Op Bevroren Blog

Een toevluchtsoord voor het Ondervoede Hockey

De koudste dagen verwarmen het best mijn hockeyhart

Now Dave Fay of The Times is a veritable newshound of hockey relative to Tarik. He’s been on the beat there for more than 20 years; covering the Caps is in his DNA. He, too, though isn’t moved much to file in the offseason. I will say this about the competing papers, and it goes to the heart of this lament: the night-and-day ideological discrepancies between them extend, in my opinion, to their respective treatment of hockey and the Caps. The paucity of coverage and the sneering derisiveness of The Compost is highly suggestive to me that it basically regards hockey a sport played almost entirely by white men and as such is worthy only of contempt and exclusion. They’d never own up to this in print of course, but its white-space-on-puck speaks volumes.

To wit: The NHL opened it season this past Wednesday, and on that morning, while USA Today incorporated an entire free-standing section to the league in its edition, and while The Washington Times, with the Caps not opening until the following evening, devoted fully three pages of sports section to the NHL, Tarik and The Compost could manage no more than one single paragraph acknowledging the start of the new season. Journalistic malfeasance.

And it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, way back in the 1980s, The Compost had one of the best in the business covering the Caps, the late great Robert Fachet. In some other file I’ll wax poetic about the halcyon days of Fachet in print and Ron Weber up in WTOP’s broadcast booth.

Speaking of radio, Washington has one sports radio outlet, WTEM. For the region’s hockey fans, its call letters are WREDSKINS. Recently, its program manager, Andy Pollin, more or less told Caps’ fans on the air to go have sex with themselves if they didn’t think the team was getting its fair shake there. I’d link the discussion thread of this stunning act of arrogance, but it’s been deleted from the Caps’ official site message boards. But just tune into Pollin once in a while and his family’s longstanding loathing of the Caps will surface.

On TV, things are just as bleak. The local 11:00 p.m. sportscasts sometimes fail to offer even individual games results from that night. That would be unheard of for any of the region’s other professional teams. The dean of all the TV sports talking heads, George Michael of Channel 4, is (in)famous for pimping NASCAR and rodeo to a metropolitan region with no legacy of interest in either. What meager clips we do get on local TV are the predictable formula of who scored a goal or two hurriedly squished into the sportscast’s final 40 seconds.

I will not indict every local television personality on the hockey front. She generates a special beat in my hockey heart. Stay tuned.