You're leaving Canada dry

Sporting News, The, Oct 16, 1995 by Steve Simmons

There is something about the words, the tone, and the accent of Gary B. Bettman, first and only commissioner of the NHI, that Canadians seem to resent.

Maybe, it's hearing him speak hockey with an accent from Manhattan not Moose Jaw. Maybe, ifs hearing him misuse the terminology we have all grown up with. Maybe, it's simply what he represents: the further Americanization of a Canadian game.

This is our insecurities speaking out loudly and angrily, in reaction to an assault on our sensibilities and on the game we call ours. Make no mistake: The Canadian fan is feeling disenfranchised.

The very real sense is, we're losing our game.

Hockey isn't so much a Canadian sport as it is a definition of our country. Ask Americans over the age of 35 where they were when they first heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot and they will easily supply an answer. The Canadian equivalent of the Where-were-you? question comes from a hockey anecdote, a goal scored by Paul Henderson in the famous Canada-Soviet Union hockey series of 1972. That was our sporting shot heard 'round the world.

Canada is a confusing country of unrelated regions and widespread disparities. Quebec wants to be its own country. The West Coast has as little in common with the Maritime fishermen as it does with the farmers of Saskatchewan. Ontario, home of major league baseball and basketball franchies, snubs its nose at the rest of the country.

There is no harmony, the only common thread that links these regions in any way is a game we all know, play, watch and talk about

A game we still like to think is ours. When "Hockey Night In Canada's" Don Cherry speaks, as the most recognizable face and voice in the country, the sound is turned up on television screens, no matter what the content of his current rantings.

It is part of what makes us Canadian.

The NHL used to be our own little secret, the prize that nobody outside Canada paid a lot of attention to. Oh sure, there have been pockets of fans in Boston, Philadelphia and even in Chicago in spite of Bill Wirtz's Neanderthal ownership of the Blackhawks, but it was never all-consuming, it was never like Canada.

All that is changing, and we don't like to change anything but weather, politicians and coaches.

The Quebec Nordiques were sold in the summer and are now the Colorado Avalanche.

The Winnipeg Jets will soon be sold and on the move to Minneapolis.

There is major league hockey in Texas, in Florida, in three California locales while the strained economics of the game have rendered clubs in Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa to year-to-year status.

Hardly a day goes by when the general manager of a Canadian team doesn't mumble about the difficulties of doing business in American dollars, where the exchange-rate difference is almost 40 percent We watch Canadian teams leave for markets that have already failed as NHL cities and wonder aloud We see the price of talent go up extraordinarily and fear for the future of Canadian franchises. We have watched, one by one, Canada's greatest players sold or traded to American teams because of the cost factor Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles; Mark Messier to New York; Al MacInnis to St. Louis.

Our game has grown too large and now some of our cities can't even afford to play in the big leagues anymore.

Of all that Canada has successfully exported, from music and wriring and SCTV, to lumber and oil and beer, little hits home the way the names of hockey do. Bobby Orr. Bobby Hull. Bobby Clarke. All the great Bobbys have been Canadian.

Now, it's Eric Lindros in Philadelphia, Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh, Gretzky in Los Angeles, Messier in New York, Cam Neely and Raymond Bourque in Boston, Paul Kariya in Anaheim. All Canadians. All moved on.

And it isn't just that. It's much more. It's about differences in attitude and differences in hockey. We spell defence with a Canadian C. Americans spell it with an S. In Canada, Pavel Bure is a right winger. In St. Louis' Brett Hull is a right wing.

These are little things, but when all the little is added up it makes for a big number.

The Detroit Junior Red things became last May the first American team to win the Ontario Hockey League championship. And they did it with more American players than Canadian. That was new.

When the entry draft came in july, the first pick was a defenceman - er, defenseman -- Bryan Berard, from Woonsocket, R.I. Hockey players are supposed to come from Medicine Hat and Saskatoon and Sudbury and Chicoutimi. They're not supposed to come from the prep schools of Rhode Island. That was new.

These are changing times. Disney and Blockbuster Video came into the picture as NHL owners. Soon, there will be teams in Atlanta, maybe Phoenix, maybe Portland, maybe Nashville. The map is ever changing -- and the indignity Canadians feel grows ever more.

The very real fact that Canada might be losing its game came to light last June, when this country normally halts operations--to bring on the Stanley Cup playoffs. But this time, the Fox network was calling the shots and suddenly daytime weekend playoff hockey, which produced among the largest audiences for hockey in American history, produced the smallest in Canadian history.