Dallas – Even as it recovers from a self-inflicted wound in its foot, there is evidence the NHL still doesn’t understand what makes pro sports leagues tick.
To be sure, hockey plans on Saturday to trumpet its return to the North American sports calendar after a year-long absence not with a television ad campaign featuring the reasons – like engaging young stars Jarome Iginla and Sidney Crosby – that anyone might want to buy a ticket to a game or a subscription to a season-long cable or satellite TV package.
Instead, the league praised by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) for its wholesomeness intends to air a commercial featuring a bare-chested actor pretending to be a hockey player, sitting in what looks like a candle-lit locker room, approached from behind by guess who? No, not Nicollette Sheridan, but some stereotypical scantily clad woman just the same.
“Ready?” she coos, touching his shoulder. “It’s time.” Then, to the beat of war drums, she helps the anonymous hunk into his pads and a generic NHL jersey. It all follows a quote from Art of War philosopher Sun Tzu, suggesting hockey players are warriors – like soldiers fighting in Iraq, I guess – or heroes, like Coast Guard crewmen who daringly plucked countless Katrina victims off rooftops in New Orleans, I suppose.
And you thought we were supposed to be toning down such imagery in mere playground games.
How ridiculous.
The only thing more shameful about this episode is watching NHL and NBC female executives defend their employers against charges of sexism from Martha Burk, the National Council of Women’s Organizations chair who dared take on Augusta National’s males-only membership policy.
“It’s a double-entendre in my view,” she told the Toronto Star, which brought the ad to her attention. “She’s in the ad as a sex object.
“The ad is just gratuitous,” she charged, and correctly.
“This ad is very respectful of women,” Bernadette Mansur, an NHL spokesperson countered to The Associated Press. “The woman is a spiritual and physical trainer for the warrior, and his mentor.” Good grief.
Of course, this is what the NHL hoped for from sucker sports pundits like me, that some of us would be so outraged that we’d write about it. Any publicity is good publicity, the league probably figured.
And what sells better than a little sex? We know the NHL does not.
This is as desperate an attempt to attract attention as you may ever see from a pro sports league. But the NHL is a desperate league.
The only people who really missed it during its management-labor impasse were those who depended on it for employment, people who grew up with it in places like Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Canada and the niche fan bases that exist in some, but not all, NHL cities.
ESPN didn’t miss hockey. Planet Earth’s sports network dropped the league like a hot puck.
The reason it did so was because sports fans continued to tune out the league, as ratings just fell and fell and fell.
So hockey is trying to entice fans with skin, like the Indy Racing League used Danica Patrick.
There is one big difference: Patrick is one of IRL’s drivers. The open-wheel league should promote her, even if her success hasn’t measured up to her looks.
That’s what real sports leagues do. They sell the elements of their contests that people turn out to see.
The really ridiculous thing is the NHL has a lot it could tout for the 2005-06 campaign.
But the start to this ad campaign the league calls “My NHL” makes even less sense. All it does is make you realize why the league’s national cable TV outlet this season will be the Outdoor Life Network, same as volleyball.
