On the Predators

This doesn’t need to be nearly as long as many analysts have made it.

The TSN.ca editorial sums up the situation nicely. Remember that the NHL owners’ group is possibly the most hidebound, self-destructive old-boy network in North America short of the current U.S. administration. They just elected Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs chairman of the league’s Board of Governors, either the most- or second most-powerful position in the league depending on how much freedom you believe Gary Bettman has. This despite Jacobs’s systematic competitive destruction of his own franchise, ruining a franchise that should be the league’s flagship U.S. team. (Hockey’s natural homeland in the U.S. is the “Three M’s”: Massachussetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. Detroit as a city is dying, and the Twin Cities have no national cachet — sorry, Lileks. But Boston has the name, the climate, and the history. The Bruins should be a marquee franchise, and Jacobs certainly has the money to make them a winner. He just doesn’t care, and in a city with an outsized sense of pride, that’s a surefire route to irrelevance.)

And yet he’s the leader of the NHL ownership group. Why? Because he’s been in the league forever, and he’s completely non-threatening to his peers. His team makes money without exerting the slightest amount of effort. Sure, the serious local fans hate him, but hockey is secure enough in the city that the team can survive on corporate tickets and two-game-a-year casual spectators.

PI: Would you like some elitism with your soccer?

Steven Wells’s Guardian blog entry this morning on English attitudes toward American soccer provoked a rather visceral reaction from this quarter. Of course, provocation was his goal, calling out traditionalists as xenophobic “little-Englanders” simply afraid that resurgent U.S. soccer could displace Britain from yet another field in which it regarded dominance as its birthright (capitalism, naval warfare, etc.). And he might have a point.

But it takes chutzpah to condemn prejudice in one paragraph and in the next type this:

Public toilets, atheism, publicly funded radio and association football - these are all things of which no society can have too much. Witness the fact that soccer-playing America is massively liberal, loving, caring, socially conscious and nice. While soccer-hating America consists of increasingly isolated gangs of Bush- supporting, bible-bashing, gun-crazed, dungaree wearing, banjo-playing, quasi-fascist chicken-lovers and their twelve fingered, pin-headed, cyclopic, drooling monster children.

Bias and hyperbole aside, he inadvertently touched on a key conflict of English-speaking American soccer fanhood — one that was easily observable during the 2006 World Cup, when U.S. political blogs that otherwise condemn spectator team sports as low culture (and don’t even ask about NASCAR) professed sudden admiration for a European-based game. Soccer has an internationalist cachet in America that no other sport can match; that self-identification was virtually irresistible to the young, urban, well-travelled and politically alienated.

But if soccer support in English-speaking America becomes strongly associated with the cultural elitism of urban left-wing Euro-wannabes, the sport’s commercial horizon is awfully close.

Can MLS succeed as a niche product for this fanbase plus the Hispanic market? At its current scale, perhaps — it’s a well-off demographic. And maybe that’s fine. But if MLS wants to overtake the National Hockey League and join the top ranks of North American sport, it needs to be accessible to the casual fan who’d just as soon go to a baseball or American football game. That won’t happen if you have to buy a whole set of cultural assumptions with your ticket, when you’d rather just have a hot dog and a beer.

This post constituted my first entry over at PitchInvasion.net, a new blog hosted by Thomas Dunmore focusing on soccer fan culture. Give it a read — it’s well worth your while.

Dodge Caliber: riding on good intentions

Upon arrival at the Thrifty counter on our recent trip to Maine, the clerk tried to stick us with a PT Cruiser. I’ve had two in the past six months (Toronto and Arizona), and that was two too many. The only other vehicle she was willing to offer without an upgrade charge was a Dodge Caliber. So with a swipe of the Visa and two misinformed efforts to sell me insurance I didn’t need, I was off in a black New York-plated 2007 Caliber, with visible scratches on every exterior surface, 7400 miles on the odometer, drink stains on every seat and the floorboard, and an orange paintball ground into the driver’s seat. Clearly, I wouldn’t worry about brushing beach sand off my feet on this trip. (On the upside, the cost was 40% of a comparable rental at Hertz.)

The CVT automatic was strange at first: after the initial kick on pressure applied to the gas pedal, I only heard a constant medium-pitch roar from the engine and felt little push. I joked about hamster power until I noticed that I wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with traffic pulling out of tollbooths. I’d call the power and transmission subjectively OK — a little better than H’s Corolla, and qualitatively different enough from my manual diesel Jetta that I can’t make a meaningful comparison. The seats were reasonably comfortable, and spacewise, it was fine until you tried to sit in the back — no worse than my Jetta, but for the apparent physical size, I’d have expected better. No problems on front legroom or headroom for this 6’4” driver. The cargo area, with a pull-out cover, was fine for two medium-sized suitcases and my trusty laptop bag.

But the handling… better than the PT is about all I can give it. The PT was notorious for its huge turning circle; at least it seems like they fixed that. But for someone used to VW precision and Toyota confidence, the steering was awfully truck-like — which would be fine if it weren’t a compact hatchback.

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