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Hockey: The RC Cola of Sports
Posted: Friday June 09, 2000 07:32 AM
Several months ago, in Pittsburgh, I was sitting on stage with the owners of the city's three major league teams, leading a discussion of the trials and tribulations that professional sports face today. At one point, as Mario Lemieux, the Penguins' owner and an athlete I admire as much as any I have ever seen, looked at me in a perplexed state of bemusement, I explained how it is best to describe ice hockey in the United States as Royal Crown Cola. And, even more important, how the National Hockey League in particular must learn to think like RC Cola. Perhaps I can make more sense of this to you than I did to Mario. When I was a child, RC Cola was a distant third to Coke and Pepsi. It is today. It will be when I die. RC Cola will, I am confident, distantly trail Coke and Pepsi when we enter the third millennium. And yet RC Cola is a very good soda pop. I'll bet if I gave you one of those blindfolded taste tests, a lot of you would even pick RC over Coke or Pepsi. But also this: As far as I know, RC has learned to live happily being No. 3. I guess it turns a neat little profit for whomever runs RC, wherever they are. As far as I can tell, RC Cola knows itself and is very comfortable in its own skin. If only all the people in hockey could wake up tomorrow and take a big swig of RC and say, "You know, this is a very good cola, even if it is No. 3, and we are a very good sport -- and it really doesn't matter that we are far behind baseball, football and basketball." But, of course, hockey doesn't do that. Hockey has a terrible inferiority complex, and it tries to solve all its problems by aping the Coke and Pepsi of team sports -- baseball, football and basketball. Hockey takes teams out of Canada, where they are indigenous and loved, and puts them all over the Sunbelt, where they are sideshows and passing fancies. Hockey sells its soul to get on network TV, and then gets hopelessly tiny ratings, which only embarrasses it more, adding to its inferiority complex. But because hockey is in the Sunbelt and on real network TV, the players say, "Well, we deserve as much money as other professional athletes." And so the owners pay them and raise ticket prices and pretend that they are just as big as anybody else. Only they're not. Right now, the finals of the Stanley Cup are taking place between ... Do you want to poll the audience, call a friend, go 50-50? Well, the answer is the Dallas Stars and the New Jersey Devils. The other day, a big-time New York TV sports announcer called Dallas "the North Stars," which they used to be, years ago, in Minnesota. As for the Devils, they play in the shadow of Manhattan, but the newspapers and radio and TV of New York barely acknowledge that their suburban team is playing for the championship. It just doesn't register. But in Montreal last week, Maurice Richard was laid to rest with what amounted to a state funeral. "The Rocket" he was, star of Les Canadiens. Shoot dat puck, score dat goal. Richard mattered to his people, to the nation. Most people in the U.S. couldn't even name a home-team player. There is a lesson here, I think. Maybe hockey should have just stayed where it counted, been content to be the big love in a small heart. Everything doesn't have to be huge. Everything doesn't have to be global. Everything doesn't have to be publicly traded. Wouldn't it really be better if Winnipeg was playing Quebec for the Stanley Cup championship? So, OK, I'll raise a toast to Dallas and Jersey -- but it's a glass of my very best RC Cola. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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