| Fish Bowl
By Patryk Fournier October 16th, 2008 |
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A few years ago the Ottawa Senators introduced the moniker “Hockey Country” to describe the Ottawa region’s support of hockey which was largely a thinly veiled attempt to capture some sort of the marketing that Detroit has already established with the ‘Hockeytown” brand. The truth of the matter is that with the glut and unified voice of Ottawa’s sports media coverage it makes “Hockey Country” resemble the type of nation that relies solely on state-run media. When defenseman Joe Corvo got traded from the Senators to the Carolina Hurricanes last year he wasn’t shy about voicing his displeasure with the Ottawa sports media in a parting shot, “The media here at times can be completely ridiculous, the way they can take some of the stories that are nothing and make something out of them.” Corvo’s comments while largely true we’re ironic for the simple fact that it just provided the Ottawa sports media with more ammunition that they could stretch out over a few days. Ottawa is an interesting place (something that doesn’t get said very often) that is from a sports standpoint. The Sens are the only professional sports team in the city, yet judging solely from the shear amount of resources that are thrown at sports coverage in this city you would think the Ottawa sports media are covering a city with a wide sports landscape like Chicago. Simply put, Ottawa is a massive fish bowl. To put into perspective how ridiculous the amount of sports media that’s dedicated to covering the Senators you have to look no further than Exhibit A – the coverage of last year’s four-game round 1 playoff sweep of the Sens. Team 1200 is Ottawa’s sports talk radio station, why a city that has one professional sports team needs a dedicated 24hr sports talk radio station is beyond me; it makes about as much sense as naming your daughter Bristol Palin unless you purposely want her to get confused with a hotel. Just take a look at Team 1200’s ridiculous gameday programming schedule during last year’s playoffs
Team 1200’s signature show “3 Guys on The Radio” which you can normally count on to delve into a wide variety of different sports and off-topic humourous stories even gets into the act by focusing almost 100% on the Sens playoff status. Over the Edge and More On Sports two general Ottawa sports shows that normally dedicate about 80% of their time talking about the Sens during the off-season, helped continue the ad-nauseam Sens coverage. The internationally syndicated Jim Rome which usually runs in the noon – 3pm time slot was pre-empted on Senators playoff games just to get an additional three hours of Sens talk in. From 5:30 in the morning to midnight, Team 1200 will talk about the Senators, speak to analysts, broadcast the game, and take calls from fans. This all amounts to 18 hours of coverage about one hockey team who drew the number 7 seed in the first round of the playoffs. It’s insanity! What the hell is there to talk about from the time people wake up in the morning to the time they go to sleep? That’s just the radio part of the Ottawa Sports media. During last year’s playoff run the city’s two newspapers, the Ottawa Sun and the Ottawa Citizen had 9 combined sports writer dedicated to covering the Sens. This doesn’t even include general assignment reporters that cover things like fan stories, support that the city is throwing behind the team, etc. While newspapers across North America are scaling back their writers and resources, to borrow a line from Season 5 of the Wire, they’re asking their papers to do more with less, the Ottawa dailies somehow can justify having 9 dedicated sports writers covering one freaking team! The amount of coverage is more overdone than Chris Neil’s usage of “you know”. The funny thing is, almost all of the voices writing about the Sens are identical. My buddy Peter said it best with regards to reading a story on the Sens in the paper, “You can start off by reading a story on the Sens and when you flip the page to read the rest of the story you can mistakenly start reading another article by another sports writer and you still won’t get lost.” Want another example of the absurdity of Ottawa’s fish bowl sports media? I present to you Exhibit B: The Sens 2-game NHL opener in Sweden against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Did you know that Daniel Alfredsson is from Sweden? If you didn’t you were painfully made aware of it and reminded of it for every minute of the Sens Swedish excursion. I get that Alfie was the lone Swede in the game but it’s really not a big deal. With the amount of coverage Alfie’s visit to his homeland got, you would think he was from an exotic country for hockey players like Mongolia or Uruguay, certainly not Sweden where the NHL boasts over 50 Swedish players, half of which play for the Red Wings. Everything was covered in Alfie’s return to Sweden from his high school, his old teachers, his old teams and everything you ever wanted to know about the Alfredsson clan. At one point Alfie’s mom was battling Sarah Palin for most media coverage by a hockey mom. The amount of coverage was even worse than the “Jerome Bettis from Detroit “angle that was played up during the Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl in Murder City a few years ago. You would think with so many voices in the Ottawa sports media that we would see more dissenting voices and differing opinions but aside from some Ottawa sports bloggers the voice of the Ottawa sports media all sounds about the same. For instance Sens CEO and President Roy Mlakar was recently announced as the city’s CEO of the year and all we heard was praise even though there’s proof to the contrary. I know the economy is in a downturn but since when does someone get rewarded for seeing their season ticket base drop by 1,500, be forced to offer regular season tickets at a 50% discount to 2 of the team’s first 4 home games, have a disastrous first season of offering Sens PPV broadcasts that included numerous glitches and worst of all be part of the organization that launched that embarrassing ‘300’ Spartan gaffe on the world. Who knows maybe next year the City of Ottawa will honour the WNBA, New Coke, Bre-X, and Stephane Dion as good ideas. And you wonder why the likes of players such as Joe Corvo are relieved when they get to leave the Ottawa fish bowl. |
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