If a puck drops on the ice in London, does anybody care? Not in the United States. The NHL opened its season with a couple of games in Europe, and nobody noticed. Few Americans are even aware that the NHL season has started at all.
ESPN said little about the opening games. SportsCenter does view hockey as a sport worthy of its valuable airtime. It would simply be inefficient for them to bother collecting game footage and making a few oversimplified comments while the tape ran for 14 seconds.
The American public lost its taste for the NHL when Gretzky retired. Since then, there has been little attention paid to the sport of hockey. With the exception of the occasional Sidney Crosby sighting, the only time we even hear it mentioned these days is when a player seriously injures someone during a game, or during the Winter Olympics. Other than that, we never hear anyone speak about the sport.
Since the passing of the NHL's glory days, what did the American people find to fill its sports void? Celebrity Dancing.
How pathetic can one nation be? We have abandoned one of the fastes,toughest, most physical, and most violent sports ever played, and replaced with with a modern version of Dance Fever. The public TRIES to convince itself that this is a sport by placing actual athelets on the show each year. Jerry Rice, Emmit Smith, Jason Taylor, Helio Castroneves, and now Warren Sapp all agreed to participate in this fiasco. Sure, it helped their Public Recognition ranking and made them each a bit more marketable as spokesmen. But it certainly did nothing to solidfy our fond memories of thier great carreers. An entire generation of kids will grow up remembering Jerry Rice as 'that dude who won Dancing with the Stars,' rather than remebering him as the single greatest wide reciever of all time.
Even worse, some of these kids will dream of someday being just like him... holding the championship disco-ball trophy high above thier heads.
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