Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes

Sporting News, The, Oct 4, 1993 by Bruce Schoenfeld

A tale of two cities:

They serve homemade enchiladas at the Border Cantina, which is cater-cornered to the Dallas Stars' new corporate offices at 901 Main. Patrons of the West End bars down the street like to punch up Jerry Jeff Walker on the jukebox or accordion master Flaco Jimenez and the Texas Tornados. They chase their tequila shots with Lone Star drafts, the air conditioner purring along because the hot sun reaches through the smoked windows to tap you on the shoulder - even in October. They buy snakeskin boots to wear to the Texas-Oklahoma football game or the calf-roping event at the Texas State Fair or to match with tuxedos and monogrammed cufflinks for the annual Cattle Barons' Ball.

Up in Minnesota, where the snow settles in just as soft and clean and smooth as the hand-woven blankets from the old country that thicken bedsteads from the Des Moines River to the Mesabi Range, the towheaded grandchildren of Scandinavian farmers glide over frozen lakes as their ancestors did. The rhythmic scratching of the blades across the virgin ice is the only sound in the chill of that early-morning mist. And then it's time to go inside because there's a Peewee game to be played at the local rink at 9 o'clock, the demand for indoor ice being so great that youth league schedules are spread from sunrise until late at night.

Dallas has a National Hockey League team this season.

Minneapolis doesn't.

And if you hadn't already come to expect such convoluted thinking from professional sports leagues, you might even be surprised.

And it takes an understanding of marketing in America to understand why.

The Minnesota North Stars have gone to Texas after 26 seasons in the Twin Cities, a living embodiment of the NHL's growth strategy for the next century. The last franchise shift as symbolic as this one happened when the Dodgers and Giants abandoned the stone stoops and cracked sidewalks of the;r traditional New York neighborhoods for the vastness and pure potential of California. Even the bitterest baseball fan left in Brooklyn has to admit that it was a sound financial move. But it's also true that baseball has never been the same.

The creation of the Dallas Stars, who sound like a team Burt Reynolds would play football for in a movie version of a Dan Jenkins book, wasn't just a caravan of trucks rumbling down I-35. It was a true sociological phenomenon. Dallas has built art museums and an airport bigger than the island of Manhattan, staged operas, even developed a world-class newspaper; but the arrival of the NHL outweighs all of that in closing the urbanity gap with the East.

But the sad part is how the realities of these marketing-mad '90s, in which autographed sports paraphernalia is hawked by former players on televised shopping channels, had to be acknowledged at the expense of America's most hockey-aware fans. For the first time since the league's original expansion in 1967, the state of Minnesota, the home of 60 percent of the players on the gold-medal-winning 1980 Olympic team and far more than its share of hockey professionals, will be without the NHL. A kid in Tarpon Springs, Fla., can dream about skating for the hometown team, but each year's Minnesota high school hockey champions can't anymore.

"It's a shame for Minnesota, but it was absolutely inevitable because of the nature of the sport," says Owner Norm Green, who saved the North Stars from a move to San Jose three years ago but now has taken them from Minnesota after all. "The game of hockey is clearly the best spectator sport of all, and it isn't played outside. There's no reason in the world why they shouldn't have a team here. (Dallas-Fort Worth) has 4.5 million people."

Just 30 months have passed since the NHL standings revealed a single Sun Belt hockey team: the Los Angeles Kings. With Disney's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and Wayne Huizenga's Florida Panthers, both first-year expansion franchises, joining San Jose and Tampa Bay, there are three NHL teams in California and two in Florida, which makes for a lot of players skating around with big league suntans. Meanwhile, Milwaukee, Denver, Salt Lake City and other major league cities with sizable arenas and a genuine feeling for the sport are left ... out in the cold.

That's no accident.

"There was talk at one point that I was looking at Milwaukee," says Green. "I was never looking at Milwaukee. The idea is to go where the people are."

Perhaps the most clamorous advocate of Sun Belt hockey is Phil Esposito, the Tampa Bay general manager and Hall of Fame player.

"Dallas is in, Miami and Anaheim are in, and you can bet Atlanta will be in the league soon," he says. "You watch. Ten years from now I wouldn't be surprised to see a third team in Florida. There's that much interest."

The North Stars, who finished ahead of only Tampa Bay in the Norris Division last season, had an average attendance of 13,947 a game at Bloomington's aging Met Center. But much more to the point than any attendance figures, however, is Dallas' status as one of the country's premier media markets, behind only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago by some measures. South Florida and Orange County, Calif., aren't much further back, and they're still growing. It's no longer possible to get national attention (i.e., network-TV money) for a league with a regional base, not when the population is abandoning the old, cold cities in vast numbers for places in the sun. The truth is, the NHL had gone about as far as it could with the snow-and-ice mentality, and the situation was only going to get worse.