Why I don’t go to hockey games any more

This is one of those topics I’ve considered writing about for a while, but it’s one that’s easy for some people to misinterpret at attacks on what they enjoy, so I’ve hesitated. It’s not intended to be, it’s really about personal choices I’ve made, not about whether those choices are right or wrong for others.

But I had a couple of friends ask me if the Sharks or Kraken are first in the house now that we’ve moved north, and if I’ve gotten to a hockey game at Climate Pledge arena yet. I’ve also started unpacking our hockey library in the downstairs offices where it’s going to live (and buying more bookcases, since we’re going to need them), and that’s had me thinking about all this a bit.

The short answer to that first part is easy: it’s still San Jose first, but now Seattle second, Chicago Blackhawks are third via Laurie’s history, and then if there’s a hockey game on, we probably have the TV tuned to it. But if there’s a Sharks game on at the same time as Seattle, we’re watching the Sharks.

I will note I’m very impressed and happy with this year’s Sharks, so far playing way better than we expected them to. Right now I think they have a good chance of going to the playoffs, which before the season I didn’t think I’d say this year. They are definitely going to battle for a wild card, I think, and it’s making the season fun so far. They care and it shows in their game.

Seattle is — unlike Las Vegas, which caught lighting (and Marc-Andre Fleury) in a bottle — an expansion team. They’re good, but not really good, much less great. They have a good work ethic and they play hard, and they’re almost .500 at home, which is nice. They are fun to watch and I enjoy their games most nights. That said, they’re an expansion team, and that shows, and the pundits (which the consensus seems to be thinking 90 points and contending for the playoffs) definitely convinced themselves this team was better than it is. they are very watchable, unlike, oh, first couple of years of the Minnesota Wild teams, or year two of the Sharks. They have upside, and I think they’re a solid team with potential to improve, not decline, in year 2 and 3. I don’t see watching them as a chore or obligation (see: year 2 San Jose Sharks) and as I learn the players and how they play, they’re growing on me. But the Sharks have been my primary team since year 1991-1992, and I don’t see my loyalties shifting to the Kraken coming first for a while, if ever. But I also don’t see this as something that requires monogamy to a single team… I am, at my core, a hockey fan more than a fan of any specific team.

As to going to a hockey game here in Seattle? That’s… complicated.

For those that don’t know my history, Laurie and I were season ticket holders with the Sharks starting year one in the Cow Palace, where we had a ten game package. Year 2, we upgraded to a full season commitment and moved to seats 3 rows off the ice near where the Sharks entered the arena. In year 3, we shifted to about the same location in San Jose arena, and we kept those seats as long as we kept our season tickets. And that was for 20 seasons of Sharks hockey. And then after that 20th season, we kinda looked at each other and said “the couch seems like a great idea”, we didn’t renew. For 19 of those season we averaged 35 games or so a year in the arena, maybe handing off tickets to others for 5 or so games every year.

That’s a lot of hockey, but it’s also a lot of scheduling your life around driving to the arena, paying for parking, walking into the arena and down the stairs to the seats, buying dinner from the waitron, and then after the game getting back to the car and going home. Basically, for about six months that’s twice a week for four hours a game to commit in time, plus all of the associated costs. Plus, if you’re committing to be at the game, it means you can’t be elsewhere, so it impacts your ability to do other things.

I won’t say money didn’t play a part in this decision to retire from the arena, but it wasn’t a primary reason. Having said that, the seats we had were club seats and not inexpensive, being 3 rows off the glass, and it came with waiter service, but over the 20 years we held them we invested a bit north of $200K in tickets, which translatest to about half a season of a fourth liner. Add in another $75 a game or so for parking, food, drinks, etc… and it all adds up.

This was the time my knees were getting bad, and stairs and my knees are not besties. We were going to have to consider ADA seats sooner or later, probably sooner, and neither of us were really enthusiastic about that idea. They did have ADA seats glass side elsewhere in the building, but as much as anything, we liked the group of people we were sitting with and that was a big part of going to the games for us by that point. Moving meant losing that.

San Jose did a stupid thing that last season, too. We came into the first pre-season game to find that the arena had restructured the seats in our section and added one more seat to each row. The new seats were a lot narrower, the cushioning was less comfortable, and my general reaction was that I’d just had my seat promoted from business class to coach without any warning. The person I sat next to most nights was 6’4”, and I’m not a small person, so sitting in those seats was a lot less fun the entire season. The Sharks decision to squeeze in a few more seats was what started our “why are we doing this?” discussion, and made the decision to not renew fairly easy.

