Thanks to Dave Erickson for his cathartic rant on the TV
sports situation.  Empire Sports, which produces the ECAC Game of the
Week, seems to be availble only in Western New York and with a
mini-dish.  This means that if you want to watch the ECAC GotW, you
have to a) get a mini-dish yourself or b) find the one sports bar in
your area which gets Empire.  Since my housing situation currently
rules out option a, the other two most active Cornell alums in Salt
Lake and I took up option b.  I suppose we should count ourselves
lucky that we got to see the game at all, even if that sports bar
(they call themself a sports grill) hasn't grasped the concept.  The
place is trying to be a restaurant with a gimmick.  They have three
dining rooms with about five or six TVs each.  So far, so good, but
suppose you actually want to *listen* to your game.  They have a
central sound system in each room, and they tend to put one basketball
game on all three of them.  If the Jazz are playing, forget about it.
Last week, when I was there for the Colgate-Union game, the bartender
made the intelligent selection that I turn on the sound of the one TV
in front of me.  But that time the sound system was blasting techno
music.  Hello, this is a *sports* grill!
        Okay, so this week they put us three Cornellians with a family
of six in front of us.  Could we have the sound?  Of course not, there
was a Pistons-Celtics game on.  So once the family left, another
member of our party turned the volume up on our TV.  Great, now we
could hear our game, and the two or three people in the room who might
have been paying attention to the basketball could also hear theirs.
(We seemed to be the only people there actually into our game.  In my
mind, a sports bar should be filled with enthusiastic partisans, but
then this is Utah.)  This was fine until right after the last Clarkson
goal, when the manager happened to wipe off the table next to us and
notice we were actually listening to our game.  He turned down the TV
and proceeded to lecture us.  At least one of us is never going back.
        So now the big problem is the ECACs in two weeks.  This was
the only place in town I could get Empire.  Even if we do go back
there, we won't be able to get the sound for our game.  I hate being
at the mercy of sports bar managers, who in my experience are real
jerks when dealing with fans of unpopular sports.  I just hope the
telecasts get picked up by another network so we can broaden our
options.  (What were those satellite coordinates I heard?)
 
                                        John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                        <[log in to unmask]>
        <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/jshock.html>
 
Cornell Men's Ice Hockey: 1996-7 Ivy League Champions
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