Hello, I am the "non traditional market" hockey fan that lured the NHL to the deserts of Arizona and the humidity soaked Florida peninsula. I was born in Florida a decade before any franchise found a home there, and I moved to Carolina five years before the Whalers had the same idea. I never even knew hockey existed until I was twelve years old, and even after I accidentally discovered the sport I did not know a single person that liked, watched, or knew a damn thing about it. Even with all those factors working against the NHL, I still fell in love with hockey.
Growing up in Florida you either played football or baseball, and I was on the diamond before I was in grade school. I spent my afternoons in the backyard with the neighborhood kids pitching a tennis ball at a trash can trying to strike out the Braves starting line-up. My love of playing sports was easily transposed into a love of watching sports. My earliest allegiance was pledged to the Florida State Seminoles, which turned out to be a great decision once I moved to North Carolina just in time to enjoy a decade of football dominance over the rest of the ACC. Later in that decade, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers gained my allegiance after they drafted Warrick Dunn. When it came to baseball I was a Braves' fan for a brief moment, thanks to Ted Turner's evil empire it was easy to like a team you have easy access to. Later I witnessed Frank Thomas destroy a baseball and switched my allegiance to White Sox, but that came to an end when the strike of 94' cut the season short.
Later that year I was home alone on a Wednesday night flipping through the channels on my TV when I stumbled across Wednesday Night Hockey on ESPN. It was the first moment that I had ever witnessed hockey. The Devils were playing the Flyers and I was in awe. I had no idea what was happening; play stopped for unknown reasons, everyone had a stick, and they were all chasing a foreign object around the ice. The game was constantly in motion and at such a fast pace but still extremely physical, but it all appeared to require an amazing amount of skill. I knew instantly that I had discovered my new favorite sport.
Within minutes of turning the game on I was a Flyers' fan. I loved the orange and black colors flying around the ice. Their aggressive style reminded me of the Florida State Defense in its prime, but the Flyers appeared to be a little more ill-tempered. The idea of a goaltender was appealing to me because I was a pitcher from the first season we were allowed to pitch. I knew absolutely nothing about the sport, but I knew instantly that I loved it and that I was a Flyers' fan. Although it would take me years to fully grasp my hatred, a part of me knew then that I hated the Devils.
The rest of the 90's passed with a minimal amount of hockey in my life. I was only able to watch the Flyers games when they were on ESPN, but no one in the family liked hockey, so I only watched on rare occasions. I was awake to watch Keith Primeau net his 5 OT winner, but hockey was still scarce. It was not until I moved to Raleigh in 2002 that I was able to watch hockey on a regular basis. There I found Blinco's, probably the only bar in the city that was owned by a hockey fan and had 2 bartenders that were Flyers fans. I lived the next 2 years of my life in Blinco's watching every Flyers game, as well as every other televised sporting event. I also made friends that owned season tickets with the Canes and was able to see the Flyers live for the first time.
Since then I have moved to Philly, attended over 100 hockey games, and up until this past season I never missed more than five games a year, and now I am coauthoring a hockey blog. So that's the story of how the NHL turned a kid from the South into a die hard hockey fan.
So thanks for reading and feel free to share the story of how you became a hockey fan.
