One of the challenges of being a North American expatriate in the Middle East is that you lose touch with your sports.
And of North America’s four big sports, ice hockey is the one hardest to keep track of.
Football demands your attention only one day a week. Baseball’s frequent afternoon starts are at a reasonable hour here. And basketball is on television regularly.
But ice hockey falls through the cracks.
The main problem is that the vast majority of games take place in the middle of the Arabian night. A 7pm puck drop in Boston is 3am or 4am here, depending on the time of year.
This leads to the second problem: the loss of shared experience. Fans might tape one of those 3am starts to watch later in the day, but it just isn’t the same. Part of the excitement of watching sports is the knowledge, especially in this age of social media, that others elsewhere are doing the same. You are part of something larger.
But when you watch it on your own, half a day after the fact, it is just you; everybody else already knows the score.
The third problem is that even when a game is live on television here, the broadcasts are painful.
The region’s main satellite carrier is OSN. But its hockey telecasts are bombarded with the same ads over and over – almost exclusively promos for OSN.
During Sunday night’s airing of the Montreal Canadiens at the New York Islanders, every advert but one was for OSN.
The exception, in the middle of the third period, was for Aldo, a Montreal-based shoe retailer.
The OSN promos included OSN’s Legends of Action movie night; OSN’s Thursday Night Premiere; how to register with OSN; mixed martial arts on OSN; an actor from The Blacklist suggesting you watch it on OSN; a golf tournament on OSN; and a short promo that a new OSN channel, wrestling’s WWE, was coming soon
“This is unbelievable!” shouts one announcer, during the WWE bit.
“Here we go!” adds a second voice.
All the above ads ran in the minutes between the 3am start of the broadcast and the actual beginning of the pre-game commentary.
This “OSNness” quickly has a deadening effect on the viewer, especially when the ads are repeated to a punishing degree.
The WWE ad had aired four times before the game even began.
By the end of the first period, it was up to 10.
This is unbelievable!
After two periods, 17.
Here we go!
By the end of the game, 25.
Twenty-five times with the same advert.
Alas the cure is not much better then the disease. You can record the game and fast-forward through the ads, but, again, this is not so captivating as watching it live.
You can also subscribe to NHL GameCenter on the league’s website, which mercifully shows dead air during ad breaks. But you still have the problem of the time zones.
Gradually, drifting away, you lose track of player movements, and of how the various teams are doing.
You start to forget about the little rituals of the game, a subtle comfort of fanhood. The shot of fans arriving at the arena; a clean sheet of ice to start a period; the goalie whacking the ice with his stick as a penalty is about to expire – thwap, thwap, thwap; the jerseys of the Original Six; enforcers, after a fight, shrugging it off and calmly skating to the penalty box like auto workers coming off shift; the knowledge that, somewhere, a Zamboni is lurking.
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
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