Reports of the National Hockey League’s demise indeed may be exaggerated, but the way the league is going, its participants should be glad if anyone notices at all.
Negotiations between players and owners have made progress over the last 24 hours, creating some hope that a season still could be salvaged after two-thirds of it already has been lost to a lockout.
But hockey’s major professional league has slipped so far from the public’s consciousness that Stan Mikita arguably could draw a bigger crowd at a Chicago autograph session than a Blackhawks game could at the United Center.
For myriad reasons–misguided marketing strategies, overexpansion, lack of television exposure prominent among them–enthusiasm for the NHL has plummeted.
It is, to be sure, a far cry from the glory days, when the Hawks consistently hovered atop a 12-team league and every kid in the Chicago area either owned a hockey stick or wanted one.
They flocked to makeshift rinks or played street hockey with tennis balls, fighting over who got to be Bobby Hull and longing for a ticket to Chicago Stadium, where Hawks’ games were wild and raucous.
When the Hawks made the Stanley Cup finals in 1971 and again in ’73, fans shelled out $5 a head to see home games on closed-circuit television at the Bismarck Theatre. The rest hovered around radios in numbers that hearken back to the days before TV, only enhancing the mystique of its stars.
Mikita. Hull. Tony Esposito. Keith Magnuson. The names were burned into our consciousness like Dick Butkus and Wilbur Wood and Ernie Banks. Jerry Sloan and Bob Love had to play catch-up.
The Blackhawks were Chicago; the NHL, a proud member of sports’ Big Four.
And now?
Quick. Name two players on the Blackhawks?
How about the name of the NHL franchise in Columbus, Ohio? Oh, you didn’t know the NHL had a team (called the Blue Jackets) in Columbus? Then you may have missed the Atlanta Thrashers, Minnesota Wild and Nashville Predators, three other recent NHL expansion teams bloating the league to its current 30 clubs.
While the NHL awaits word from the players’ association Wednesday morning, after increasing its salary-cap proposal from $40 to $42.5 million per team, longtime fans waffle between anger and apathy.
“I’m angry,” said Andy Delman, 40, a lifelong hockey fan from Deerfield.
“As a father, my love now is seeing my child enjoy playing the game, but it would be so terrific for us to have the same kind of conversations many fathers and sons have about a sport. But we don’t have the sport to talk about anymore. It used to be so special. There’s nothing special about hockey anymore.”
Where radio-only broadcasts of home games was once acceptable, the issue is now a lightning rod for fans’ disgruntlement with Hawks owner Bill Wirtz.
While the move from the Stadium to the United Center once was lamented, it is now but a footnote to the discontent that grew as popular players like Jeremy Roenick, Ed Belfour and Chris Chelios were traded because of contract disputes.
Last year, the team had to buy its own radio time and sell its own commercials because no local station was interested in paying for their rights.
And, as with the rest of the Big Four, ticket prices are prohibitive for middle-class family entertainment.
Worse yet, the NHL is getting harder and harder to watch on TV for even hard-core hockey fans.
“I cannot follow the puck on TV because of the advertising [on the ice],” said Mark Ganis, president of Sportscorp. Ltd., a sports industry consulting firm. “When replacement programming on ESPN2 is drawing more viewers than primary NHL telecasts the year before, you know you have a problem.”
While some have blamed hockey’s identity problem in large part to the great influx of European players entering the league, it is probably simplistic to take that argument very far because the skill level also has increased.
Others, however, argue that when the helmetless Hull was gliding down the ice for the Hawks, the emphasis was on skating and not fighting.
“It used to be fan-friendly in so many ways,” said Gregg Chudacoff, 47, of Glencoe. “Would my boys rather go to Hawks’ games? Yeah. But I take them to Bulls games and they want to go back because it’s fun.”
Still, while the NHL has floundered, hockey has thrived elsewhere. On the youth hockey level in Illinois, there are approximately 19,000 players, coaches and managers involved, according to the Amateur Hockey Association of Illinois, which credits Wirtz with contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to its organization.
The American Hockey League’s Chicago Wolves drew a crowd of nearly 15,000 to its game last Saturday night and has had approximately a 30 percent increase in attendance this season, obviously partly explained by the NHL lockout.
“So many people have tried our game instead of the NHL and really enjoy it,” said Billy Gardner, a broadcaster for the Wolves who played seven seasons with the Hawks in the 1980s.”I think they feel it’s more entertaining than an NHL game and more affordable.”
Not all fans, however.
Mike Miller, 33, of Oak Forest, a Web developer who hosts a Blackhawks Web site and online chat room, is so dejected he said he will have a wake at his home if the season is canceled.
“I’ve gone to a couple of Wolves games, but to me it’s just not the same,” he said. “I proposed to my wife down by the ice [during a Hawks game]. We have a picture taken in the wedding with the bride wearing white and the wedding party wearing red Blackhawks sweaters.”
The bride and groom walked down the aisle to the team’s theme song, and left under crossed hockey sticks. Only the lockout averted a logistical nightmare.
“If the Hawks’ home opener had been on the night of the wedding, I’d have missed the wedding,” Miller said, “or we’d have had to reschedule. . . . It’s a sickness, I know.”
Despite the loyalty of those like Miller, however, Steve Konroyd, an NHL broadcaster who played for the Hawks from 1988 to 1992 and on the last Chicago team to play in the Stanley Cup finals, worries about the future.
Late Tuesday night, the NHL and its union still appeared to be significantly apart in their last-ditch negotiations.
“The biggest thing that surprises me is I don’t think many people care and I don’t think it’s just Chicago,” Konroyd said. “Hockey has really fallen off the radar screen. That’s what concerns me. We all know hockey will one day be played again, but I don’t know what the damage will have been.”
