TAMPA — I love all the angst over the National Hockey League’s fighting issue for a number of reasons.
Those reasons include, but aren’t limited to, the old mainstream media’s attempt to deal with the issue on a “Letters to the Editor” basis. You know what that looks like: “Our readers have had it with fighting,” the headlines blare.
Yeah, sure they have. The people who write letters to the editor are generally the people who haven’t paid for a hockey ticket in more than a decade. These are the people who haven’t watched a game and haven’t even looked at the standings since the Jets left Winnipeg. Of course they have an opinion on fighting.
It’s like that donkey host of The Reporters on ESPN (his name escapes me). He hasn’t paid any attention to hockey since the day Versus got the U.S. rights to live telecasts, but he sure had an opinion about fighting in the NHL on Sunday. He couldn’t tell the difference between a hockey puck and a curling stone but that didn’t deter him from telling the rest of us what’s best for the NHL. He’s a typical New York TV commentator and he’s the biggest problem the NHL has. That’s because he’s the guy the New York-based NHL is trying to tailor its game toward: A guy who has never been to an NHL game and will never go.
Fact: No hockey fan has ever left an arena when the fight started.
Sure, it’s possible to find a way to get fighting out of the game, but why in heaven’s name would we want to do that?
One simply has to look at the numbers, to see why the general managers spent so much time discussing fighting at their winter meetings in Naples, Fla., last week. Coming out of the lockout, in 2005-06, there were fewer fights in the NHL than at any time in the previous 30 years. Then a year later, the Anaheim Ducks took part in the highest number of fights in the game and they won the Cup. Now, fights are growing at a pace not seen since the late 1980s when teams (in 1987-88) averaged 2.1 fights per game.
Obviously, if games are called tightly and the officials stop allowing the weasels (not the goons, the weasels) to skate around elbowing people in the head (Todd Fedoruk, Darcy Tucker, Steve Ott, the old Sean Avery), then fights won’t be as necessary as they are today.
But because the media (and a few fans) whined about all the power-plays during that “New NHL” season (the one after the lockout), the league obviously told the officials to stop calling it so closely. With that, the weasels took over the game and the only way to stop the weasels is to send the goons out after ‘em.
The NHL could stop fighting with the same rule change instituted by college hockey: Fight and you’re suspended. But why take fighting out of the game when the fighters do more to maintain control than the officials?
And also, despite all the stupid polls, dimwitted New York TV commentators and letter-writing campaigns, fighting sells tickets.
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THE SLOW DEATH OF AN ICON
ORLANDO — Along with the news that FP Newspapers Limited Partnership (publishers of the Winnipeg Free Press, the Brandon Sun and the Canstar papers) lost $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2008 after making $4.6 million in 2007, comes word that more and more American newspapers are going under.
The San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer could go down any day. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Chicago Tribune are in bankruptcy protection. The Rocky Mountain News has ceased to publish.
The death of printed newspapers will be a slow death, but it will still be a death. Sadly, the people who ran the business in the 90s and early 2000s didn’t see it coming. They were either dishonest (that would cover the ones I worked for), ignorant or just plain unaware. Newspapers have been treading water for years and now they’re about to sink. It’s sad, but inevitable. When the vast majority of your readers are over 60, death is as certain as taxes.
On Saturday in Lakeland, as the Detroit Tigers played host to the Toronto Blue Jays at Joker Marchant Stadium, the press box was about half full. There was a time when you couldn’t get a seat in the press box at Joker Marchant, especially if the Blue Jays were in town, but fewer and fewer sports journalists are traveling to spring training these days — mainly because there are fewer and fewer sports journalists around — so if you have a spring training media pass this year, you can sit anywhere you want.
After Saturday’s game (a game that was pretty dull considering that the Blue Jays didn’t bring any big names to Lakeland while the five best Tigers are playing in the World Baseball Classic), we got back to the hotel in Orlando and as I stopped to get a coffee at the Starbucks in the lobby, I noticed that the old Orlando Sentinel racks were filled with scarves, on display with a hand-written note on top, telling prospective buyers that the scarves were 30 per cent off.
Like so many papers, the Sentinel no longer fills the hotel racks outside downtown Orlando. Way out here in Lake Buena Vista, the hotel gives away internet access, as well as about five different ESPNs, and as a result the newspaper has become obsolete.
There is simply no need to read the sports page anymore. Almost all the news in it has already been telecast on ESPN (TSN in Canada) — more than 12 hours earlier — and anything else a reader would need, is on the internet, often days in advance.
Daily newspapers got old, tired, dull and pretentious. News was replaced with inanity. A newspaper mob formed and that led to horrible journalistic decisions such as the U.S. rush to war in Iraq, the Duke lacrosse case and the Barry Bonds witch hunt. Most of the people who wrote about these issues had no first hand knowledge of any of it, but they kept plugging away at it anyway.
Small, local magazines and weekly or bi-weekly niche newspapers will survive and prosper. Big dailies with huge buildings, hundreds of employees, fleets of cars and trucks and overpaid editors are just about toast.
It’s sad, but in recent years, all newspapers have been able to do well is hurt people. That’s another reason why there won’t be that many people missing newspaper when they go.
In the meantime, someone still has to figure out a way to turn a profit off an internet information site. If that ever happens, the recession will be over.