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YES, I SAID IT FIRST.
HOCKEY REALITY
By Patrick Morand, Senior Editor, “YES, I SAID IT FIRST”
The jewel in the National Hockey League season this year might not be the Stanley Cup being won in June, but rather it could be the advent of true sports reality as HBO produces a four hour documentary covering the two teams that will square off in this year’s NHL Winter Classic on New Years’ Day. It’s not that hockey is becoming such a hot property that it needs to cast from many different angles, although we conceded ratings for last year’s finals did turn some heads, pro sports have started to embrace a natural progression into the realms of reality TV. Reality TV which caught on about a decade ago has moved away from the competition of strangers stranded on islands and racing around the world towards prizes to its natural home in sports where the conflicts and drama are more sporadic but already really going on. By following two teams from within their sanctuaries as they prepare for the heavily promoted outdoor game on January 1 hockey is certainly not the first to invite film makers to capture the moment from perspectives we rarely see. NFL Films has made a business of following players and teams for years and produced a brilliant product to capture the historical record of pro football. Seldom though has major television used it to create a story. For some reason this NHL story is capturing imaginations and I think I know why. Hockey is very different from other sports. The players are considered fairly normal and not recognizable away from the rink. They blend in like the rest of us - usually. People can relate to that. While the video following any NBA franchise or major football team tends to narrow cast on stars, hockey is a solid team game. Some of the stuff that interests us most we all privately question. Whether we are veteran followers of pro sports, or those who want to know about the human aspect of the game away from competition we all will be riveted to this. We will get to see how the players prepare, and perhaps candidly if the editing is minimal what they really think before and after a game. How do players relate with one another off the ice? How do coaches and trainers really do their jobs? How much of the game do these guys live out or care about when not at the game? Maybe the Winter Classic documentary won’t reveal all of this, but there is no denying that we want to know that sort of stuff. When I was in high school I had season tickets to watch the American Hockey League farm team of the Montreal Canadiens. I went to all the home games and especially liked that I would get invited to off-ice promotional events with the players. The players were very different away from the game, and remember these were minor leaguers hoping to make the NHL but paying their dues while making small wages and riding buses. You know I would have paid as much as I did to watch forty games to be a fly on the wall on one of those bus rides. Well, you know what, one of my best friends Geoff took that sort of dream one step further. He lived and breathed hockey and knew all the junior players, college prospects, minor leaguers, and especially the tough guys. He wanted to be on that bus even more than me. He wanted to be down the chain in the minors as low as the East Coast Hockey League because that is where he said the stories would be. We used to imagine what these guys did. Most knowing they never had a chance at anything higher than tier two minor league hockey careers. After Geoff completed his university degree he found out firsthand what went on. He ended up writing a book based on the history the minor league franchise we grew up watching. “Here Come the Vees: An Illustrated History of the Nova Scotia Voyageurs, Montreal Canadiens’ Top Farm Team (1969-1984)” by Geoffrey W. Kent was released in 1997 by Nimbus Publishing. While Kent’s book did tell stories of following the Vees it was really a reality chronicle of stories that happened on those long bus rides as told to him directly in interviews with several colourful AHL, ECHL, and NHL players and coaches. The interviews were very candid and definitely not G-rated, but they told a story of how professional hockey works. How players and coaches got into conflict, and about the pressures of being away from families to play in sometimes awful situations and be called professional. Stories with and about players being sent down and called up, and competing on the same teams for the same jobs at the higher levels. How can we follow the stories of the pro sports players and be interested in it without getting our hands and feet as dirty as Geoff had to? Perhaps it is already here in reality TV. Hockey and football are prime venues for extending the fan experience beyond just the game and cocktail bar after the game. Baseball has always had its fantasy camps in the winter where for a fee you can travel to a sunny ball field and catch pop flies from big league players. Golf has its pro-am culture where everyone who can golf will in their life golf with an expert. Football and hockey though? Not if we really have to lace up skates and really have to ride the bus. That