Home : Ice Hockey :

Destined For Greatness?

On Thin Ice

It’s the world’s fastest, fiercest sport—but no one’s watching. Can hockey be saved?

Back in the 1970s, pro hockey seemed destined for greatness. Finesse players were scoring jaw-dropping end-to-end goals, enforcers would drop gloves just because you looked at ’em wrong, and NBC’s NHL Game of the Week even had its own cloying animated character, Peter Puck. Then in 1975, just as Wayne Gretzky, the biggest star the sport would ever know, was preparing to enter the league, the NHL lost its national TV coverage. Over the next 20 years, hockey’s popularity turned to slush while the NFL and NBA became exalted, cash-rich American institutions on par with Hollywood and the Mob.

Fast-forward to 2001, when the NHL had two of the decade’s greatest sports stories—the return of cancer survivor Mario Lemieux and 21-year veteran Ray Bourque’s quest for the Cup—and the ratings still suck. By some measure, even the freakin’ XFL was more popular than the NHL. We couldn’t sit idly by any longer. We got together with the biggest names in NHL history to devise six no-fail solutions to save this great sport before it’s too late. (Note to NHL management: Ignore ’em at your own risk.)

Let the fists fly

If the NHL wants to recapture the hearts and wallets of the American sports fan, it has to fight for it. “No matter what all those bleeding hearts say, none of them get up to leave when a fight’s going on,” Barry Melrose says. Unfortunately, starting in the 1992–93 season, the NHL has been using penalties like the instigator rule to consciously crack down on fighting. The effects have been disastrous. “If you cut down on fighting,” Gordie Howe explains, “it just gives guys that want to fight an opportunity to start swinging sticks.” He’s right. Since 1993 the number of career-threatening injuries caused by stick-swinging has skyrocketed.

Ding! Ding! Ding! “If a player wants to hack somebody, he should have to stand up for himself on the ice,” Melrose adds. “But now you’ve got these little cowards who resort to stick work because there are no repercussions.” Even the greatest finesse player of all time agrees. “I used to be a big believer that we should eliminate fighting,” Wayne Gretzky says. “But there’s no question that by allowing certain guys to fight, you eliminate a lot of the unnecessary stick work.” It’s the sport’s greatest irony: Fights exist not as gratuitous violence but as the most effective deterrent to unsportsmanlike conduct. Oh, yeah—they’re darn cool to watch, too!

Maxim

Sell the violence

Now that we’ve injected more good, clean violence back into the sport, it’s time to get the word out. “People love football; they love wrestling; they love Tyson fights,” Tie Domi says. “But we don’t sell the fact that hockey’s a tough sport. We try to be prima donnas and say, ‘Oh, come and watch us—it’s like fairy tales out there.’ Well, it’s not. When we play, it’s a war. And that’s how it should be marketed.”

Denis Leary agrees: “People watch this game because they love the game in total, and that includes a guy like Cam Neely grabbing Claude Lemieux and beating the shit out of him—and I mean a righteous beating. If they actually sold this game the way it’s played, the ratings would go through the roof. But it’s like legalizing drugs—it’s the right thing to do, but you can’t do it because it’s politically incorrect.” Maybe political incorrectness is just what hockey needs.

Screw the zone

Sure, kick-ass defense wins games. It also bores the shit out of fans. The consensus: The mind-numbingly dull neutral-zone trap that’s strangled the game in recent years must be banned forever along with plus-size spandex. “The Devils—God love ’em, God love their fans, but I hate that fucking team,” Leary says. “I hate the way they play. It’s boring, frustrating hockey.” Melrose agrees: “You make me commissioner for a day and I’ll eliminate zone defense so we can capitalize on the speed and aggressiveness of our athletes.” Adds Cam Neely: “You can’t play a boring style all season and expect people to be excited about watching the sport.” Amen.

