The quest begins Wings ready to defend title

By Ken Welsch
HPR Media Services

Wings’ goalie Curtis Joseph is set for his first Stanley Cup run in Detroit.

Bob Seger fades from the popular music charts, and rapper Eminem bursts onto the scene. It happens that way. Cultural symbols of Detroit that reach far beyond the Michigan state line forever come and go.

Through it all, the city’s distinction as the “home of the automobile” remains, a tag that dates back decades. The search for the person who doesn’t connect “The Motor City” with Detroit would surely be a time-consuming hunt.

But in the world of sports, a more recent moniker brings equally wide recognition. Somehow, a game born in Canada and whose highest honor, the Stanley Cup, steered clear of the Motor City for better than four decades, now lends its name to one of sports most recognizable havens.

Welcome to Hockeytown.

Getting a full handle on why an industrial midwestern city like Detroit would wind up the self-anointed King of Ice requires observation that even the most sports oblivious pedestrian might figure. First and foremost, people love winners, and for the better part of a decade, the Red Wings have not only won, but they’ve won in April. And in May.

They’ve won when it matters most, with the Stanley Cup on the line. And what’s more, they’ve won with the full attention of Detroit sports fans, starved for something not named Barry Sanders for whom to cheer.

So while hockey fans in Minnesota or California or Florida or nearly any other place that plays host to an NHL team have been under the impression that the hockey season started back in September, the Wing Nuts have a slightly different take.

The regular season matters most if the Wings are struggling, as they were for a stretch in January when call-in radio shows were nonstop chat sessions on what might be ailing the beloved Red Wings. But the ship righted by February, with the return of longtime captain Steve Yzerman following surgery, and radio callers returned to their regular-season habits, which typically include reigning Red Wing praise while wondering who the team might nab by the trade deadline. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a half-year countdown to the playoffs.

Welcome to Hockeytown.

“(The Red Wings) mean so much to the people,” said rookie Henrik Zetterberg, readying for his first foray into the playoffs as a Wing. “I knew this is Hockeytown; it’s one of the original six, so I knew it was going to be a little bit crazier.”

As Zetterberg gradually acquaints himself with Wings’ fans, the team’s more dominant figures continue to grab headlines in Detroit at a pace outnumbered only by the current war in Iraq. The Detroit daily newspapers have dedicated weekly coverage throughout the season to include special Red Wing sections, and mini-posters of the team’s longtime heroes, including Darren McCarty, Kris Draper and Sergei Federov, continue to be in hot demand.

Understand this much: The term Hockeytown in Detroit, one of few four-sport cities in America, might never have surfaced were it not for the long-term floundering of the other three franchises. By the late 1990s, when the Wings reeled in back-to-back championships to break 42 straight Cup-less campaigns, the Lions, Pistons and Tigers were reaching their sport’s respective middle-pack, at best.

By 1997, the Wings first Cup since the 1950s, the Tigers’ baseball championship of 1984 seemed a lifetime away, the Pistons’ basketball title runs of the late ’80s were rinsed away by years of sub-.500 play, and the Lions, as Detroit sports fans have come to say, well, they’re still the Lions.

Amid all of that, here came the Wings, and with the arrival of future Hall of Fame Coach Scotty Bowman in 1993, the playoff runs got deeper by the year.

And here came the fans.

With largely the same core unit of players, the ice finally broke in 1997, and again in 1998. It’s by little coincidence that the term Hockeytown surfaced here, rather than, say, during the 1970s, when the team was perennial Norris Division also-rans.

“I think a lot of people who didn’t watch hockey before started watching then,” said Jim Newton, an avid Wings’ fan even before the team’s 1990s run. “And a lot of those people are still watching. They don’t watch much during November and December, but when the playoffs start, they’re there every game.”

Hockeytown started as a team slogan, and eventually spread to become synonymous with Detroit during the hockey season. By now it’s even the name of a popular restaurant in downtown Detroit, neighboring the Tigers’ Comerica Park and the Lions’ Ford Field, down the street from a towering, building-side mural of Yzerman, near the neighborhood where the Wings once played at Olympia Stadium.

It was in 1926 that professional hockey came to Detroit, when a team named the Detroit Cougars took the ice. They were renamed the Falcons in 1930 before finally settling on the Red Wings in 1932, and within 20 years that featured some of the game’s most storied players, they won the Stanley Cup seven times.

Number eight didn’t come until 1997.

Like we said, some cultural symbols, like the Stanley Cup playoffs, come and go. For Wings fans, the latter can’t get here soon enough.

“It’s a great place to play hockey,” Zetterberg said. “The people always support the team. There’s always a full house when we play, not like some places.

“I don’t what playoffs are like here yet, but I think it will just get crazier.”

(Ken Welsch is a Detroit area freelance writer. You can reach him at kwelsch@wideopenwest.com.)

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