Hockey 101: Nashville's crash course with the NHL
by Jeff Middleton, Nashville
Correspondent
A learning experience, that's what we'll call it.
Something like that, anyway.
Mr. Bettman, this is Music City. Music City, this is Mr. Bettman.
Oh, and these are his friends, the NHL.
Once you get past the introductions, it's time to get down to
business. This is a puck. This is the goal. This is the crease.
This is icing. Sure it doesn't look like "Keith Ka-chuk," but the
T is silent...really. No, they will not let you drive the
Zamboni. Yes, that thing is called the Zamboni. And so on and so
on...
Welcome to the world of hockey in Tennessee.
Ever since the New Jersey Devils teased this city with threats of
relocation after their Stanley Cup win in 1995, Nashville has been
drooling over the idea of an NHL hockey team settling here. Okay,
"drooling" may be pushing it, but that courtship did put Nashville
on the map of major professional sports. The Tennessee Oilers have
since made their way East and are awaiting the completion of a
brand new stadium in which to play, but obviously a more
significant event was the NHL awarding Nashville its first brand
new major professional league sports franchise on June 25, 1997.
The obvious question on everyone's mind was how Nashvillians would
respond to this new sport. Professional hockey has actually been
played in the city for years, but the Central Hockey League is a
far cry from the NHL. Franchises like the Knights, Nighthawks and
Ice Flyers have relocated or gone bankrupt trying to find an
audience in Nashville, so there was no evidence that a hungry,
hockey starved fan base was waiting to scoop up the tickets needed
to meet the requirements for final approval of the team.
In order to create a product that would be appealing to fans, owner
Craig Leipold needed to find upper management with not only the
experience and energy to put together a winning team, but also the
desire and drive to sell the South on the sport of hockey. Within
six weeks, Leipold had hired Jack Diller (former President of the
NBA's San Antonio Spurs and VP with the New York Knicks and
Rangers), David Poile (former General Manager of the Washington
Capitals), and first-year NHL head coach Barry Trotz (former head
coach of the AHL champion Portland Pirates).
In the meantime, pressing issues were facing the fans. What will
the nickname be? What will the logo look like? What will we do if
their colors are blood red and powder blue?
Unlike Bud Adams and his Oilers, Leipold decided that the fans would
have the chance to vote on the team's nickname, as long as they
didn't pick anything stupid. The Nashville Rednecks and Tennessee
Tuxedos were thrown out after little debate, and four names were left
in the mix -- the Ice Tigers, the Fury, the Attack and the Predators.
To help out a little, the team's colors and logo were revealed.
Attempting to appeal to Nashvillians, the team's main colors of blue
and yellow are accented with the orange of University of Tennessee
and the gold of Vanderbilt University, which is located in Nashville.
Contrary to popular belief, the logo does not show a tiger with some
sort of genetic tooth defect, but is actually the extinct
saber-toothed tiger, a prehistoric native of Nashville. In 1971,
excavation of a site downtown uncovered a nine-inch fang and
foreleg dating back to the last ice age that hit Nashville --
15,000 to 80,000 years ago. Using the slogan "Return to the Ice
Age," Nashville's hockey team, officially named the Predators, set
off to sell some tickets.
An amazing 14,000 season tickets later, a majority sold to
individuals rather than corporations, Predators fans have been
through a lot -- the first trip for the Stanley Cup to Nashville,
the first Predator (Marian Cisar, for all you trivia buffs), the
first franchise player (David Legwand), and the first captain (Tom
Fitzgerald).
What remains to be seen is how the city as a whole embraces hockey.
It is clearly a feeling out period for both the hockey aficionados as
well as the hockey illiterate. So used to spending gobs of time
worried about SEC football and whether the Vols would beat the Gators
this year (which they did on Saturday), most Nashvillians have still
not been exposed to hockey.
The first full team scrimmage was open to the public last week, and
over 2,000 people showed up to watch. Rules were announced over the
public address system to explain why play had stopped (icing,
offsides, etc.) as most of the hesitant crowd reacted slowly to the
action. For anyone who is used to the rivalries between the Devils
and Rangers or the Avalanche and Red Wings, it would have seemed
like the crowd didn't get it, but some of it was probably a little
bit of Southern Hospitality...folks didn't want to distract the
team, you know! As the game loosened up, however, so did the
crowd. A second period fight and some scrumming at the end of the
1-1 tie were more than enough to pick up the energy levels of
everyone at the arena.
But was it enough? For the many displaced NHL fans who now live in
Nashville it was a relief. No more CHL, it's time for the real
thing. But for the folks who travel three hours every other
Saturday to Knoxville for college football or the PSL holder at the
Oilers' new home, the jury is still out. Local sports talk radio
shows and nightly news sports anchors still spend the majority of
time talking college football, and have not yet dedicated
significant portions of shows to the Predators.
This is a symptom of the fairly universal problem in Nashville's
general media -- nobody ever had to learn about hockey, so they
didn't! Now that the pros are coming, sportscasters are asked to
report on the progress of Krivokrasov and Shtalenkov, as well as
interview Bordeleau and Kjellberg. Definitely a learning process.
Fans who have never had anything but college sports and NASCAR are
trying to understand this foreign game. Definitely a learning
process. Even some the players are trying to fit into this country
music community, a few even forming a band. DEFINITELY a learning
process.
All learning processes take time, and this one will be no different.
The test of whether hockey will sell in Nashville has been answered
by record season ticket sales. The test of whether new fans in
Tennessee will love the sport as much as the folks in Toronto or
Montreal or Boston has yet to start. The best way to learn
something, it has been said, is to do it. Participation in hockey is
skyrocketing among both kids and adults in Nashville, and the
Predators have played no small part in creating the interest. But
lots of people play slo-pitch softball, while ESPN2 consistently
chooses to rebroadcast the World's Strongest Man Competition from
1982.
It has always been said that in order to appreciate hockey you must
see it in person. The success of hockey in Nashville now depends
on people who have never watched hockey coming out to see the game.
If you build it, they will come. Well, they built it. And when
they come, the Predators are hoping that they will never leave.
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