Time for your mighty post sports report on the 10 o'clock news. The scores may change, but the video highlights here on fin du siècle TV invariably remain the same. For baseball: home run after home run. Boom. Boom. Boom. For gold: the day's freak hole in one. For tennis: some insipid match point. For basketball: three slam-dunks. Boom. Boom. Boom. And for hockey:

   A fight. Or on a good hockey TV night: two fights.

   Most Americans who have never seen a hockey game live can only assume that it is all brawl, punctuated by an occasional goal that no one with the naked eye sees go into the net. The National Hockey League is hoping, though, that with its stars allowed into the Olympics for the first time, the league can attract fans who would never otherwise chance upon their product. This consummation is so devoulty to be wished by the NHL that it has actually called off the season for two and a half weeks while 125 NHL players from nine nations fly off to Nagano to play for patriotic glory--and, often enough, against the very comrades in arms who are their NHL teamates.

   Gary Bettman, who has proved to be a wily NHL commisioner, fashioned a unique deal with Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Olympic president-for-life. Bettman obtained an arrangement that passed the top six hockey countries--Canada, the United States, Sweden, Finland, Russia and the Czech Republic--through to the final round. This allow those teams to practice together for a full week, while two other countries (most likely Germany and Slovakia) play through to join them in the medal round.

   Still, the midseason hiatus frightens some NHL stick-in-minds and even obliges Bettman to hedge his enthusiasm a bit. Nimbly mixing metaphors, he declares: "We're reinventing the wheel from the ground up. Hockey has been historically underexposed, so I view this as another building block. But however nice the Olympics are, this sport is still about the Stanley Cup." Bettman is so cautious that he won't even commit to an encore in 2002, when the Games will be vastly more conveniently located in Salt Lake City. There is, after all, always the chance that when the league takes its long winter break, too many fans will simply forget all about the rest of the season.

   On balance, though, the Olympics appear to be a gamble worth taking, even if hockey labors under a number of spectator burdens. First of all, the game televises terribly. Second, in a celebrity sports world, hockey never creates identifiable stars, and, in fact, NHL rules work, perversely, to actually diminish its heroes. Even a goalie, Tom Barrasso of Pittsburgh, laments how the very scorers he must content with are hamstrung by goonish tactics. "Until they let the great players dictate how the game is played," says Barrasso, "we're going to have an inferior product." Barrasso's teamate Mario Lemieux--handsome, courageous and nearly saintly--was the only hockey star since Wayne Gretzky (who's a fading 37 now) to possess visibility abroad in Oprah Land. But Lemieux retired prematurely before the season, desparing of the sport's tedious grasping and groping.

   Likewise, hockey has failed to find any poetic rhythm in the United States, the way other sports have been sweetened into homely metaphors for life and dreams and sneaker wearers. Says George Solomon, the sports editor of The Washington Post: "Hockey's never attracted the literati, gliterati crowd." The NBA outglamours the NHL in Washington, New York, L.A. and Chicago, all the places where glitz matters, and then ripples into the Lesser Consciousness of the heartlands.

   Nevertheless, while hockey is a distant fourth in national popularity behind baseball, basketball and football, there are statistics that suggest that's so largely because the sport is not popular beyond the franchise cities where people are familiar with it. "We're only the No. 4 sport because of where we're not" is how Bettman puts it. Wherever the NHL does have a franchise, the sport is often the favorite of the wealthy and the wise, the women and the young. The 15-to-34 crowd, which is the only couch-potato gold that glitters, favors hockey, rating it "the coolest" sport. Not surprisingly, the NHL has tagged Olympic hockey as "the coolest game in Nagano."


Yet overall in the United States, certain numbers and certain impressions doggedly remain. For exemple, even as Bettman has led the league to increase its sunbelt presence, with $80 million expansion franchises scatered about Dixie, national TV ratings for hockey are stuck around 2. There is a certain viciousness of circle at work, too. To sqeeze out marginnaly higher ratings, Fox regionalizes its package, which means that the NHL players aren't seen nationally and remain marginal sports celebrities.

   It does not help, either, that, compared with face-first basketball players, hockey players are ensconced in helmets and unattrative, diaperlike uniformes. Worse, the puck is so hard to follow--especially around the net--that watching hockey on television seems reminiscent of the mime tennis game in the old movie "Blowup." Fox television tried to give the puck a little comet's blue tail, and while the response to that experiment has been mixed, Bettman still believes that much of the problem can be solved simply by technology. "Almost all the R&D in sports television has come at the network level," he says. "And we weren't even on an American network for almost 20 years."

