At the crossroads - Part I

For those who weren't paying attention - and I can honestly say that aside from the value as a punchline, I nearly missed it - former Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz died a few weeks ago.

In the time that has passed, Bill's son, Rocky, has taken over the team and a few games have made their way to television. Now, Chicago's remaining half dozen hockey fans are waiting to see where this goes and if any significant changes will be made.

It was announced today that Chicago Cubs team president John McDonough will be leaving the North Side for his new home on Madison, where he'll take over as team president for the Hawks.

McDonough is seen as a man of the fans, who introduced the Cubs Convention idea to bring fans in to meet the players and stoke the fires during the wintertime. The Hawks are hoping he can use his bag of tricks to make the United Center warm and fuzzy again for thousands of apathetic and alienated fans.

As a little background here, the elder Wirtz became an evil cartoon caricature by the mid-90s when he blacked out home games (he was afraid that by giving home games away for free that fans would stop going to games), failed to resign the team's established stars, drove ticket prices through the roof and a laundry list of other disrespectful acts that meant Blackhawk fans beat the rush out the door before the lockout killed the rest of the league.

Long story, short, more than one former Blackhawk fan swore off the game until Wirtz died and now it's an interesting time to see how the fan base reacts. In the interest of full disclosure, I have zero idea what has happened in the Hawks season this year, aside from their 5-3 win over Detroit a few days ago. I found that out accidentally.

Today, there was a question posted on the Chicago Tribune web site regarding the McDonough move and what he should be doing for the team. Speaking as the fan that the team is trying to lure back, here's my quick rundown.

* It was never a matter of cash that limited the fan turnout. I think it's safe to say the self-imposed blackouts were the biggest problem the casual fan had with the Bill Wirtz regime. You had a stubborn owner who refused to see things differently and a fan base that eventually threw up its hands in disgust.

Speaking as a former Minnesota Twins season ticket holder, even if you have the financial means, it's virtually impossible to make every game based on time and interest constraints. Now that the team needs to lure back fans, adding television broadcasts will be the smartest move the team makes.

* The Blackhawks are in unenviable position of having hostile fans on top of the disillusioned ones. For anyone who wasn't turned off by the team prior to the strike, there was that to push the remainder of fans away.

This means that the team has all the problems that everyone else in the NHL has in addition to a hostile fan base that was on its way out the door to begin with. Not good.

* It's no secret that I'm a baseball junkie and will go well out of my way for information, but for the breed of fan required to bring the franchise back, that's not going to cut it. Everyone in town knows the business of the Cubs, knows about the Garland trade for the Sox and knows that Rex is slowly killing the Bears as they have a disappointing season.

No one knows much about the Blackhawks and they're not going to go out of their way to find out.

This will be a problem in growing the brand. Short of giving away free tickets, I don't know how they'll address this.

* Finally, the big problem for fans like me is the respect issue. I became a fan in my early teens, when I couldn't afford a ticket, couldn't drive and needed that TV coverage in order to stay in the loop with the team.

It was insult to injury when the team then locked out fans when they were in town.

Add the financial and time pressures and you take what amounts to a blue collar sport and put your fans on the wrong side of the glass.

When you can't make the game and the team decides to dedicate years mocking you for it, that just might be a problem even McDonough and his bag of tricks can't fix.

(Image from: FirstAndTenSportsden.com)

Minnesota, in a nutshell

They don't call it "The State of Hockey" for nothing, as evidenced by the United States Hockey Hall of Fame which is way, way up north in Eveleth, MN.

As I was looking for a place for dinner last night, I accidentally found the world's largest hockey stick. Honestly, I should have been a little more surprised than I actually was.

I have a few pictures here and here, with my favorite here.

The fact that there's a sign up in town that points you in the direction of The Big Stick is one of the most awesome things I've ever seen on a sign.

There appears to be a little rivalry going, with another "Largest Stick" in Canada and mentions of the new and old one in Minnesota - seems like someone had to up the ante to keep those Canucks in their place. The Minnesota one is also listed as the largest authentic stick - what justifies that distinction is beyond me.

Just to make the whole thing more complete for me, when you Google "Big Stick, Minnesota" you get a ton of stories about the state fair and the unnatural attraction to foods on a stick that probably shouldn't be.

These are the things I'll tell my children about.

(Image from IronRange.org)

Your NHL Champion... Ducks?

I broke down and watched the end of tonight's game to see the Stanley Cup get passed around and it was a little weird not knowing any of the year's storylines or even who was on the teams (turns out a guy I covered in Junior A was on the losing Senators).

One of the greatest traditions in sports is that as a Cup winner, you get it for at least a day, to bring it home, drive it downtown in a parade, feed a horse out of it, launch it into a pool or whatever you damn well please. (those are all true stories, btw).

If I were prone to captions on this blog, I'd surely make a "What's been filled with weirder stuff - the Cup or Lohan?" reference, but I'm not that savvy with the coding.

At any rate, it was nice to see guys who grew up dreaming of the Cup, for whom this all still means a great deal. While I've written off the sport, rating continue to free fall and your last two Cup winners are Carolina and Anaheim - ahem... that's just unnatural - it's still cool to see.

