Learning to Share

Big showdown in the hockey blogosphere this week over attendance and non-traditional markets, with Tom Benjamin playing Prince of Darkness against usual foil Chuq von Rospach and dean of hockey bloggers Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion.

The battle actually started with Mike Chen, when he pointed out last week that the ebb-and-flow of attendance can be most easily explained by paying attention to the local team’s performance. Tom proceeded to cherry-pick statistics and work from absolute numbers rather than trends to get in as many slams on non-traditional hockey markets as he possibly could in a piece ironically titled Inconvenient Truths, and basically blew off the fact that the bottom end of the attendance figures correlates very closely with the bottom of the standings. Chuq tore him up, and Eric followed by challenging Tom to lay out his vision for a successful hockey league, as opposed to merely complaining about everything wrong (and a lot of things that aren’t) with the NHL.

Tom accepted Wednesday with his proposal for Canadian secession from the NHL. Far better than my initial response of a stream of obscenities, Eric responded with an eloquent appeal to history:

Part of me wishes I could pass Tom’s words onto some of the great Canadians who spent the better part of their professional lives trying to win a foothold for hockey in the United States. I’m talking about men like Lester Patrick and Art Ross. Men who left their homes North of the border and took on the challenge of selling the game in regions that had little or no history with it. I wonder what they’d think about Tom’s strategy. […] Then again, men like those loved the game so much, that they were committed to growing it no matter what the cost.

I’ve always found it curious that people like Tom, who claim to love hockey, choose to express it by aiming to strangle the game’s growth. Those guys Eric talks about — they’re heroes of the game because they succeeded in importing hockey to what were once foreign markets and now are considered core to the sport. (Even Tom acknowledges that he’d want those franchises back, once the American remnant league failed and they came bowing in supplication to their Canadian masters.)

And in the final analysis, that’s what this is about — an expression of Canadian nationalism at its anti-American ugliest. I spent last fall taking an online class in hockey history from Seneca College in Toronto, taught by curators at the Hockey Hall of Fame. The last discussion topic, asking members of the class to propose their improvements to the game, yielded a slew of demands for teams in Quebec City, Winnipeg and Southern Ontario, along with the requisite slaps at Southerners for idiots who’d never appreciate Canada’s game.

It’d be great if Canadians could simply take pride in their country and its national game. And plenty do. But too many more seem to think that for Canada to be proud, the U.S. needs to be taken down a peg — and nowhere does that insecurity show more clear than in hockey.

Eric concludes:

I’m talking about “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, a man who worked to turn Atlanta into a hockey town, only to see the Flames move to the Canadian prairie. But even then, he didn’t stop selling the game, and lived long enough to see Atlanta become a hockey town again, and have a better chance to win a Cup than it ever did the first time around. Today his grandson Blake — a Florida native — is one of the most promising young American talents in the game.

Actually, Eric, it’s even better. Blake Geoffrion was born in Florida, but he grew up and played his youth hockey in Nashville, Tennessee — one of those markets so derided by our northern overlords.

Hockey is growing in the U.S., despite every effort to kill it, and despite the heaps of scorn piled on each new market south of the 49th since its inception. We have Lord Stanley. We’re growing, hockey’s staying, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Kids from Texas, Tennessee and California are playing Division I college hockey. The Kings recently promoted the NHL’s first North Carolina native. And with local heroes to emulate, this trend can only improve.

So, Tom, keep with your fever dreams about an all-Canadian league. Me, I’ll be at Verizon Center tomorrow night watching Washington battle Carolina — the game’s brightest young star versus the Stanley Cup champions. And before the game, I’ll take my hat off to the Stars and Stripes, and offer a silent thank you to the Maple Leaf beside her that men like Patrick and Ross had the foresight and the generosity to share Canada’s gift with the world.