Motoring … to the top

Sporting News, The, July 6, 1998 by Bob Hille

With Barry Sanders' doubly grand run, Michigan athletics leaving the deepest of imprints on the national scene and the Wing wrapping two Stanley Cups around the most heartfelt of stories, Detroit is our Best Sports City for 1998

The day that changed everything, the best day for the best team in the best sports city, dawned with anticipation as thick as the humidity.

June 7, 1997

On that day the years of frustration--years heaped upon years since 1955, a production line of years--would end with a victory that completed the Red Wings' sweet Stanley Cup sweep of the Philadelphia Flyers.

This is Detroit, where "Hockeytown" banners hang from light posts outside Joe Louis Arena...where the Golden Tower is Red Wings red and wears a 20-foot-tall octopus for good measure...where a woman in labor at The Joe keeps her mind off the contractions by rooting, breathing, rooting for the home team and certainly not leaving a Stanley Cup Finals game ... where, hey, you have to drive south to get to Canada, which cares a thing or two about hockey.

This ain't Dallas, where hockey is a fad, destined to skate on the second line with any sport not called football. Or Denver, where hockey tradition stretches back 32 months and has the bite of a curveball at Coors Field, or D.C., where the Caps are every bit as de rigueur as the "Contract With America" was back in ... now when was that?

June 7, 1997, changed everything for Detroit a richly ethnic, proudly made-in-America city that had been hoping, yearning, wishing for some--any--good P.R. spawned by sports. Even when the Tigers last won the World Series, in `84, the enduring image was of overturned and torched cars.

So as the seconds ticked, ticked down on a 2-1 Game 4 victory last June, it touched off celebrations from Lake Orion to Estral Beach, Ann Arbor to Anchor Bay and points between and beyond, from coast to coast (that would be Port Huron to Muskegon).

Last June's Cup victory, a well-read foreword to this June's repeat, galvanized southeast Michigan, a patchwork quilt of cities and counties that rarely agrees on much besides bow to pronounce Mackinac (MACK-uh-naw), what to expect when you order ginger ale Nernor's) and when to back its hockey team (24/7). But no one, Detroiters included, could've predicted the outpouring of admiration and affection that a million fans, riding a winged-wheeled bandwagon, showered on their team during a 1997 victory parade that was a solve for some civic cuts and scrapes, by-products more Of perception than reality.

The day that changed the day that changed everything come less than a week after Steve Yzerman had skated solo around The Joe, the Stanley Cup aloft, only six days after coach Scotty Bowman had strapped on skates to take a turn with the Cup. The celebration stopped on a Friday night June 13, with a stretch limo wrapped around a tree in suburban Birmingham.

The qualifying criteria for The Sporting City's News' Best Sports City won't be in fine print at the bottom. Nope, let's get the qualifying criteria right here at the top, Read this carefully: For a city to have made it to the final cut for No. 1 in our fifth annual ranking of the best sports cities, it must have at least one team in each of the four major professional sports (NBA, NHL, NFL and major league baseball), as well as a school that plays NCAA Division I-A football and Division I basketball. To be ranked at all, a city must have at least a Division I basketball team, though we've expanded this year's rankings to include some cities that are home to minor league, baseball teams, NFL training camps and CBA teams.

Much of this is clear-cut, some of it is not. Repeating from last year, we know Rutgers is just a tunnel toil's throw from New York, but its football team doesn't qualify as The City's I-A football representative because there's no emotional investment there, no scarlet thread woven into New York's sports fabric. (And that doesn't even touch on whether Rutgers, a big, fat oh-fer in '97, counts as a legit I-A. football program.) Likewise, Los Angeles doesn't make the No, I cut because it stilt is sans NFL.

Is this arbitrary and inflexible? Yes and no. We've made a subjective call on whether a nearby college town actually is in a city's ranking (Boulder, for example, is included in Denver's ranking, Stanford and Cal with the Bay Area).

These rankings are based on the present sports climate, with the criteria including championships, playoff berths, won-lost records, overall fan fervor, sports atmosphere and knowledgeability, abundance of teams, stadium quality, accessibility and ambience, ticket availability, franchise ownership, marquee appeal of athletes and quality of competition.

"Tradition is history, `This is a year-to-year thing. Denver, last year's No, 1, scores points for the Broncos' winning the Super Bowl but isn't penalized for their not having won one before. (it is, however, penalized for the Nuggets being truly awful and the University of Colorado suffering a fall-off in football and basketball.) Likewise, Baltimore-Washington is helped by the Capitals' Stanley Cup finals appear price, but the Redskins' Super Bowl years are, well, hogwash in our rankings. And though Detroit is Hockeytown, its Stanley Cup victories last year arid this are more important to our rankings than the Wings' "Original Six" tradition.