Why Hockey Isn't Popular in the United States

I love hockey. I have for as long as I can remember which I’m sure is the result of my father’s love for the game as well. He instilled in my brother and me the fandom he held his entire life for our beloved Detroit Red Wings. We grew up playing, watching, even refereeing and coaching hockey as a family. Having been raised on the sport I was mildly surprised when I got older and realized we were certainly in the minority in America when it came to our athletic event of choice. Don’t get me wrong, we love football (the American kind) and baseball, I’ve started to get the rest of the family into soccer a bit and while we don’t particularly care for basketball, we can still enjoy it when the University of Michigan Wolverines are involved. But it always came back to hockey. My surprise turned to intrigue when I started to figure out the actual reasons that I loved hockey more than any of the other sports and wanted to find out why my friends preferred them to the greatest game on ice. So this is my best effort at trying to explain why, in this country, hockey has remained decidedly in the background when compared to the rest of the major sports.

Hockey is decidedly a winter sport. The other major sport that schedules its season during the same time period as hockey is basketball, which isn’t at all constrained to the colder months. In fact, basketball is played indoors only because it is played in the winter. It would make more sense for the Heat to play outside like football and baseball teams but because a court is small enough to be put in a building, the sport allows itself to be played all year round.  This means it can avoid major conflict between itself, baseball and football, which, for the most part, are played in decent weather. Hockey on the other hand requires a temperature well below freezing to be played outdoors or else needs some impressive technology to maintain a sheet of ice. The compressors that keep the playing surface functional aren’t by any means cheap but that is another factor that we will get to. The point is that one of the great ways that kids and even adults develop love for a sport is just picking up and playing. Who hasn’t just gone out and played some touch football or some 2-on-2 basketball a random afternoon? Hockey is a little more difficult. Roller hockey exists of course and can be a decent substitute in warm weather but any ice hockey player will tell you that it is a totally different game. Ice is what makes hockey hockey, unfortunately ice is difficult to make. There is only a pretty small portion of the country, outside of Alaska, where outdoor hockey is ever possible, which forces us to rely on rinks and that expensive technology we mentioned. This effectively alienates the whole southern United States or at least puts hockey at a distinct competitive disadvantage, especially when you consider that if it never gets cold enough to allow for hockey it also doesn’t get cold enough to make those other sports impossible to play.

The other disadvantage hockey has to contend with against the other major sports is the cost of play. We already mentioned the rather expensive nature of building a warehouse the size of a small airplane hanger and then keeping that room cool enough to maintain a 200-foot long sheet of ice, but this is really just the beginning when it comes to actually playing the sport. Skates, sticks, gloves, helmets, pants, elbow pads, shoulder pads, shin pads, the list is long and none of the stuff is going to come cheap. Even if you go to used equipment shops the cost is going to be much higher than it could be for basketball, baseball, and probably football.  So again hockey alienates kids from developing a love for the sport from playing it because many parents can’t afford the equipment let alone pay the high costs of renting ice even split amongst an entire team. In the same way that cold made the game more difficult to casually play, the high cost of hockey makes play at an organized level, even a very low one, difficult as well. It’s this development of love for a game as a child that is so important to creating a love for the game as an adult although it isn’t necessarily required (my dad never played any kind of organized hockey until he was in his 40’s and still is one of the best hockey fans I’ve ever met). But still if you think about the sports you love the most I bet you’ll be able to remember a childhood experience playing that sport, it’s a key factor in fostering a love for anything, not just sports, and hockey is again put at a distinct disadvantage. The hook’em while they’re young strategy just doesn’t work. But these are only problems with getting people to love the sport through playing it, That isn’t really the central issue because the kids aren’t the ones buying tickets or holding the TV remotes. Hockey’s popularity problem is less about the cold and cost issues and more about the game itself and how it is played and represented.

