Hockey Should be Loved by All

At the end of one of Kyle’s post he takes a bit about the whole Tocchet gambling ring in hockey and how he hopes that it is the final straw for US hockey viewers. I don’t understand Kyle’s pent up anger against the US liking hockey however, the only thing I can come up with is that he sees it as a final loss of sovereignty, that final definition of what makes us Canadian. Hockey in the US is not big however, you can tell by going to espn.com. Along the top you will see all the sports listed from left to right. The further left the sport the more popular it is. As you can see the NHL is ranked less than then NFL, MLB, NBA and Nascar. What is even worse is that two of those sports are not even active right now. That goes to show how much Americans care about hockey. Now this is a generalization, because there are fans in the US who do like hockey, and those that do tend to know a lot about the sport. Go into any US NHL team message board and you will generally find a very dedicated group of fans who are as knowledgeable (or more knowledgeable) than a lot of Canadian bandwagon jumping fans. Personally I have nothing against the US liking hockey, why shouldn’t they? It is a great sport. Yes I would like to see more teams in Canada, but realistically not many more Canadian teams could support an NHL team. That is my take anyway.

As for the whole Tocchet investigation it seems a bit odd that Tocchet funded a gambling ring run by organized crime bosses. I never knew Tocchet had that kind of money. Also the whole smearing of Gretzky’s name is a joke. I don’t really see him as the type of person to be involved in any of that type of activity.

Back to politics it seems this Emerson issue just won’t go away for the Conservatives. People are campaigning daily in Vancouver for him to step down, and the Liberals finally have a new breath of life in their party, feeling energized being able send out some attacks regarding ethics rather than always fending them off. A lot of people keep saying though that if Emerson can solve the softwood lumber dispute then they don’t care if he is a Conservative or a Liberal. The sad thing is I think the only way the softwood lumber dispute will be solved is if Canada bends over and takes it up the ass, similar to the way we are currently taking it.