has to be done through a looking glass like the TV. It’s just who do we trust to really bring us the whole story and the true story? HBO has done this sort of thing before with boxing. They would give us the inside story on the lead up to the big fight with both athletes. A team sport is even more ambitious, but you know what? We want it, and we don’t want stuff left out. Football has had its NFL Films to splice together sideline tapes of great teams or great players before they retire to make a video archive of all the greats. But only as recently as 2001 has the Hard Knocks series started to go into training camp with these guys. It’s popular because it shows us what it takes to be a pro football player. If we like the players they depict we can live vicariously through them in the camp at least. Those series have taught us nuances about the game of football. It has taught us about position players on the team that do the real grunt work that helps the star receivers, quarterbacks, and running backs win games and get the applause for it. We learned that coaches sleep at the office almost all football season – who knew? We also learned that they can do just about anything on television. We do not have to live in imagination land with fairytale stories of what pro sports are supposed to be like. Hockey has done the reality stuff before, significantly edited with shows like Making the Cut which were made for TV. The show had seven real hockey player candidates compete in different skills and workouts to try and earn one spot on a junior team for a tryout. Only that’s reality fake. It would be like the whole NHL existing for the HBO documentary. There would have been no tryout for Making the Cut if the television cameras were not there. We are now moving into things that are not staged – just followed closely by the camera with the advent of The Road to the Winter Classic. So real reality is now here and it has the opportunity to change the face of hockey before other sports get on board with the same exercise. What a relief that will be for the NHL and I will tell you why. Since 2004 NHL hockey has significantly changed and people who stopped watching the game long ago have started to come back to watch again as evidenced by the ratings in the playoffs, on regional cable in some markets, and on NBC. Hockey wants to be more present on popular network TV or ESPN, and from what I gather ESPN has started to notice this is a property they might want back. Hockey is the only sport to significantly change its rules to reconnect with audiences. Hockey wanted a faster game that could be presented better in TV. There are fewer stoppages in a game now, and better flow with rules that prohibit holding or slowing players. Players graduating from junior leagues were groomed to play in this type of game. Hockey is winning back market interest because the product is better, and now some players are capturing national attention. Marketing is all related and the game is now showcasing the skills of the players that fans want to watch. Fans like goals and there are more goals. Fans want officials to be consistent and let the skilled players play and it is hard to argue that for the most part that is happening. Fans want ......more fighting.....well no. There are fans that want to see aggression in a fast game, but they do not want the silly Slapshot style brawls and brutality that always dogged hockey back when I used to watch the AHLers. What the NHL wants to do is distance itself from Slapshot all together. It wants people to get a second look at the game and its players, most of who were not even born back in 1977 when the Paul Newman movie was released. The movie Slapshot was of course a fictional depiction of a minor league team, the Johnstown Chiefs and their coach that would stop at nothing to win. Of course the fighting and the brawling on the ice and in the stands make up for most of the ice scenes. The Hanson Brothers who played on the Chiefs in the movie are legendary in hockey circles, and get a good laugh for nostalgia sake, but unfortunately their image is mistakenly associated with mainstream hockey in the mainstream world. Away from the lowest levels of beer league hockey that type of game is gone if not illegal. My friend Geoff loved Slapshot and he probably watched the move 100 times. It is the number one most watched hockey movie on record. He was in to that, but he also went and interviewed minor league players to write a book on that sort of stuff. The NHL really would like the world to forsake its image of Slapshot and create a new lasting image, and why not, I can think of an armload of other movies that starred big name actors just like Newman that nobody watches more than twice even though hockey is a main theme.
Mystery Alaska (1991) starred Russell Crowe and was about getting the New York Rangers to play a game in a small town. Bringing hockey to its roots – so Winter Classic...ish. (In the present, isn’t that what Kraft Hockeyville organizes every year to raise money for restoring old arenas in Canada)Jean-Claude Van damme starred in Sudden Death (1995) which was a story about terrorists plotting to blow up the Pittsburgh Civic Arena in the Stanley Cup Finals.
