Nhl Final A Real Youth Mover
Even Fox’s hip, young audience might be too old for this Stanley Cup.
Most 12-year-olds, after all, have given up already on the Tooth Fairy and have moved on to such things as Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. No teenager who’s ever had “E.1999 Eternal” blasting from his boom box could take something as silly as Florida vs. Colorado too seriously.
Nevertheless, the best-of-seven Stanley Cup final begins on Fox at 5 PDT tonight at Colorado. Fox will televise Games 1, 3 and 7, if necessary. ESPN will do the rest, including Game 2 Thursday at Colorado.
“I personally think its exciting,” said Fox hockey analyst John Davidson, and who’d expect him to think anything else? There aren’t a lot of network hockey analysts jobs around.
“We’ve got two new hockey markets, and they’ve both gone hockey crazy,” Davidson said. “Here in Denver, you can’t get a ticket, and you can’t buy any memorabilia. And in southern Florida, of all places, they’ve gone nuts. You’ve got 18-wheelers going down the freeway with ‘Go Panthers’ written on the side.”
The Colorado Avalanche, who were the Quebec Nordiques until this year, might have some geographical claim to hockey. At least it gets cold in Denver, and water occasionally freezes all by itself.
“Hey, we went for years when people laughed at our sport, and the only highlights you ever saw on TV were the fights,” said Davidson, a former goaltender from Ottawa. “Well, the league has started to change, and I think people are starting to see it.
“In Canada, they’re loving the playoffs. Even without Canadian teams, it’s doing well on TV there. At the same time, the popularity is widening” in the U.S.
Fox play-by-play announcer Mike Emrick, meanwhile, would remind us all of hockey teams in cities like Charlotte, Huntsville, Ala., and Oklahoma City.
“Those were all championship teams in professional hockey this year,” he said. “We’ve got 48 contiguous states, and 39 or 40 of them have pro hockey teams now.”
Out takes
The NBA finals begin in Chicago Wednesday night, and forgive NBC types if they don’t worry too much about ratings competition from the NHL.
“Usually, people who follow the NHL don’t follow the NBA too much,” said NBC play-by-play man Marv Albert, who also does New York Rangers hockey. “It’s a completely different following. I hope the NHL continues to do better, but sometimes there’s a tendency by those pushing it to distort the numbers they get.
“They say their ratings are up 40 percent, but they’re going from 1.5 to 2.5. I don’t think you can really compare the NHL to a league like the NBA which gets such huge numbers.”
This isn’t just another 11 hours of Olympic footage strung together mindlessly and set to pretty music, a la Bud Greenspan. HBO’s “Spirit of the Games,” a 1-hour documentary on the golden age of the Olympics from 1930-‘60, makes its debut tonight.
By the folks who did the HBO award-winner, “When It Was a Game,” this retrospective takes a hard, yet loving look at the Games as they were when true amateurs were the stars. More than a tribute, this hour tries to tell a story.
“In the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was commonplace to see world record-holders working side by side with ordinary Americans, putting in an honest day of work before heading out to the pool or the track,” the narrator says.
Besides previously unseen film, “Spirit of the Games” includes dozens of interviews with former Olympians who struggled to make a living, train and pay their own Olympic expenses, all at the same time. Also, there are interviews with some who heard: If you go to the Games, you won’t have a job when you get back.