So at the end of the regular season, we didn’t buy playoff tickets, which surprised our sales rep. And we watched the playoffs from home, we liked being able to eat dinner at home, settle on the couch, watch the game, and then turn off the TV and not have to drive home through traffic. So we didn’t renew, and that’s the last time I walked into the San Jose Arena.

This probably makes you think I’m not too interested in getting to Climate Pledge, and the answer to that is — sort of. I am curious to see how they fixed that building for hockey, because we have seen hockey in it in the past having taken in a few thunderbird vs Winter Hawk games, and the old Key Arena was not a good arena in general, bad for hockey with terrible sight lines, and the rehab the Sonics put on the building that they then demanded be done again and ultimately moved away from was just a bad design overall. I’ve heard really good things about the building and I’m curious, and I do enjoy the intensity of a game in person, but…

Since me knees are still allergic to stairs, and since the arena is a ferry ride and probably two hours travel each way from where I live, I don’t think I’ll satisfy my curiousity any time soon. but I am curious, and maybe I might convince myself to go for a matinee at some point. It won’t be this year, though… But trust me, during hockey season, if there’s a hockey game on, we probably have the TV on, and we thoroughly enjoy watching it from the couch, minus the driving and parking and cost of being there in person…

One More Thing

There’s one other aspect of this I’ll close with. Laurie and I both used to be very active in the fan bases of a number of teams, and at one point ran what we think was the largest online fan community out there — but then places like Yahoo Sports and Barstool and other corporate funded big sites moved in and the small, personal sites became hard to be relevant online. The tone of the fan conversations changed, and we found it harder and harder to hold the kind of conversations we enjoyed; things shifted more towards the “morning zoo” style of bluster and yelling. There was also a trend where we could see more violence and bullying going on in and around arenas, probably the highest profile being the attack on Bryan Stow in Los Angeles at a Dodgers game. While we never felt unsafe at San Jose, even San Jose Arena had its problems with some of the visiting fans (most commonly Detroit and Philly in my experience), and when Laurie and I visited other places, we ended up always going without wearing fan gear and we sometimes saw activities that made us wary. I ended up deciding to stop writing about hockey, in part because I could no longer generate discussion with my writing, only yelling and bullying, and it just wasn’t worth it. Laurie did the same, in good part because, of course, there were just some guys who couldn’t deal with a woman writing intelligently about their favorite sport. (for those curious, I’ve archived my hockey writing into its own site, which you can visit at hockey.chuq.me, but it’s no longer part of my current site here, and we also have archives up of all of the content generated while we were running those fan sites before the big companies moved in…)

This is very much old guy me yelling at everyone to get off my lawn, but sports fandom has changed in the last 20 years, mostly in ways I’m not thrilled at, and part of that is the fan experience, being part of the fandom, just stopped being fun to me. In San Jose, the last couple of years we were there before the Sharks downgraded our seats and raised our prices, the seats on the glass in front of us were given a few times a year to an older man and his son, who became known as “dammit Leroy, sit down”, because when the action came into our corner, he always stood up to try to get seen on camera behind the players. As the experience of being a fan, online and in arena, stopped being fun for me, I did what I believe the smart thing to do was: change things up to focus on the fun parts — which is sitting back and watching hockey.

I don’t miss writing about hockey (well, mostly), and I don’t miss the in game experience. I had a lot of it (35 games x 20 years plus road trips plus that year working for the spiders and seeing 30 games of theirs ON TOP of 35 with the Sharks — adds up to a lot of games) and I regret none of it. Today, I’m watching a lot of hockey and enjoying all of it. And not putting money into season tickets and parking means I could invest instead in my camera gear, and photo workshops, and travel for my photography and birding instead, which also makes me happy.

And that’s kinda the point, I think: after all those years of putting a big focus of my time into going to games, I decided it was time to focus on other things, and to enjoy but not deeply immerse myself in sports as much as I used to. Ultimately, it’s not about what’s good or bad, but what makes you happy, and I’m happy with the choices I’ve made. And one of them is not putting the money and time and effort into getting to a game in person any more. Not because that’s a bad thing, but because it just stopped being a primary priority in my life compared to other things I do.

And, of course, because it always involved stairs…