You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
NHL Hockey.
I’m in a sports bar. I’m watching Anaheim versus Nashville.
It’s Ducks Vs. Predators.
It’s West Coast Vs. Third Coast.
It’s a bar full of men staring at monitors on the wall, beers in front of them, palm pilots on full tilt.
It’s a game that is so fast, it’s a drag race on ice. It’s a game so exciting, it’s Viagra with pads. It’s big time wrestling on skates with a 30mph hip check into the glass.
WHAM!
The problem with the National Hockey League? It’s just a terrible sport to watch on TV.
Watching hockey on TV is like watching speed chess. It makes no sense. The moves are so fast, that unless you have an announcer and super slo mo, it’s hard to tell what just happened in front of the net.
It’s like 4 225 pound mastodons in the crease swinging sticks like a group of boy scout moms swatting at flies. It’s insane.
Hockey is great in person, in the arena, in the thick of the action. The cold air, the cold beer, the foul mouth guy in Row E. Then there’s the organ playing and the crowd screaming and 11 year olds banging on the glass like they just graduated from the Charles Manson school of Etiquette.
You want to talk intensity? I’ve seen school girls bite the head off a cat fish and then throw it like a bloody scaled hand grenade on the ice. That’s crazy.
Sadly, none of that translates on the big screen.
The problem is the white ice is covered with graphics that say Nashville Predators and Stanley Cup Playoffs. There are blue lines and red lines and face off circles. It looks like a rubex cube of confusion.
Adding to the quagmire; the sticks are black and the skates are black and the puck is black. Following the puck is like following a pick pocket in a mardi gras crowd.
Can you imagine other sports where you can’t follow the object of the game?
It’s be like a bowler tossing the ball down the alley and you suddenly scream; “where’d that 16 pound orb go?”
It’s like Tiger Woods driving the ball and you never seeing where it lands.
It would be like the quarterback throwing the ball and you never see who catches it.
That’s hockey. It’s a terrible game to watch on TV. HD helps, but to really see this game you would need the Hubble Space Telescope.
Normal cameras just can’t follow a biscuit traveling 100mph, traveling 2 inches off the ice, skimming through pads and sticks and skates.
HE SCORES!! REALLY? WHEN?
FOX sports is innovative and they tried to re-create the wheel. They realized hockey is too fast and the puck too small. So FOX Foxified the NHL. They put a chip in the puck so every time the puck was passed or shot, there was a cartoon flame tracer that followed the puck across the ice.
On FOX, you could follow the object that everyone is chasing. On FOX, you could follow the game. If you could follow the game, you might actually care about the sport.
FOX executives realized this early on and they garnered pretty good ratings.
But the purists said “We hate the fire tracer graphic” and it was gone. And so were a lot of part time hockey fans.
Now the home sewing network gets a better rating.
Some sports love the camera. NASCAR is a great example. Cameras in the brakes and on the bumper and inside the cockpit. Give them time and they’ll stick a camera on a driver’s crotch.
There’s graphics that show RPM’s and MPH and average viewer brain activity which is barely higher than a chipmunk.
And then you can hear the driver talking to his spotter.
Football is a wonderful TV sport.
Baseball is slow, but at least you can see the pitch.
Hockey is a game where goals are scored in an invisible vacuum of “what just happened?” “Why is everyone dancing around and the red lights spinning.” “Damn I missed that goal.”
In my mind, until hockey fixes the problem that is so obvious to me, there’s no way this sport will ever compete.
Until they put a camera in the puck, on the goalie’s glove and in the coaches lapel, there is no way this sport will ever generate more than a flicker of interest.
When is Wimbledon again?
And that is crazy.™