball have enough of a base -- both financially and in terms of fans -- to weather out salary spikes until the market corrects itself. Hockey does not. And in an era where there are 30 teams with 30 owners -- at least a dozen of which got into the sport as a business investment, not a love of the sport -- you can't count on ownership's passion for the game to entice them to ride out rough spots. These guys want to be making money NOW, and if it doesn't happen, they're cutting out on their hockey team like they'd sell off an unprofitable investment.
The NHL is in precarious shape as it is. And now you're going to have a labor standoff that cancels part or all of a season, just as your TV contract runs out and several teams are poised on the brink of bankruptcy or sell-offs? Stupid. Just plain stupid. The stubbornness of both ownership and the players' union is truly cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
It took Major League Baseball close to a decade to recover from the 1994 strike and the cancellation of the World Series. Hockey does not have that luxury. If the 2004-2005 season is not played, the next time you see the NHL it will not resemble anything like its current incarnation. You'll keep the Montreal and Toronto franchises and both New York teams, plus Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Minnesota, Philadelphia... and maybe two of the three teams in western Canada, and maybe Washington. That's it. Everyone else is gone. 9-12 teams survive. That's it. The NHL cannot afford a labor stoppage. And yet both sides seem prepared to accept one rather than concede an inch.
Oh well. There's always the skating potato.
