The Good Old Hockey Game Is The Best Game You Can Name
I have had an on-again, off-again love affair with hockey for much of my sports-watching life. Upon first getting into sports as a child in the first half of the 1990s, morning viewings of SportsCenter before leaving for school shaped a lot of my interests, and the NHL got significant play on ESPN’s flagship program back then.
I remember Wayne Gretzky’s 802nd goal and the appropriate reverence paid to the moment; his jog on the ice after putting the puck in the net one of those sports images etched in my brain.
I unfortunately can’t remember if it was Dan Patrick or Keith Olbermann — or another anchor entirely! — who’d quip about “Jim Carey and his mask” when the Washington Capitals goalie was on fire in 1995.
I had also learned enough that when one of my friends on the seventh-grade basketball team in 1996 discussed playing as “Jeff Jagger” on his copy of NHL ‘96, I could pompously interject, “You mean Jaromir Jagr?!”
Oh, and that’s another thing: EA Sports’ NHL series.
The Jon Favreau comedy Swingers wove NHL ‘95 into the zeitgeist for years.
Lamenting the removal of fighting from the game but the gleeful pursuit of unlocking the game’s pixelated blood is hilarious in retrospect, as it reminds me of the aggressive push politicians made in the mid-1990s to curtail cartoonish video-game violence.
It was a misplaced pursuit that paid lip service to real problems without actually addressing those problems…but it did help score points for Sega owners such as myself during the console wars. Genesis kept Fatalities and blood in the original Mortal Kombat, a huge win for us disciples of Blast Processing.
Now, there are a few gripes I have with this becoming such a seminal piece of pop culture:
The following year’s NHL ‘96 was far superior in every way, yet I found myself in college a decade later arguing1 — MORE THAN ONCE! — with misguided souls who believed ‘95 was better simply for its association with Swingers.
It’s overshadowed the funnier scene from a film released a year earlier, Mallrats, in which one of the protagonists explains the significance of the Hartford Whalers beating the Vancouver Canucks.
Memories of this era came flooding back for me this week while working on an NBA-focused piece, ironically enough, over at sports-media outlet Awful Announcing. I referenced a 1994 Sports Illustrated cover story in which the magazine declared that the NHL was hot and the NBA was not.
It’s an amusing sentiment in retrospect, given how much more culturally relevant the NBA both was and became in the 21st Century. However, it wasn’t an unfair claim at the time.
Hockey was hot, and it certainly piqued my interest. It also helped living in Arizona that around this time, the Winnipeg Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes.
What had been the most successful WHA franchise brought the Valley of the Sun an immediately competitive roster, including the acquisition of Jeremy Roenick. I knew Roenick from having tuned into the occasional Chicago Blackhawks broadcast on WGN, so adopting the Coyotes from the outset didn’t require a hard sell.
Unfortunately, the Coyotes also play a prominent role in my hockey fandom lapsing.
As I moved onto high school and a new millennium began, I upgraded to a Playstation and continued playing EA’s yearly NHL release. I also gained a proxy appreciation of the Toronto Maple Leafs; not that I could see them beyond SportsCenter highlights, but I liked Mats Sundin and I loved the time Tie Domi fought obnoxious Flyers fans.
Also, Bret Hart removed his Calgary Hitmen sweater to reveal a Leafs jersy during the last-ever good segment aired on WCW Monday Nitro.
But I was never going to be a Maple Leafs fan. Likewise, I completely tuned out of the 2002 NBA Finals my first summer home from college, disgusted by and despondent from the officiating atrocity that kept the Sacramento Kings out.
I instead turned my ire to the Detroit Red Wings, a team that in the early 2000s I viewed as the hockey equivalent of the era’s New York Yankees: In love with its own mystique and dismissive of the fact its success was built on simply constructing a super-team.
In hindsight, I’m mad at myself for choosing to vocally support a Carolina Hurricanes franchise that came to be from its theft of the dear, sweet Hartford Whalers. Kudos to Carolina for establishing such a successful organization in a seemingly unlikely places, but whomever approved the Hurricanes wearing Whalers throwbacks deserves a lengthy stint in the penalty box.
It’s a uniform tragedy only matched by the Tennessee Titans donning Houston Oilers retros2.
Nevertheless, I had to root against a super-team consisting of former St. Louis Blues great Brett Hull; former Los Angeles Kings great Luc Robitaille; former Chicago Blackhawks great Chris Chelios; and worst of all, The Dominator, Dominik Hasek. I loved Hasek during his otherworldly run to the 1999 Stanley Cup Finals, and his joining up with an already-loaded Red Wings roster was like a precursor to Alex Rodriguez signing with the Yankees.
The only difference between Hasek and A-Rod is Hasek’s move paid immediate dividends.
