Well, it`s Stanley Cup time again, a traumatic period for many sports fans.
Hockey is all over the front pages of the sports sections, television and the radio call-in sports shows.
Bombarded by hockey, millions suffer the terrors of loneliness, insecurity and the fear that their terrible secret will be discovered.
And what is that secret? Simply that they neither know nor care about hockey.
We are not talking here about people who don`t like sports. No, we are talking about people who watched the entire, boring Super Bowl last January, who know the names of the guys who come off the bench for the Philadelphia 76ers, who have a firm opinion about the designated hitter but who ignore the National Hockey League.
You know if you are among them.
Can you name the last six baseball commissioners but be confused over just who Stanley was, not to mention Smythe, Campbell, Norris or Wales?
Can you decipher the penalty signals of a football referee, even when he is signaling an ineligible receiver downfield, but still not know the difference between icing the puck and balling the jack?
Can you name every Los Angeles Laker but only one Los Angeles King, the one everybody knows?
Well, come out of the closet. You are not alone. You are, truth to tell, a majority. Most people, even most sports fans, do not follow hockey, despite all the media attention it gets during its playoffs.
Before going on, a disclaimer:
The object here is not to disparage hockey, which, even as played in the NHL, can be a fine game, especially when the players fight less and play hockey more. It has speed, grace and a powerful beauty. No wonder it has a mass follow-ing. In Canada.
Down here below the 49th parallel, there are also hockey fans, but not as many as you`d think. How do we know this? To start with, hockey is not on network television, and if it had a mass following, it would be. The people who run TV networks are not geniuses, but they can count.
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NBC did televise the NHL All-Star Game last Jan. 21, and its ratings provide the best indication of hockey`s popularity. The game got a 3.8 rating, meaning about 4 percent of all households tuned in.
That understates hockey popularity because it includes potential viewers in Dallas and Orlando, where folks think ice comes, crushed or in cubes, from a factory. But even up north, the game got a still modest 4.4 rating.
Which, it should be noted, is not bad for a Sunday afternoon. As a comparison, the highest-rated sports program on network television two weekends ago was Saturday`s baseball game, with a 4.9 rating, from which we know that almost 95 percent of the American people were doing something other than watching major-league baseball.
Wait a minute! Isn`t this supposed to be a sports-crazy country? Yes, and in some ways it is. But as those ratings show, it is also an event-crazy country. The country goes ”crazy” over the Super Bowl, the World Series, the New Year`s Day bowl games. It goes mildly loco over the college and professional basketball playoffs. During the regular seasons, a few fans go crazy while most people are working, studying, cleaning, wooing or out taking a walk in the woods and looking at the birds.
Out doing what? Yes, it`s true. According to an extensive survey taken by the Interior Department`s Fish and Wildlife Service, more than 70 percent of the American people regularly engage in ”non-consumptive wildlife-related recreation,” which is not serious bird-watching but is walking in the woods and looking at nature. This means that, as Pete Rozelle did not say, on any given Sunday afternoon in October, more people are outdoors watching warblers than indoors watching forward passes.
But outdoor recreation is not ”news.” You will not see a story in the paper saying, ”George Rockwell and Martha Jones tromped through the woods Thursday and saw some yellow birds.” It is not an event. ”Hawks beat Blues 8-2” is, and is therefore news, meaning it gets in the paper, even if it is of interest only to a small percentage of people.
Ah, but they are the right people. In 1988, the NHL commissioned a study that showed, to its joy, that hockey fans are ”significantly upscale,” in the words of league spokesman Joel Nixon. According to the survey, taken by Yankelovich, Skelly and White, 71.1 percent of all hockey fans have household incomes of more than $35,000 a year, making them a far more affluent group than fans of the other major sports, and even more affluent than those who don`t follow sports at all.
So sports fans in general and hockey fans in particular are most attractive to those who sell things, especially those things-cars,
televisions, mutual funds, airplane trips-that are advertised. This in turn renders hockey fans beloved by institutions that depend on advertising-to wit, television stations and newspapers.
It isn`t that newspapers aren`t written for everyone, rich and poor alike. They are. But the preferred audience consists of people in the upper
”quintiles,” to use the current jargon. That`s why newspapers don`t mind raising the newsstand price. Sure, they lose circulation, but mostly among the lower quintiles, for whom the advertisers don`t want to pay, anyway. The advertisers want hockey fans.
So if you`re not one, don`t fret. You`re in a lot of company. If you wish, you can learn the game and even try to earn enough money to get into a higher quintile.
Or just take a walk in the woods and look at the birds. That`s what most people do.