In the past year, while the NHL was on strike, SportsBusiness Journal and much of the rest of the media gave hockey and the NHL almost as much space as if the 2004-05 season had been played on the ice instead of in negotiating sessions.
A certain “newspaper of record” devoted column after column of its valuable space to stories about the negotiations, stories which could have been run under the same standing head, something like “NHL Owners, Players Meet, Disagree, Adjourn.” And I’m talking 600- to 800-word stories! Several times a week!
And now that hockey is “back,” SBJ and the rest of the media are again treating hockey as a major sport.
It ain’t. Yet in your Oct. 3-9 issue, you devoted nearly 11 pages to hockey edit. I’ll admit it may have been good short-term business, with some 3 1/4 pages of ads. But …
Speaking for the 99.9 percent of Americans who care no more about ice hockey than about field hockey, I think SBJ ought to — very seriously — reconsider treating hockey (and specifically the NHL) as a “major” sport.
Yes, hockey fans are devoted, enthusiastic, fanatic. But there just aren’t very many of them.
And, although media entities from The New York Times to SBJ have given hockey and the NHL every opportunity to succeed, and ESPN and now OLN have shamelessly promoted hockey with almost unbelievable intensity in an effort to jam it down the throats of their audience — and despite the fact that the NHL and its franchises have followed the same home teams/local arenas formula backed by intense local and league PR promotional programs that have worked with varying degrees of success for other professional sports — hockey remains a sport with very limited popular appeal.
As I said many years ago in the course of researching an article on sports coverage for Esquire, “Everybody who wants to read about last night’s hockey game was AT last night’s hockey game.”
It was true then, and it’s still true today.
The TV networks abandoned hockey because of low ratings over a period of many years. And even after exceptionally strenuous promotional activity by ESPN for the two or three years preceding last year’s lockout, hockey’s TV/cable viewing ratings continued to scrape along at the very bottom of the Nielsen barrel.
Obviously, someone in the hockey establishment has done a great job of selling the sports business on the game’s importance. But it’s a snow job. Or, to apply Gertrude Stein’s famous assessment of her hometown, Oakland, to hockey, “There’s no there there.”
Even if they gave the tickets away, it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Isn’t it time for SBJ to realize that treating hockey as a major sport is the Emperor’s New Clothes of sports journalism … and sports business? And time for SBJ to set an example for the rest of the media?
James Dunaway
Austin, Texas