My biggest gripe with people who say they don’t like hockey is that the majority of them have never seen a game, and I don’t mean watched on television, I mean actually attended a hockey game. This is what I believe to be the most important factor keeping the American public from embracing hockey: that the television presentation of the sport has never and will never even come close to the experience you get watching a game in person. It is a multi-faceted issue so I will try to break it down as best I can. To truly understand hockey you have to understand that the positions of the players are much less set in stone than any of the other sports (except goalie, I know but bear with me). In football it would be ridiculous to see a tight end playing quarterback or for a center to try shooting guard in basketball. Even in baseball where there is much more room for switches, like a first baseman or a catcher moving to third, once the positions are set before a pitch nothing is going to change once the action begins. Hockey is totally different. I’ve heard a quote attributed to Wayne Gretzky that reads “Positions are only there so you know where to line up for the face-off”. I have no idea if The Great One actually said that but it is a great way to describe how hockey flows – that everyone has the opportunity to be at every point on the ice during a shift for one reason or another and not be out of position. Now obviously there are limits to this and defensemen don’t spend much time in front of the opponent’s net like wingers don’t spend much time behind their own but still, it is a very foreign concept to people how much switching weaving and covering can go on in a very short period of time. Now what does this have to do with TV? Well the thing about TV broadcasts of sporting events is that you can’t possibly see the entire playing surface, whether it is a court, field, or diamond, in every shot (that is camera shot). In basketball that tends not to matter because you only need to see half the court to take in all the action most of the time. In football because so much happens around the line of scrimmage and it’s easy enough to follow the ball you don’t miss much as well, plus the breaks in between plays allow for so many replays from different camera angles you never feel like you miss anything. In baseball it could be said that TV improves your vantage point from any you could have at the event because you can perfectly see what the strike zone is and the location of each pitch. Hockey, though, is really hurt by the fact that you can’t see the whole ice, or even the entirety of one offensive zone, if you’re watching on the tube. This is where we connect the different definition of positioning with the television issue; it is simply tough to keep track of everything that is happening on the ice even when you can see the whole ice and know who everyone is and what their positions are and where they are supposed to be. Now imagine someone who has a very limited understanding of the game trying to watch this crazy collection of people flying around in and out of frame, it could easily devolve in their mind into just a bunch of guys chasing around a little black piece of rubber, not very entertaining.  Which brings us to a second problem that hockey has with TV: speed.

Hockey is the fastest out of any of the major sports and moves at such a frenetic pace at some points that it becomes a near impossibility for camera men and announcers to keep up, leading to a shaky broadcast at best without top notch talent bringing it to you. For hockey fans the speed and fluidity of the players are two of the best things about the sport but they can be very difficult to adapt to. I’ve spent many hockey games trying to explain finer points of things to people and have found myself frustrated by the television coverage not giving them the full view that a person needs to understand my point. Being at the game makes it so much easier to learn the ins and outs and for people who are already hockey fans the experience is much better. Hockey is the only one of the major sports that is significantly better live. People will argue that all sports are better live than they are on television, which is very true, but the point I’m trying to make is that the gap is much wider in hockey which, once again, puts it in a tough spot. Die-hard hockey fans can watch the games on TV and not lose much but we aren’t concerned about those people anyway, we are more worried about the potential casual fan who can become so easily discouraged not because of the actual sport but because of the medium through which they are viewing it.