For a guy who never watches hockey, it's pretty silly to have a whole tag devoted to it on this blog, huh?

(Image from NHL.com)

Hock-Key???

I'm told the Stanley Cup finals begin soon. I'm also told that childbirth is really painful - I lack any personal knowledge of either with which to speak with any degree of certainty.

The Ottawa Senators will face the Anaheim Mighty Ducks in this year's final, which is both funny haha and funny strange.

In high school when hockey was actually a sport in Chicago - incidentally, check out Eddie Belfour's personal site, which is linked to from the league site - these teams were a joke.

Imagine a Lions/Jaguars Super Bowl and you'll understand the level of confusion I'm mired in today.

The Ottawa Senators were the class of 92-93, while the Ducks entered the league in the 93-94 season, so good for those franchises, but this goes a long way to explaining why even in Minnesota - the state of hockey - people are looking for something else to do.

I keep meaning to give hockey a chance, but without a respectable - notice I'm not even asking for "competitive" or "winning" - team in Chicago, I can't see that happening.

Call me a frontrunner if you want, but it's going to take one hell of a carrot to drag me back to a sport I loved so much and then did me so wrong. The retirement of Bill Wirtz wouldn't hurt, either.

(Image from ajhs.schools.sd76.ab.ca)

Because you can't spell "No one cares who the hell wins" without NHL

Seeing as the Red Sox are required by some obscure league rule to start a breathing human being regardless of talent tonight I am tuned in to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

This is only because How I Met Your Mother is on a repeat I've seen. Seriously, that is the only reason I went back to hockey before the third period. This is a pretty sad day for me.

Unlike Frank the Tank, I remember watching hockey (and the Blackhawks being shown the door by the St. Louis Blues year after year) as a kid. I came to the sport late and largely because of the the NHL series produced by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis.

I remember trips to my grandfather's house in Michigan which meant I could swing by a sports card shop and open pack upon pack of hockey cards in the car all afternoon. There was a time where the only way I could remember locker combinations and phone numbers was to associate them with past and present Blackhawks. It was a pretty sick time.

From there, I picked up street hockey pretty easily and played anywhere I could when I was out of soccer season. From blacktop to the ice and back again if we could play for free, we'd drop the net on top of my Ford Taurus station wagon and head out to play for hours on end.

Some guys snuck out to drink or raise hell - we found a schoolyard, dropped the net and went to work.

My first paying gig in newspapers was Junior A hockey in Green Bay, which saw two or three players from that team make the NHL. Of course, by the time that happened, I'd all but abandoned the sport.

When you take a year of storm warnings about an impending strike and couple it with a pointless holdout that sees two losers - the players were forced to knuckle under to financial pressures and the owners who cried poor showed that they could go an entire year without revenue - it's not hard to imagine that hockey is seeing death's door-type numbers.

If I got a bad taste in my mouth over it, I can only imagine how the NASCAR set is reacting. For the NHL, this is an awful position, especially considering how they've been alienating Canadian fans for the better part of a decade now.

For the quick recap:

Me: Grew up in an Original Six city; played countless hours of both ice and street hockey; attended a college where hockey was the major sport; covered Junior A hockey; lived with a hockey mad roommate in DC.

Average fan: Is pretty sure hockey is played with a squashed ball and not a real ball.

Way to shit the bed on that one, NHL.

While I hesitate to offer my own proposal on how to save the NHL (and Frank hit it pretty much spot on - hockey and college athletics are about the only two things we can agree on) I think it boils down to everything the Tank said and these key points.

* More Canada, less Florida. A good rule here is that if you can't normally maintain ice outside at some point in the year, you can't have a hockey team

* Return Wayne Gretzky to the wild in Alberta

* Every third male born in Ontario must be named Dougie to help replenish Canada's natural supply of hockey players with hockey names (note: after some deliberation, Cam is also acceptable in place of Doug)

* Allow fans of the anal violation teams (mainly Chicago and Boston) to control the teams via the Internet like the Schaumburg Flyers

* Canadian commissioner, minimum of half the owners are Canadians and let's try to avoid "investment partnerships" in the future. This is a Canadian game and I think they're just too polite to tell everyone to stick it. Seriously, how would you feel if the commissioner of baseball was from Sweden? Pretty outraged, huh?

* More Darren Pang

* Less Barry Melrose

* More Barry Melrose mullet

In short, the big story line for me tonight is that you have an uber-small market in Edmonton fighting a sun-kissed new market team in Carolina. Guess who I'm pulling for here?

If I'm the commissioner, I start hyping the games like they were WWE matches. Play good versus evil, tradition versus American expansion. Add a little spice. I saw hundreds of hockey sticks in cars and minivans up here this winter and the rumor was that the city of Edmonton ran out of beer in the playoff run, so someone's watching here.

Lost in the shuffle have been fans and casual fans. The hard cores seem to have come back, even if it was slowly at first, but everyone below that level was happy to wave goodbye.

My only question is why the NHL hasn't tried to court some of us back with something along those lines. When it comes to making chicken soup out of chicken shit, the NHL is failing miserably.

(Photo from telus.net / geocities.com/caloilers / thgworldwide.com)