Buzzer Beater: Did anyone really win the Herder?

Buzzer Beater

Did anybody really win the Herder?

By RYAN COOKE

I tried to come up with some kind of snappy introduction for this week’s column, but I couldn’t do it without sounding like just another sore Cataracts fan. So I’ll just get straight to the point.

The Herder final we saw this past week was not a true final.

A hockey team is only partially made up of the players on the roster. It also encompasses the management, the coaching staff, and “most importantly, the fans”, as any player with a trophy in his hands will tell reporters.

But the fans were not there this time around, and we have Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador to thank for that.

It might sound like I’m being a sore loser, like the Soviet fans who complain about Valerie Kharlamov being knocked out of the Summit Series, while ignoring the fact that Bobby Orr didn’t play for the Canadians.

But really, think about it.

The Joe Byrne is small, yes. It’s much smaller than the Pepsi Center, or Mile One. But that only adds to the atmosphere in the building.

As a fan, it’s exhilarating at times to watch a close game in the arena, whether it be the Cataracts or your 12-year-old nephew’s Easter tournament. You can attribute that to the wild fans, the size of the building, the acoustics, whatever you want. But simply put, it gets loud.

And that isn’t just exhilarating for the fans.

I attended the University of Prince Edward Island this past year, and worked for the school newspaper. I interviewed the captain of the UPEI Panthers men’s hockey team following a thrilling playoff win in double overtime. The team had played three games in four days, and had been outplayed and outshot in all of them. He told me the only thing pushing the team past the exhaustion they felt was the fact that the fans were still right there with them. In a small arena similar to the Joe, the place was literally shaking.

That kind of energy generated by a home crowd is what can make or break a game. And we saw none of that last week.

Senior hockey in Newfoundland could very well be at a higher level now than it ever was. It’s sad that such great hockey had to be subject to such petty insolence from HNL.

There’s always been an “us versus them” attitude when it comes to the rest of Newfoundland and the Avalon. In politics, we’ve seen it too many times. In sports, we often see it on the ice/field/court.

And that’s where it should stay.

There’s a feeling going around that the Cataracts and Caribous were screwed over by the HNL boys at the executive level in St. John’s, who don’t care about hockey outside of town. Some say HNL would just prefer an Avalon league and leave the rest of the province out.

But you know, it’s probably a good thing the turnouts for the Herder games were so weak. Now HNL can’t possibly ignore the fact that the focus of this year’s final was not on hockey, but on the weak attendance and poor decision-making of the wonderful governing body of the province’s favourite sport.

Maybe now they’ll see it the way we saw it all along. You can move the Herder, you can screw the sponsors and you can gyp the arenas. Go ahead. But you won’t see us travelling three or four hours to watch the games and feed money into your pockets. The tournament might be called the Herder, but the fans are not sheep.

It’s just a shame that the Cataracts coaches, players, management and sponsors had to be the casualties in this.

But don’t worry, boys, there’s always next year (well, depending on how far in the hole HNL wound up last week).