Just your average hockey fan here……a dying breed.
The hockey fan has been one of the most abused sports fans over the last decade. I remember when I could pick up at least 3 or 4 quality hockey magazines to read at a convenience store or Barnes and Noble….now I’m lucky if I see just one. Hockey was once on a major network when major networks cared about hockey. Now we’re just an afterthought that gets pre-empted by the Belmont Stakes. We were promised a 24 hour NHL Network almost 3 years ago…we still haven’t seen it in the United States. There is no real NHL recap show on anymore since NHL 2 Nite went off the air a couple seasons back. Even with the advent of Center Ice and the start of the upcoming hockey season on Saturday, the hockey fan is an abused entity nonetheless.
For any kind of real, credible coverage…we either have to look to the blogosphere, newspapers, or well…..Canada. Sure it would be great to have a more all-around media presence in the grand scheme of things but we just don’t. The hockey fan is often relegated to whatever the internet or special sports package provides. Major sport outlets like Espn treat the hockey fan as a second class citizen…if you see 60 seconds of highlights in a 60 minute Sportscenter…you are lucky. The only way hockey gets more coverage is if a brawl breaks out or something bad happens.
That gets to the crux of the problem. The hockey fan when walking down the street will even get looked at funny. I kid you not….it is worse where I live….people have actually come up to me and asked if I supported Satan. Yes I am a Devils fan…but that is a hockey team. The Jersey Devil from which the logo was spawned is kind of a mythical legend of sorts but that is for another time and another story. I even get asked wouldn’t you rather follow football….hockey is just a sport of thugs and goons who fight all the time and no one cares to watch. Again that is just another falsehood. Violence actually draws ratings for hockey….just ask the viewers of that Ottawa-Philly brawl a few years back….that was one of hockey’s finest tv ratings moments. Violence is not necessarily the main draw…the physicality of the sport is what draws fans in.
Most hockey fans I know truly love the game…they live, eat, and breathe it. They live for that physicality…the in your face action. The abuse we take for that drives us to care about the game more…to write about it…to get angry about it…even to take action to make sure it doesn’t completely vanish from the public’s consciousness. All the podcasters, bloggers, and people who form message boards, etc….do it for that very reason. If we weren’t passionate about this game at this grassroots level….we wouldn’t take the inevitable abuse that goes along with it. Every hockey fan who views hockey as the sport they care about most takes the slings and arrows from other sport fans who laugh at how poorly hockey does in the United States.
I remembered what one of my friends told me about football…saying that hockey was just pure violence…so I made him watch an entire hockey game. Yep we went to an Isles-Devils game about 5 or 6 years ago. He has been a diehard hockey fan ever since. All us hockey fans ask for is a little exposure…and a little good exposure for a change. Because usually what dogs us is the bad media exposure we do get from outlets like ESPN. The abuse we do take is not life threatening by any means but hurting one’s pride and ego sometimes hurts worse than any physical trauma. We are all very passionate and care about this sport more than any other….all we really ask for is the respect we give every other sports fan.
