SOUL ON ICE

The American people have spoken, and what they’ve said is that, as a sport, professional hockey is somewhere down on the importance scale below bowling or women’s golf, but just a little bit above indoor lacrosse.

I came to this conclusion after yesterday’s cancellation of the entire NHL season by commissioner Gary Bettman. You could have seen this coming months ago. It was like being in a road construction zone where it’s about to go down from two lanes to one, and there’s a guy who saw the ‘MERGE’ sign two miles back just like everybody else, but he just had to rush ahead to the front of the line, and now he’s trying to merge back in, but the guy he’s next to just will not budge, so their two cars bang into each other at 1.3 MPH in the world’s most avoidable traffic accident, and now, instead of moving very slowly, nobody’s going anywhere for a long time.

Every NHL fan–all six of us here in the States–is trying to figure out who’s most at fault in this regrettable, ridiculous situation. But blame is like fruitcake: there’s usually enough for everybody to have more than they really care for, thank you very much. You can fault the league and its owners for greedily expanding, putting a team onto every horizontal surface where water can somehow be made to freeze. They should’ve seen that, while there’s almost enough demand for 32 NHL teams, there do not exist everywhere on Earth 700 players capable of playing NHL hockey, at least not well enough that people will pass over a “Murder, She Wrote” rerun to watch it. Instead, the fans were rewarded with desperate clutch-and-grab snorefests which usually featured about the same number of shots on goal as a soccer match. And we all know how much Americans love to watch soccer.

You could also fault the players for thinking that some who-dat whose total professional experience consists of starting most of one season for the Aaooooaieaiaatiiooo Brpmliads of the Southeastern Latvian Volunteer Fire Department Hockey League deserves $5 million a year because, well, he’s playing a professional sport in America.

But truthfully, the real money problem in the NHL is more basic: there just isn’t enough money in the league to support either the players or the owners in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed. And thus, I’m reminded of a limerick:

There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Which each thought ’twas one cat too many
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
‘Til instead of two cats–there weren’t any.