Bring the action home

ScanVision, which incorporates 30 robotic cameras and allows viewers to see plays develop from multiple angles, was a huge success in the playoffs last season and should be used more consistently. “Hockey is tough to follow on TV,” Neely says. Pronger agrees: “The puck is going 100 miles per hour, in unpredictable directions, so it’s difficult for cameras to get in the middle of the action.” “ScanVision is a good example of new technology,” Gary Bettman says. “High-definition television may also help. In addition to the clarity, the rectangular shape should let you see more of the ice surface.”

Canucked Up Famous Faces Last year both Jim Carrey and Pamela Anderson became U.S. citizens, joining Michael J. Fox, Peter Jennings, and Alex Trebek. But guess who’s still 100 percent Canuck? Tom Green! Canadian Bacon The boys up north grind out over $2 billion of this overrated pizza topping each year…which is good, because recent mad-cow episodes have cost their beef industry at least $3 billion. Molson Stock in Canada’s largest brewer is soaring! Uh, that’s because it’s been bought out by American brewer Coors. At least you guys still have the world’s eighth-biggest economy! Maple Syrup Canadian farms produce 67 million pounds of it a year, dwarfing our measly 12 million pounds. In fact, Canada delivers 80 percent of the world’s syrup. Then again, who cares? Medicine The FDA has deemed imported Canadian drugs illegal, thus saving us from scoring any cheap Viagra. But who wants to hear, “Nice hose, hoser,” anyway? Other than us, of course. Celine Dion Mock her all you want, but she’s well on her way to making $100 million in three years at Caesars in Las Vegas. (In Canadian currency, that’s roughly 72 million beaver pelts.) Mounties They sold out by licensing the rights to their image to Disney, then got the rights back in 1999…just in time for Brendan Fraser’s submission for Worst Movie Ever, Dudley Do-Right.

Save the Canadians!

Canada is home to some of the best quality hockey in the entire world. TSN’s hockey slogan says it best ”Hockey Lives Here”. Arguably the two best players in hockeys history, Lemieux and Gretzky, are Canadians. Other names that come to mind throught hockeys history are Maurice Richard, Bobby Orr, Guy Lafleur, Gordie Howe, Steve Yzerman. Canada has been home to so many hockey greats and has so many devoted hockey fans. This country’s passion and dominance is why hockey is Canada’s game.

Americans (and actually many people around the world, including Canadians) will know where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Canadians have an event they know all where they were. Paul Henderson's '72 Summit series game-winning goal against Tretiak. Everyone was in front of the TV watching the game, Canada was supposed to sweep the series.

Frankly, most Americans couldn’t give a flying frog fart about the financial future of the NHL’s Canadian teams. But with just 31 million people, Canada still produces 60 percent of all NHL players and most of its coaches, general managers and referees. So if the Canadian teams fail, that vast talent pool could dry up and play would suffer. “I blame the Canadian people,” Leary says. “It’s their sport. Imagine if baseball were moving to Japan and there were only three teams left here—the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Dodgers—and they were about to fold. You can bet your ass we’d get some money and change that.”

Expanding from six teams in 1967 to 30 teams in 2000, has the league's reach exceeded its grasp, or is it just suffering growing pains caused by stretching from Canada to the Sun Belt? The game's creativity is being stifled by defensive systems coached to cope with a talent pool diluted by expansion. “In Canada, hockey’s a religion,” Melrose says. “There’s an old joke: Why do Canadians always make love doggy-style? So they can both watch Hockey Night in Canada.” It’s your freaking sex life, people! Don’t you want to save that?

Television ratings - a key revenue driver and measure of a sport's mass appeal - which have gone from bad to worse. The league continues to aspire to a national television audience, despite years of evidence that shows the NHL is a regional sport whose economics are attendance-driven. The NHL parted ways with ESPN when the network declined to offer the NHL any type of upfront rights fees for airing its games. Instead, ESPN proposed splitting profits after the network recouped its costs, terms virtually unheard of among the major professional sports leagues.

Alex Straus. On Thin Ice. Maxim. October 2001.

top of page

back a page