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Wednesday, 7 October, 1998
Hockey's south is risin' again
Clearly, the times they are a-changin'.
In Civil War days, the Mason-Dixon ran between Pennsylvania and Maryland, extended through parts of West Virginia to the south and was considered the line between slave and non-slave states. Today, with the expansion Nashville Predators joining Washington, Carolina, Tampa Bay and Florida, and the Atlanta Thrashers preparing for their debut 12 months down the road, Canadians might as well raise the Confederate flag and learn to drink mint juleps frozen on a stick.
Our game has gone south, and a lot of our best players with it, off to the land where they'll undoubtedly speak of away games and hominy games, and think true grit is served at breakfast over eggs.
Of course, the game has been southern-fried for years. Stretch Messrs. Mason and Dixon's imaginary boundary clear to the West Coast and you could add Dallas, all the California teams plus Colorado.
But they were southwest, not southsouth. We could live with that.
But how do we live with being a hockey minority not just to the whole U.S., but to its southern quarter?
Bad enough we had a team in Colorado named after a natural disaster that starts at the top, rolls to the bottom and stays there. Now we've got so-called Predators, who'll be lucky to out-bite field mice, and Thrashers and Blue Jackets to come. An honest commissioner would insist that all expansion teams be named the Cheetahs, because they'll never prosper.
But then, it isn't the same game, is it?
We now have a league that will employ fashion police spot-checking goalkeepers to be certain they obey the latest style dictate that Less is More.
No more goalies so padded they have to be jammed into the net like a cork into a champagne bottle. No more puffy sleeves, shoulder pads that go up as the goalie goes down, or jerseys big enough to hide the Zamboni. You're stylish or you're outta here.
We now have the phasing in of two referees instead of one, making it easier to call the behind-the-play clutching and grabbing so they add half-an-hour to games that are already longer than War and Peace.
Maybe the changes will help. But no less an authority than Dominik Hasek says the goalie patrol won't work, because with only post-game equipment checks, goalies will follow the lead of their skating brethren with their curved sticks, and use illegal equipment for the first two periods, then change to gear that meets the standards for the third and the inspection.
Luc Robitaille says the double-ref system helps the flow.
Wayne Gretzky says it hurts it.
And what do Canadians think? Who cares?
For all the talk of aiding the small-market franchises, the league mandate is to flee south with the geese every winter, lay franchise eggs in every city within a major television market, and let the people down there figure out what these damned Yankees and Russians and Swedes and Czechs and Finns are doing chasing that hunk of rubber smaller'n a pissant's toenail.
It's coming, and we can't stop it.
You'll know it's arrived when kids out on the pond stop shouting Na-Na-Hey-Hey, and start screaming the rebel yell.
