Capitals’ Stanley Cup victory was great for hockey
When I saw Alexander Ovechkin raise the Stanley Cup and watched the celebrations in Las Vegas and Washington D.C., Thursday night, I thought of Glenn Brenner.
Unless you lived in the D.C. area in the late 1980s and early ’90s you have probably never heard of him.
Brenner was a local TV sportscaster in Washington back when local news was still a big deal. And he was a really big deal. When he died from a brain tumor at 44 in 1992, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan spoke highly of him and said he would be sorely missed.
Reagan mentioned his humor and his exuberance. That’s what Brenner was known for and why he was making more than $500,00 a year.
I met him in April of 1991.
I was in Washington covering the Penguins and the Capitals in the Divisional Final and we were doing our work out of Brenner’s station – WUSA-TV.
Photographer Michael Challik and I were excited to be there. The Penguins playing in their second playoff series was a big deal back then.
Brenner let us know right away that it wasn’t a big deal to him and his WUSA sports team. We were sitting in an outer office outside of Brenner’s office and when he saw us, he pointed to us and said, “Hi, boys, just want to let you know that, if the Capitals were playing the Penguins right there, this is what we would do.”
He reached out to the double doors and pulled them shut as he backed into his office.
He had no use for hockey and didn’t believe his audience did, either. Maybe he was right.
Keep in mind that, at the time, Washington didn’t have a baseball team and the NBA’s Bullets were in the middle of a 15-year stretch with 14 losing seasons. The Redskins were all they had and they played 16 games a year. Brenner, the No. 1 sportscaster in town, said he’d rather cover the Redskins in a charity golf tournament than a Capitals game.
The Penguins won that series 4-1, advanced to the Prince of Wales Conference Final where they beat the Boston Bruins and then on to their first Stanley Cup win over the Minnesota North Stars.
I had covered the Pirates’ World Series win in 1979 and the Steelers in Super Bowls XIII and XIV and covering every Penguins game and practice – home and away – during that Cup run was and still is the most fun I ever had as a sportscaster.
Lots of people in Pittsburgh, including way too many in the media, discovered hockey that year and have been hockey fans ever since.
I have thought of what Brenner said every time the Penguins played the Capitals in the playoffs, and I knew the only way to change the hockey attitude in the D.C. market was a Stanley Cup win.
There are now literally hundreds of thousands of new hockey fans in Washington D.C. , including many in the media, who have looked at the Capitals as an annoyance for most of their existence.
The Capitals’ win was great for the NHL because it may have finally turned the USA’s seventh-largest TV market into a hockey town.
- There are hundreds of thousands of people in Las Vegas who had never seen a hockey game in person and never had an interest in watching one on television who are now hooked on hockey for life. Most of them probably haven’t spent much time thinking about the possibility that it could be another 15 or 20 years before the Golden Knights play in another Stanley Cup Final. The Penguins, with some of the best players in the world, went 17 years between their second and third championships.
- Those were two expansion teams playing for the Stanley Cup Thursday night in Las Vegas. The Capitals were an expansion team in 1975. Their 8-67-5 record that year may have had something to do with it taking a while for the sport to catch on.
The Golden Knights finished their first regular season 51-24-7.
- The Philadelphia Eagles deserved to be disinvited to the White House by President Donal Trump. They were scheduled to be there Tuesday to celebrate their Super Bowl win, but they let it be known that very few players would show up. Some reports said that quarterback Nick Foles was the only player confirmed to be there. Somehow, most in the media blamed Trump and he was called everything from a coward to a racist for saying nevermind.
If you invite 53 people to your retirement party and 52 say no thanks, are you still having the party?
- Colin Kaepernick created quite a storm by deciding to turn the playing of the national anthem into his personal vehicle for self-expressionmore than a year and a half ago and he thinks it required collusion on the part of NFL owners to make him the most radioactive football player on the planet. Why would any owner want to hire him?
- Pro football season starts this week. The Canadian Football League opener is Thursday. ESPN will carry the games again. No touchbacks.