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June 15, 2004
The Growing Danger
One of the great strengths of the National Football League is its impeccable sense of timing. You can always expect the league's opening week sometime around Labor Day, and then leave the stage with an incredible bang around the end of January. It peeks its head up in the Spring for the draft and minicamps, and starts full-blown workouts in the heat of the Summer while most of us are on vacation. By the time Week One (I love how so many events in sports are proper nouns) rolls around again, the nation is literally salivating at the prospect of the return of professional football. Like a smart girlfriend, the NFL knows the value of scarcity. Those 32 owners didn't become multimillionaires by accident. Sometimes, there really can be too much of a good thing, and the folks who run the league know that instinctively. But if that's the great strength of the NFL (and Major League Baseball for that matter), it's the greatest weakness of the NHL. The Stanley Cup Finals are followed rapidly by the postseason awards, with the NHL Draft only a few weeks later. When the teams return for training camp in September, it hardly feels like they've been gone at all. Of course, with a labor crack-up just around the corner, we're probably finally going to get that chance to miss the NHL. Which brings us back to the other great strengths of baseball and football -- predictability and tradition. If NHL players and owners can't come to an agreement over the Summer, it will mark the second time in 10 years that the NHL will have missed part of a season to a labor dispute. The first time, back in 1994-95, a strike by players helped blunt some of the momentum coming out of the Rangers' Stanley Cup run in 1994, and robbed the sport of the opportunity to fill part of the vacuum caused by the 1994 baseball strike. But while baseball and football have survived labor unrest, the NHL can hardly afford the same risk. While baseball has had a number of work stoppages, most recently the strike that wiped out the World Series in 1994, the league has been able to fall back on decades of fan loyalty -- loyalty buttressed by the fact that the sport has been woven into the fabric of American culture for better than a century. On the other hand, hockey is still a stranger in a strange land when it comes to the U.S. market. Unlike in Canada, where loyalty to the home team is buttressed by passion for the sport in everyday life, American passion for hockey, for the most part, is an acquired taste. Many of our fathers never played the game. And the names of the greatest to ever play the sport -- Richard, Howe, Beliveau -- will never fall so easily off an American tounge the way the names Mays, Mantle, and Aaron do. But it goes deeper than that. As we've seen through U.S. television ratings, passion for the home team doesn't always translate into passion for the sport. So while a Stanley Cup victory for Tampa Bay can't be anything but good for the game, don't doubt that most of those fans won't dare tune into the Finals next season if the Lightning aren't on the ice. Might this change one day? It's possible, but only after decades of hard work developing the sport at the grass roots level. That means developing youth programs, both regionally and nationally. And, unfortunately, it means finding owners who are willing to lose millions to help the game gain a foothold in places many in Canada believe it has no business being. What's the bottom line? For most American fans, losing the Cubs or the Red Sox for a couple of months is an incredibly painful prospect. But baseball is part of the American scene, and there's a feeling that it's always going to come back like the Spring. But when hockey disappears, the same subtle cultural cues don't exist. What happens when you lose the Coyotes, Blue Jackets or Hurricanes for a season. For the American fan, the answer isn't terribly elusive, as most of them can remember what life was like without these teams -- and it isn't a memory from the deep dark past either. In other words, they'll live. And they'll get along just fine. So play chicken if you must, owners and players of the NHL. Your hold on the American conciousness, and the American wallet, are more tenuous than you think. POSTSCRIPT: Here's a similar thought from The Sporting Life: I’m afraid hockey will never come close to garnering the numbers that football, baseball and basketball get here. Too many areas of the country simply can’t relate to it or have no experience with it. And as America becomes more Latinized, the trend will only continue. Already, here in D.C., it isn't out of the ordinary for D.C. United to occasionally outdraw the Caps or the Wizards.
Eric
12:05 PM
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