The next summer, my mercenary allegiances settled on the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim thanks to Jean-Sebastien Giguere’s incredible net-minding. The moral of the story, in light of the New Jersey Devils’ win in seven games, is that my support is the kiss of death when it comes to hockey.
But 2003 was the beginning of my fandom lapsing. That was the year in which the Coyotes abandoned their distinctive colors and branding — Peyote Coyote, it came to be known — for a far more bland logo and an inexplicable color scheme that seemed like it was patterned after the NFL’s Cardinals.
Considering how inept the Bidwill Family had been in the Cardinals’ first 15 years after arriving in Tempe from St. Louis, that was hardly the franchise in town to emulate.
Worse, the Coyotes moved from the arena they shared with the Suns in Downtown Phoenix to a venue in Glendale.
Never mind uprooting the Jets from Winnipeg to relocate in the desert; going from the cosmopolitan and easily accessible location in Phoenix to an outpost surrounded by farmland was the most dramatic transition in franchise history.
That’s not hyperbole, either, as the move to Glendale relegated the Coyotes to a state of limbo not long after that has never been resolved. The political machinations associated with the transient ‘Yotes’ situation are bad enough on their own, but the team itself going from a competitive bunch when it came in 1996 to a consistent cellar-dweller for almost two full decades since is too much to bear.
Coupled with the 2004 lockout costing the NHL a season, I lapsed from hockey to a degree that I have still never quite regained the fandom I had as a kid.
Certain things kept the embers from going out entirely, though. My first beat on The Arizona Daily Wildcat sports section was covering the University of Arizona hockey team, which coincided with the lost lockout NHL season.
During intermissions at Tucson Convention Center Arena, the PA would often play the Stompin’ Tom Corners song from which I took this newsletter entry’s title.
In my first job out of college, my colleague and good friend — a DIE-HARD Blues fan — would go with me to watch the Bakersfield Condors, then of the ECHL.
I count those memories among some of the best I have in my time following sports. Covering the Arizona Icecats gave me the confidence that, yeah, I could do this as a career. Taking in Condors games while working as a newspaper sports editor kept alive the energy of being a fan that I think a lot of sports journalists have extinguished after years of games just becoming part of the clock they have to punch.
And by the end of the 2000s transitioning into the 2010s, I even picked up a new, adopted team. Going back to my childhood and WGN, I started following the Blackhawks.
What do you know, they were even starting to get good! So good, in fact, that my first season really following the team closely, they won their first Stanley Cup since 1961!
But just as I started to become invested in Chicago, the disheartening revelation that the young centerpiece of the team, Patrick Kane was, uh…well, probably a dirtbag really soured the reunion.
Becoming a father not long after and simply having less time for sports I wasn’t covering lapsed me further. It’s because of fatherhood, however, I found myself regaining my interest in hockey in a way I never thought I would.
My oldest son said over the summer, completely unprompted, “Can we go to a hockey game sometime?”
Credit Roblox for sparking his interest. Initially, I recoiled a bit — then I recalled how much my dad giving me a copy of NHL ‘95 on the Sega Genesis one Christmas helped feed my budding curiosity in a sport that was, and in a lot of ways still is foreign to me.
So, I started researching the Ducks 2023-24 schedule. After last summer reading Ed Willes’ outstanding book on the Canadian Football League’s expansion into America during the ‘90s, End Zones and Border Wars, I picked up another of his books: The Rebel League, a history of the WHA.
With that already on my bookshelf waiting to be read, I also picked up Stephen Cole’s fantastic Hockey Night Fever on the NHL’s boom in the 1970s.
And then there’s been ESPN’s investment in the NHL. I criticize ESPN in this newsletter with some regularity: I believe the daytime talk shows became repetitive ages ago and the format is downright toxic; the network’s hand in reshaping college sports, particularly football, is an overall negative; and, just in general, I loathe monopolies.
However, I give the Worldwide Leader credit where due. ESPN Plus offering almost every NHL game as part of a subscription teeters dangerously close to falling on the side of monopolistic, but being able to turn on a game any night of the week since the season began has been a joy; doubly so for the handful of 5:30 and 6 p.m. ET puck-drops there have been. Daytime hockey is a nice addition to Work From Home life.
ESPN’s coverage of the sport in my youth helped first gain my interest, so this is a bit of a full-circle moment for me as an adult. This week’s Frozen Frenzy has some wrinkles to iron out should ESPN ever give it another go, but the concept was innovative and fresh — exactly the kind of approach the league has needed to attract new eyeballs for years now.
The love affair is officially On Again. I guess I owe begrudging thanks to Roblox.
College is a time of intellectualism; of debating complex issues. Issues like Sega vs. Nintendo, a commercial war that ended 10 years earlier.
Yes, I do know that upon moving to Tennessee, the organization kept the nickname “Oilers” for a few seasons. That only furthers the mockery of the Titans invoking the history-rich imagery of the Houston franchise 25 years after abandoning the name and color scheme.