 But the TV problems are not entirely the fault of the game itself; another major television issue is the presentation of the sport as a whole by the NHL. This has the potential to turn into a bit of ranting and raving so I’ll try to stay on topic and save the more detailed aspects for the future. The NHL, after the 2004-05 lockout, has done everything they can think of from a rules and regulations perspective to try to make the game more exciting to casual fans but what they haven’t done well enough is realize that the game isn’t the problem. Many casual fans will tell you that they got into hockey once they finally saw enough of it to understand what was going on. My friend Will is a perfect example. He watched our high school hockey team with an ok knowledge of the game but nothing compared to what he has now which is pretty much the result of coming to college and watching Red Wings games with me and Michigan games on his own. Now he knows more about hockey then a lot of the kids I played with over the years and can get pretty fanatical himself about our Wings. This wasn’t because the NHL tried to increase scoring or eliminate the trap as a strategy. It was because he got exposed to the game. What the executives at the top of the NHL have is an exposure problem. And they royally screwed up a great chance to help fix it. Almost every male that calls himself a sports fan knows exactly what channel he wants when he turns on the television. The influence of ESPN on sports cannot be overstated in this day and age. What gets shown on Sportscenter every morning fifteen times is what sports fans are concerned about. Take the Jeremy Lin extravaganza this past basketball season for example. Would Lin be half as popular if every other story on ESPN wasn’t about him for a month? Maybe. But no one can say it didn’t help. The NHL had a chance to jump on this train and instead decided to continue its partnership with NBC. While NBC is a national network and ESPN is still a cable channel, we are getting to a point in this country that almost anyone who has the potential to buy a seat at a pro sporting event has cable so that advantage is dwindling fast. Also many basic cable packages don’t carry the NBC Sports Network, which is NBC’s version of ESPN that focuses more on off the beaten path sports, including hockey. While the NBC deal gave the NHL significantly more games actually broadcast to a national audience through “the NBC family of networks” the value of the ESPN contract isn’t just about how many games people see. It’s about Sportscenter, espn.com, and all of the promotion outside the games themselves that make every game actually shown on ESPN that much more valuable than one on NBC Sports. There, that didn’t get too rant-ish did it? Anyway, moving on.

One thing I thought about entirely avoiding in this explanation was fighting, but I don’t think that is possible. My relationship with fighting in hockey is very complicated itself so, again, I’ll try to keep my ranting on this specific issue held back until a time when it can be given the attention it deserves. But I can’t talk about hockey popularity without mentioning the double-edged sword that is fisticuffs. Fighting is part of the game. That’s the way it is in the NHL. It’s not going to change any time soon. It brings people to games and it turns people away. Right now the league believes that the former outweighs the later and I am inclined to agree but what annoys me is when people who don’t like hockey say its because to them hockey is boxing on ice. This is grossly incorrect. These people bother me to a certain extent but not nearly to the level of the people who claim to be fans of hockey that hold the same belief. I know I shouldn’t turn away any hockey fan just because they disagree with me on what part of the game is most exciting but if all you really care about is fighting then hockey isn’t for you, you can get fighting without all of the trouble of a beautiful sporting event going on in between rounds by going to a boxing match or a MMA fight. So even the people who are drawn to the games because of fighting aren’t, in my opinion, contributing to the popularity of hockey, just hockey fights. If someone who showed up just to watch a player get beat into the ground then realizes the awesomeness of the game as a whole then fighting has done the game a great service. In my experience that story is a rare one. I’m not saying get rid of fighting by any means, but don’t make it a focal point. The rest of this battle is for another day, so again, we move on.

While all of the reasons I’ve explored so far are very good reasons why hockey isn’t popular, they, for the most part, aren’t specifically reasons why hockey isn’t more popular in the United States. The reason for this I think is very simply that the sport isn’t American. The three other major sports I’ve been comparing hockey to are all American inventions and even though a few foreigners have crept into basketball very few have made any kind of impact in the NFL. Baseball has become a very diverse sport in terms of nationalities but will always hold the title of America’s pastime. With hockey this isn’t at all the case. Hockey is a Canadian thing that Americans can’t be bothered with. By the way I should probably mention that I love Canada as a country and get offended by jokes made at the country’s expense, but still it doesn’t change the fact that hockey is Canadian and not American that’s not my opinion. In fact it isn’t a sure bet that America is even the second most influential hockey country in the world. Russia certainly has an argument, as well as Sweden after their 2006 Gold Medal at the Turin Olympics.  Who’s second doesn’t really matter though when you look at numbers. Of the 251 players inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame only 10 were born in the USA, 5 from Russia, and 228 from the great white north. Canada dominates hockey history but that shouldn’t matter because at least they still speak English right? (We don’t like to talk about Quebec) In any case the gap should be bridged easier for Americans than it would be for soccer and its European influence but there are enough superstars in the NHL of European origin to add to the Canadians that make hockey foreign. It’s almost a dirty word in the US. That is why even if every other problem mentioned here could be fixed hockey would still fall behind football, baseball, and basketball in the US of A. It’s not the fault of the game or the NHL commissioner or the weather. There is just too much competition from American sports. But no matter what, hockey fans will still be hockey fans and we will be proud of it. Go Wings.