   But all the technology in the world may not overcome the insane pettiness of hockey owners. Says a high hockey official about Bettman, who came to his post after serving as a colonel to NBA commisioner David Stern: "Unfortunately for Gary, he has stupid owners, and he can't control them like Stern controls his dummies. These guys are so narrow-minded they keep the best camera angles off TV just so they won't have to give up a few high-paying seats down low."

   Perhaps an even more telling sign of hockey popularity is the money bet on its games. In Nevada, hockey accounts for only 2 percent of the total legally wagered on team sports. (Today's Olympic tip: the Czech Republic at 15-1 is the best bet at the price.) Of course, it has always been the contention of cynical America-firsters that Canada's ice export is not a real U.S. major-league sport, that it owns nothing more than a passionate small core of fans.

   Listen to those on the front lines of sports fandom, the talk-radio hosts, who possess, perhaps, the best sense of what the hardliners care about. In Dallas, for instance, where the basketball Mavericks are a joke and the hockey Stars have the best record in th league, Norm Hitzges of WLIF nonetheless hears only a loyal hockey corps. "In talk radio," he says, "we have a saying that if all five lines are lit, all that means is that five people are listening. In hockey, whenever the Stars sell out, I figure that means everybody who cares about hockey came out tonight."

   Or, says Chris (Mad Dog) Russo of WFAN in New York: "Hockey fans are extremely loyal. They've also got a little inferiority complex in them. They're just so happy when you talk hockey. But I still believe what everybody always says: that there's only 18,000 in Jersay and another 15,000 on the Island."


The Olympics are so important to the NHL, then, precisely because they can present the sport to a broad American audience heretofore unwise to the sights and sounds of the rink. What makes the connection even more intriguing is that the Winter Games have traditionally been more about pretty then about competition. "We've always known that sports fans don't even watch the Olympics," says Roxy Roxborough, the main oddsmaker in Vegas. In fact, Olympic viewers tend to fairly much mirror the typical prime-time audience, which is to say they are female. TNT, which has leased out weekday Olympic programming from CBS, is planning almost no hockey coverage but will feature a dayly figure-skating talkshow and a regular spirited discussion about Japanese cuisine. CBS will sprinkle in some prime-time hockey hightlights amid the figure skating, but for extended game action, viewers will have to wait for the late-night shift--after Letterman tells tonight's Clinton jokes. This spot may be, however, better than it sounds: the prime-time bits will be free of fighting--which isn't allowed in Olympic hockey--and the midnight ratings for the '92 Games on CBS were more than twice what hockey manages on ESPN and Fox.

   Besides, hockey is already attracting a growing female audience--41 percent of NHL arena crowds. In Denver, one of the rare places when hockey rules over basketball, Denver Post sports editor Neal Scarborough says: "Never anywhere, in any sport, have I seen the way women go for the Avalanche." Last year the Post ran a series, "At Home With the Avalanche," and since the team personnel had changed but slighty this season, it made sense to the paper to repeat those personality sketches. Denver women have absolutely demanded it.

   Some of the sexual attracton seems to relate to the fact that, unlike basketball and football monters, hockey players are of normal human dimendions. Also, frankly, in a professional-sports universe dominated by African-Americans, hockey players are white. Ironically, too, while hockey players have so long suffered (usually fairly) a no-touthed Cro-Magnon image, the constant ugly high jinks exhibited by basketball and football players have managed to make the rink rats look downright wholesome by comparison. Everybody in the NHL is making a big deal out of the fact that whereas the U.S. basketball Dream Teams would deign to register only at five-star hotels, the hockey pros are bunking in the Olympic Village, just like anonymous, penniles lugers and cross-country skiers.

   Hockey's potential popularity with women is further enhanced by the fact females are now actually playing that manly game. Womens's hockey will be officially played in the Olympics for the first time, and the NHL made it a point to include a distaff exhibition at its all-star fest last month. Similarly, the greater number of boys and girls who play in-line or street hockey have encouraged league officials to trumpet the hypothesis that those who play a game as children will pay to watch it as adult. Unfortunately, soccer has applied that wishful thinking, fruitlessly, for two decades now.


The NHL must also contend with another problem. If it succeeds in attracting a wide Olympic audience, there is still no assurance that the NHL brand of play will appeal to those attracted to the sport in Nagano. Olympic hockey is played more gracefully, on a significantly wider rink, sans mugging. Moreover, the offense in the NHL has plummeted to virtual crisis conditions. Goals scored are down 50 percent in little more than a decade to barely five goals per game. The goalies, tricked out like the Michelin man, are nearly impenetrable, and, curiouly, all that vaunted hockey agression is reserved for the defense. Long passes--the very heart of excitement in any American game--are, incredibly, against NHL rules. Just the other day, an appalled Bettman tried to stick a cork in Brett Hull, the St. