Figuring out what to do with the Hawks
It was a coin-toss on whether to attend last night’s game. Those who were there may have noted my absence. As Dylan B. pointed out on his Twitter feed a week ago, the Hawks didn’t necessarily need to announce their attendance for the Brandon game, they could have just had everyone introduce themselves over the PA. Last night wasn’t much better.
A friend asked me last night why I wasn’t at the game. I told her the same story I wrote here last year. There was a time not so long ago when I would have come to a mid-week game like last night just to see what happened. I think those days are over. The Hawks might win, they might lose, but if no one’s there, what’s the point?
Dylan B. got in a gentle dig at this reporter earlier this evening. It takes real effort for me to be sly sometimes. Dylan makes it an art. I’ll take the bait.
Who exactly have the Winterhawks alienated with their price increase? The same dead-enders who were there every night of the Goldsmith-era were sitting in their same seats last night, and paying 30-percent more. From Piper’s perspective, what wasn’t to like? Especially on a Wednesday night in November when the entire town is discussing the pending Blazer implosion. Piper’ll take what he can get mid-week.
Now, this will be the first Saturday home game in almost a month. Hopefully the Hawks have been pounding the phones to get folks out there. They’re in the Rose Garden on a Saturday night against Seattle. It should be an easy sell, but who knows. This thing isn’t going to get rebuilt in a day.
In other news, the team is beginning to make Goldsmithian noises about renovating the Coliseum. A five or six-thousand seat arena inside the Glass Palace would definitely be a community asset. I wonder how much further this idea would get if someone were to jump on the Green Line and spend an afternoon talking to the folks at PSU about joining in. The Vikings are in serious needs of new digs; if they were to join together and wrap the whole thing in a big green bow, I bet they could get something done. It would be a win-win. Goldsmith never pursued this. Perhaps Piper will.
Alternatively, I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks back with a longtime observer of the local sports scene. The subject turned to the new Beaver baseball stadium. I mentioned they were talking about building the thing at the Clark County fairgrounds in Ridgefield. I told him I live in Vancouver and Ridgefield was too far to drive to watch a game. When I mentioned that, his eyes lit up.
“If the Beavers moved there, they would own Vancouver,” he said. They would no longer be competing with all the other noise in Portland, they could just concentrate on that one location. He argued it’s too difficult to market minor league sports in Portland. A move to the suburbs would solve that.
It’s an interesting point and one I hadn’t considered. This all works for the Hawks as well. The dead-enders will all gladly make the drive to Beaverton or Vancouver to watch the team. So they’re really not going to lose anything. If anything, the team will gain.
Beaverton has its own paper, which you don’t read unless you happen to live there. We have one up here in The Couv as well. Either paper would be more than happy to put “their” team on the front page. And locals would love to go see “their” team. This theory is working all over the Puget Sound right now with both baseball and hockey. That one conversation turned my thinking completely around on minor league sports and the suburbs.
Another friend took it one step further suggesting sticking an NHL arena somewhere in Washington County and booking the heck out of it. The Blazers, for whatever reason, don’t seem at all interested in maximizing the Rose Garden. They’ve missed out on dozens of shows (AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and Fleetwood Mac…as well as the seemingly never-ending Springsteen tour, just to name a few) that Mike Scanlon would have booked in a heartbeat. A properly run big-league venue somewhere out Highway 26 could definitely work.