Re: Bruins

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Tue, 16 Jun 1998 01:55:57 -0400, Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com> said:

> Mike wrote--
>> In my experience, hockey has been difficult "place" because there are many
>> other sports options during that time of year.  

> Also, for whatever reason, hockey gets very low ratings compared to other
> sports-- their TV ratings have never been great, and even on radio, they
> seem to have a cult following-- a very devoted but comparatively small group
> of fans.

The problem is that the NHL keeps on trying to mess up the game so
that it will appeal better to people in Georgia and Oklahoma who are
unlikely to EVER be interested.  I mean, come on!  Hockey is a winter
sport, and 75% of the population of this country lives in places which
don't have either large bodies of standing water or sustained cold
weather.

The audience ice hockey appeals to are the people who might have
played pick-up hockey on frozen ponds while they were growing up.
That effectively limits its appeal in the US to parts of the country
which, outside of the northeast, are largely unpopulated.

(I'm very distressed that the NHL realignment will put Montreal and
Toronto in the same conference... I've been hoping for both teams to
contend at the same time, and for long enough, that Gary Bettman will
give up and find some other sport to screw up.)

- -GAWollman

ObRadio: the longest-running broadcast sports program is Hockey Night
in Canada -- broadcast continuously during hockey season since 1932,
first on radio and now on television.  Hockey was one of the biggest
audience draws of the fledgling CBC-TV, since most Canadians who had
TVs at the time had bought them to watch American stations; the CBC
television service did not begin until 1952 (CBLT and CBFT).  (More
history: for the first two years of its existence, CBFT broadcast in
both languages.  CBMT did not sign on until 1954, although it was
still the first all-English-language station in Montreal.)

- --
Garrett A. Wollman   | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
wollman@lcs.mit.edu  | O Siem / The fires of freedom 
Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA|                     - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick

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