Let’s get one thing straight before we go further: Love is not finite. As any parent knows, a new offspring comes along and the family grows to embrace the child (more often than not, anyway). Money and time may be limited, but not the ability to care about someone or something new. The same goes for the sports teams we say we “love,” so it’s not quite right to suggest that the American Basketball League’s Condors have a better chance of making it because the National Basketball Association owners are locking out their players. It’s not as if some specific amount of affection either is spent from season to season or else spills over from one sport to another when a team or sport alienates its fans. If that were true, more people would be attending the games of the Condors and the Blackhawks and perhaps even the Bears. Yet, with the Bulls and their Chicago fans still waiting for the lockout to end, fewer people are attending Hawks games than at any time in memory.
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These vague and abstract thoughts–abstract by sports standards, anyway–occurred to me in large part because I bid the Hawks adieu before their first long road trip of the season while sitting high up in the United Center in a section filled with kids. I had gone down that night and bought the cheapest ticket possible, $15, and been seated in the very last row of what they’d have called the second balcony in the old Chicago Stadium. At the ends of the arena were vast expanses of empty seats extending from the top to the bottom of the 300 level, yet they had thrown me into the back of a rather crowded section, presumably to generate some camaraderie–which, believe me, I appreciated. To my surprise, however, I wasn’t surrounded by the old blue-collar fans who used to populate the upper balcony at the Chicago Stadium, nor by the south-side yuppies who have replaced them, treating the UC like their regular weekend gathering place and watering hole. Around me were huge families filled with young kids–most of them, believe it or not, girls between the ages of five and ten. One group of five girls and their father sat down just to my right, followed by four more girls, their parents, and their three-year-old kid brother in the next row down, and then another family of boys and their father a couple rows down from there. Everyone seemed to know each other, and the girls got to chirping about their classes and teachers, and I all but expected Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to stroll in wearing Blackhawks jerseys and waving to everyone.
Bizarrely hockey affirming because few of these people paid any real attention to the game–and I can’t say I blamed them. The Hawks, under new coach Dirk Graham and general manager Bob Murray, have put together a miserable team. It’s reminiscent of the California Angels squads of the late 70s and early 80s, when baseball’s free agency was new and Angels rosters always seemed to comprise overpriced stars past their prime and overrated young talent, all put together pell-mell. Having missed the playoffs last year, the Hawks raised their payroll to $35 million, fifth in the league, but their two biggest additions, center Doug Gilmour and defenseman Paul Coffey, are 35 and 37 and appear well into end-of-career declines. It’s an old, slow, plodding team, and though disciplinarian Graham set out to instill a solid system–the Hawks opened with four wins and a tie in their first six games–the system soon broke down and the Hawks began losing games by disgraceful scores such as 10-3. On this night, trying to halt that ten-game winless streak against the only slightly less mediocre Ottawa Senators, they practically moseyed out of their locker room, past their bench, and onto the ice as Frank Pellico played “Here Come the Hawks” on the organ. Where was Keith Magnuson when a fan and the team really needed him–or at least Chris Chelios? (Out with a knee injury, unfortunately.)
Having scrambled back to tie the game at two, the Hawks almost blew it when they drew another dumb penalty with just over five minutes to go. The seconds ticked down as the Senators methodically attacked the Hawks’ net, and an Ottawa player in the corner passed through traffic to an open teammate in the slot who fired the puck past Fitzpatrick just as the two minutes were about to expire. “All right, let’s go!” said the same dad. He and his daughters stood in the aisle as the referees reconsidered and finally waved off the goal for an Ottawa player being in the crease. Regardless, the dad chased the girls down the aisle and homeward; it was a school night, after all.
