Here's a letter I just sent to NPR's Morning Edition.  Items 2, 4, 10
and 11 have relevence to College Hockey; 7, 8 and 9 might also apply.
 
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997 23:29:32 -0600
From: "John T. Whelan" <[log in to unmask]>
Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: From one curmudgeon to another
Status: R
 
        Being something of a sports curmudgeon myself, I appreciated
Frank Deford's list of pet peeves.  As a follower of some less popular
sports, I may even have more to be curmudgeonly about, so here is my
own list of eleven sports gripes:
 
        1. I whole-heartedly agree with the Sports Curmudgeon's
distaste for the practive of dumping Gatorade on a winning coach.  May
I offer John Madden's schtick as something else which was funny ten
years ago, but should have lost its charm by now?  Are we football
fans really the unsophisticated, slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging
Neanderthals the networks take us for, that we are still amused by
this?
 
        2. Canned music at college sporting events.  Piped-in music is
cheesy in all sports, and completely unnecessary at college games,
where there is a live antidote even better than the organist: the pep
band.  Surely any college that can find a dozen and a half folks to
throw a ball or shoot a puck can also come up with a similar number of
students willing and able to pick up instruments.
 
        3. Speaking of college sports, can we please pass a rule that
anyone who strikes a Heisman Trophy pose after scoring a touchdown is
rendered ineligible for the award?  Why should such arrogant
showboating be tolerated in a sport where they hand out fifteen-yard
penalties for spiking the ball?
 
        4. And one more college gripe: what's with these seniors who
go off and play pro hockey the moment the college season ends?  You
might be able to convince me it's in an underclassman's best interest
to accept a pro contract with a guarantee of financial stability
rather than risk a career-ending injury in college, but would it kill
these guys to finish their degrees and turn pro in the fall like
football players do?  Of course, this is only possible because of...
 
        5. The NHL's marathon postseason.  Sure, it's exciting, but
how little sense does it make to play hockey in June?  If they really
want to have three months of playoffs, they should end the regular
season in January and have the finals occur at a time when there's
still naturally-occurring ice somewhere between the Equator and the
Arctic Circle.
 
        66. An overabundance of high numbers among NHL players.
Anything above 35 (30 for non-goalies) makes you look like a football
player.  It's okay for one guy on a team, like a Wayne Gretzky or Eric
Lindros, to have a big number, but look at the Pittsburgh Penguins,
who in Mario Lemieux (66), Jaromir Jagr (68) and Petr Nedved (93)
occasionally have three of them on the *ice* at once.
 
        7. That stupid cheer where half of the crowd yells "GO" and
the other half yells the name of the team.  It may seem like a clever
job of crowd management to the people in charge, but on TV it sounds
like "ERRRR!...ARRRRR!".
 
        8. The Y-M-C-A.  Enough said.
 
        9. Television blackouts.  When used to entice fans to attend
games in person, they almost sounded like an attempt at fairness.
These days, though, it's clear their true goal is maximizing profit,
and their effect is to minimize fans' viewing options.
 
        10. Sports Bars.  Anyone who's ever tried to squeeze a
hard-to-find event out of a bartender who barely knows how to work the
satellite dish and hasn't figured out that you're not there for the
Buffalo wings understands the love-hate nature of this relationship.
And when you add the tendency of managers to say they can get a game
whether they can or not, just to get you in the place, it can become
more like hate-hate.
 
        11. Finally, I'm afraid I have to add NPR's own sports
coverage to the list.  I listen to NPR's soft-news and human interest
stories to hear about things that are quirky or offbeat, but your
sports features are frighteningly mainstream.  Every year, we get to
hear about the hype-fest that is the college basketball Final Fours,
but I have never heard a peep about the college hockey tournament
going on at the time.  Some fascinating stories you've missed include
the triple-overtime game between Maine and Michigan in the 1995
national semifinal (at least as worthy of mention as the report later
that year about yet another NBA game where the lead changed hands six
times in the last thirty seconds), and the 1996 ECAC Women's League
championship that went *five* overtimes, and is still the longest
college game on record.  Might I suggest the following items to keep
an eye on in the future: in Nagano in 1998, women's ice hockey will
become an Olympic event, and in 1999 the men's NCAA championships will
be held in Anaheim, California, and hosted by the University of
Alaska-Anchorage (the nearest Division I team is in Denver).
 
                        John Whelan (pronounced "Wailin'")
                        Amateur Curmudgeon
                        [phone number]
                        <[log in to unmask]>
                        <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/joe.html>
 
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