The Mighty Ducks (1992) was a story of a misfit team of kids who learned to play hockey that starred Emilio Estevez. The real Mighty Ducks hockey team appeared for real the next year on the coat tails of that movie. Miracle (2004) was the 1980 Winter Olympic USA hockey story that starred Kurt Russell. There was also Youngblood (1986) with Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze with a player finding out if he was tough enough to play junior hockey and Happy Gilmore (1996) with Adam Sandler who was a hockey player that ended up playing PGA Golf – so it was a golf movie?Hockey has had its share of presence on the big screen and some on the little one, but nothing reality driven until now. Imagine if the story was about really following a young player through his final year of junior until draft day with real teams? Wouldn’t you be interested in that story? The story already exists – these things happen every day in hockey outside the limelight. Better stories than even the made up ones that networks search and search to find every two years to fill time at the Olympics. How about a reality story of hockey kids in high school making the decision to play college or junior hockey? Why not chronicle some life changing moments that can be followed all the way? A summer with a general manager of any team would probably be great television be it hockey, football, or even basketball. We want to know what goes on behind closed doors with management. Even if they recorded it and showed it two years later it would be a hit when they brought it out. There are so many avenues that reality television can go down in a game where reality is already there. The project to show what the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals do as they get ready for the January 1 game outdoors (which is novel in itself) is going to be great for the teams, the league and its fans and probably the media covering it all. Most of what we learn now comes from media and reporters covering the teams second or third hand. With a hockey reality series for once we get to see these players for who they are without an interpreter of the situation. If you don’t like Alex Ovechkin or Sidney Crosby and you don’t really know why it’s probably because of the bubble you are protected within. Maybe you will see something about any of these players that will allow you to connect with them as guys just going about their jobs. For teams and players the exposure to the guts of the organization may be a great thing. Players may be seen beyond the million dollar tag we normally place above them – and seen that they have families and concerns that go beyond what the bloggers think they should be. Teams and the league obviously wish to see the exposure as a way to build fan and merchandise sales. They need the exposure to build on hockey’s momentum which the rivalry of the two teams being cast this year has something to do with. Fans are the biggest winners. Especially the biggest followers of the game because there is a possibility that the little questions we always wanted to know about behind the scenes may be answered. I will bet that if we had a chance to spend twenty four hours with an equipment manager we would all take it – we want to see what happens on the inside. What if you could watch a team go on an entire road trip and follow them from the charter plane taking off all the way back a week later? I would watch it. Most importantly if hockey is looked at through its 2010 brand of fast game with fast young players after this and can shed its 1970s Slapshot image then the NHL as a league has finally turned the corner. Pro sports are always about being progressive and in marketing especially it’s great to be a little out front of everyone else. All the leagues have penetrated to the hilt the financial gain that can come from merchandise of bobble heads, beer and luxury box concessions, and parking and arena advertising. What though is the next dimension to be explored? Hockey is very bold having brought regular season games out of doors, but nobody has given the fan the real inside story yet. This HBO special will not do it either, there will be limits, and it will span a long period of time. If my nose for media trends is correct there is a big inside story that can be added to the sport and involve us like never before. We saw what fantasy sports did to grow all sports by taking advantage of fan interaction with players. Fantasy sports are about pretending you are the coach or manager of your own teams. Yes we can’t all play the sport, and we aren’t that good, but we all dreamed that we could. Taking us into the weight rooms, through practice, on road trips to team meals and hotels, and shadowing the lives of the guys who are qualified to make it gives us a way to see what we missed. We all wanted to score the big goals and make the big play, but none of us could, but that does not preclude us from sharing in the story as if we did. Successful organizations have fans that walk around talking about their teams with the word “we”- as in “we lost last night” or “we cut a player today” or “we had a hard practice this morning”. We are that much closer to putting the fan in the “we” for real, and what exactly is that worth to you? If reality TV caught on by locking up 13 strangers in a house for a summer, just what if 13 million strangers could look in as regular Joes do their jobs playing sports that we all wanted to play. They play for us though. We follow it, we live it and we breathe it. This is where it may all be going more sooner than later. The HBO hockey documentary is just a start in mainstream hockey fully supported by the NHL and its players. How much will I pay to customize that experience even more? Just look and see how we have come a long way from the old ABC Wide World of Sports video with the downhill skier wiping out in the opening. One of the reasons I never considered taking up auto racing, diving or downhill skiing is that show. Could cameras on a minor league bus trip be next to help me set aside another lifelong ambition.....I am just wondering. YES, I SAID IT FIRST is a weekly Internet article  Tap the mail button to share this article with a friend! |
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“This is hockey in a way that has yet to be portrayed in America...” 
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