Quote:
Hockey will never be more popular in Chicago as Basketball. Maybe because of D Rose. Maybe not.
Or maybe because the Jordan dynasty coincided with a meteoric rise in sports media, coverage, and fandom, while the Blackhawks failed to capitalize on any of this. They literally did not rise above their station.
People talk about the good old days of the Black Hawks being the hottest ticket in town. They were. But the same talk can be heard about the same time period in places like Philadelphia, Boston, Long Island, New York, and St. Louis. Sports weren't the media phenomenon they are now. The NHL has always been a gate-driven league, and that was fine when local team coverage consisted of radio pxp and a smattering of road games on one of the UHFs in town that you couldn't pick up without wrapping foil around the radial, and national coverage was Hockey Night in Canada and precious little else. The other three leagues, but especially the NFL and NBA, changed the game, so to speak, and made sports into a multimedia marketing phenomenon that the sclerotic old NHL couldn't keep up with. This is in part because to be frank, football and basketball televise a hell of a lot better than hockey. You can take in football passively while you eat nachos, whereas watching hockey requires you to actually sit there and watch what's happening to get what's going on. It's the same principle that sank
Police Squad!.
I have to get a haircut right now, so I'm cutting this short (and also my hair), but I'll be happy to pick it back up later.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.