In New York, Hockey’s Glory Days Belong to a Seemingly Distant Past

Hockey’s edifice is crumbling: On Monday, it was reported that the NHL’s work stoppage had forced the league’s official puck-maker to lay off half its employees. Last week, the Boston Bruins ordered all staff to work three-day weeks. And while yesterday’s meeting between the players and owners offered hockey fans a glimmer of hope, the cancellation of the 2004-05 season remains a distinct possibility.In New York City, all this bad news is greeted mostly with silence. Whereas the 1994 NHL labor stoppage provoked a wave of anger and disappointment among local fans, hockey’s absence from the local sports landscape has caused barely a ripple this time around. The reason for the difference is obvious: The Rangers have gone from champions to chumps.“It was a great high,” said hockey writer Stan Fischler, recalling the Broadway Blueshirts’ 1994 Stanley Cup triumph. “There was nothing to equal the pandemonium of the victory parade. Then the strike, people in New York were upset they couldn’t keep riding the wave.”Just a few months after Mark Messier skated victory laps around Madison Square Garden, the NHL and its players squandered the energy in the nation’s largest market with a work stoppage that canceled 468 games during the 1994-95 season. Over the next decade, the Rangers went into a tailspin that even Wayne Gretzky couldn’t stop.By the late 1990s, the Blueshirts topped the league in salary, but a parade of expensive All-Stars, from Theo Fleury to Eric Lindros to Jaromir Jagr, rewarded Ranger fans with a seven year absence from the playoffs. The Islanders, meanwhile, showed sparks of contention, but generally continued the futility that followed their championship years in the 1980s. As for the Devils, they’ve won three Stanley Cups since 1995, but they still play in the accursed Meadowlands.Ex-Ranger Nick Fotiu knows the Rangers’ importance to New York. Now an assistant coach of the Rangers’ minor-league affiliate, the Hartford Wolfpack, he was the first native New Yorker to wear the red, white, and blue at the Garden.“The Ranger fans used to make me feel like the best player in the NHL when I went on the ice,” Fotiu said, adding that he doesn’t worry about fans coming back after a strike. “When they come back, the fans’ll be the same as ever. I really believe that. I was that fan once.”But the economic realities of NHL hockey have also helped alienate once rabid fans. Team Marketing Report, a sports and economics analysis firm, calculates the price for a family of four at a Rangers game at $279.00, including food and parking.“Games are too expensive, I can’t take my kids,” said Roland Smith of Queens, an amateur hockey player who skates at Chelsea Piers on weekends. “My son is a baseball fan because I can take him to two or three Yankee games a year.”Only older New Yorkers remember when going to a hockey game was as casual as taking in a movie. Arthur Klauber of Westchester recalls the Sunday double-header at the Garden: a minor-league New York Rovers game at 3:30, then a hamburger dinner on Broadway, and back for the 7:30 Rangers puck drop.“The crowd was vibrant and violent,” said Klauber, a native New Yorker who used to flash his student ID to get 50-cent tickets to games during the Depression. “They only had six teams, so these guys knew everything. If they had a grudge, it was the whole year.”Hockey was a standard component of a New Yorker’s social life, even a reputable place to bring a date. Klauber proposed to his wife, Barbara, between periods at the old Garden.By the 1980s, the game of hockey had arguably reached its peak. Gretzky’s Oilers succeeded Mike Bossy’s Islanders, and the high-scoring, open-ice style of play exhibited the staggering athleticism of 200-pound men on skates. But Al Arbour, who coached the Islanders to four straight Stanley Cups, said that even when Nassau Coliseum rocked with championship thunder, hockey labored to compete with other sports.“New York was always dominated by the Yankees and the Giants. And the Rangers in those days were struggling,” the bespectacled Hall of Famer said from his Florida retirement.From Arbour’s perspective, the Rangers’ championship year was more of a fluke than anything else, and the absence of reverberations from the current lockout bodes ill for a sport that recently signed a TV contract on par with the Arena Football League.But local hockey lovers, while silent, are still all over New York, and Fischler insists that the disappearing hockey fan is an exaggeration.“I know it’s a myth because I’m constantly encountering people in the streets. Whether it’s a garbage man or a stockbroker, they’re all asking me, is it coming back?” he said. “I tell them, yes, and when it does, it will be a very different game.”

In New York, Hockey’s Glory Days Belong to a Seemingly Distant Past

In New York, Hockey’s Glory Days Belong to a Seemingly Distant Past

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