Your Next NHL Team will be in...XXXXX. Read here to find out! Your hero has been off on assignment for the past few weeks. A new satire series:
Author's note: The following is either satire, hockey prognostication, an angry rant or just errant observations...anything factual or actually insightful is unintended
I sit and write this from a hospital bed in Paris, France. My wife transcribes my muttering onto our HP laptop, filling you all in on what has transpired. My body is a criss-cross etch of casts and bandages. Even my soul feels bruised, as I lie, unmoving, staring up at the mildew-pocked ceiling. I feel like a man who has sailed on his skates while head-down into Scott Stevens. Like Eric Lindros, who is still trying to answer the phone with the ringing in his ears.
How did I get here?
Well, that is the tale I am about to tell.
It starts with me reading
Scoop's Trivia question, on Hockeybuzz, one summer morning. All of a sudden, in the middle of my muddled head, which was already boiling from a crazy work schedule and a impending wedding in a week, a thought hit me like a diamond bullet.
I bookmarked Scoop's trivia question, and quickly leaped back to the Nashville situation stories. And then I trailed back to stories about the All Star game and the awful ratings...
And I realized that why the NHL was failing to grab the US markets. They weren't coming at the bottom before teams were assigned or brought in. They weren't working with schools to create rinks. They weren't creating large initiatives to get hockey to youth. They instead would study areas and make overall business decision and planning, but they were completely at the mercy then after by impatient or uneven ownerships and their own plans.
But there was a sure way to success...if they were patient and crafty enough. To come into a new place, lay in the infrastructure with schools, youth, and population, and then bring in a team after...once the tracks to this groundwork were laid.
Now, what would be a prime candidate for this grand experiment?
Las Vegas, land of the completely disconnected to reality? No way.
Hartford, stuck in a crowded zone of teams on every side in the mid-atlantic? Nope.
Ok...how about
Canada, who's fans LOVE hockey?
Well, the problem has always been not the fan base but the actual business and markets outside of it. And also the ridiculous non-competition situations for teams like Montreal and Toronto...which make it extremely difficult to bring in new teams to hot areas like Hamilton, who is clamoring for a team.
Eventually that divide would be crossed, but those wouldn't work for my grand plan. I needed a completely NEW place, maybe a place who never heard of hockey. Who had no preconceived notions, never having spied and been horrified by a Versus telecast in between their rodeo watching and fly fishing. Who haven't been one of the 4 people watching NBC on the Sunday afternoon listening to Clements and Hull dislike one another.
But where oh where would I find such a place?
I look up at my bulletin board, spying my attached tickets to my impending honeymoon. Rather than choose the typical places of Hawaii or tourist traps like Disney or that ilk, we chose Tahiti, despite the fact of the larger cost. According to Tahiti Tourism, more people visit Hawaii in 10 days than come to Tahiti in an entire year. So, we wouldn't be suffering the crowd and it was unique. French Polynesia, which included Tahiti, and other islands like Bora Bora, has a population of 278,963. It was a beautiful place with turquiose lagoons, protected by reefs offshore. And like those reefs, they were protected from the current state of hockey. They had not seen the lockout, the NHLPA turmoil, a Bobby Clarke deadline deal, or a Charles Wang contract. They had not see a Don Cherry outfit, a Mike Keenan political powerplay, or a NHL blown video review.
278,963 potential hockey fans. 278,963 more viewers for an all-star game that only got a total of 672,948 viewers.
Tahiti would be the perfect candidate for this bold experiment and to test my theory. I would smuggle in hockey equipment and bring this game to the masses. I would create a buzz and clamor for hockey in the center of the South Pacific. While the hockey nation argued Nashville's future and cried about Hamilton, I'd be setting the stage for the next stop. I'd remove, in one fell swoop, questionable places in US markets that had no interest in hockey by creating a hotbed of interest and fans.
Now it was time to set this plan in motion.
To be continued . . .
B.D. Gallof
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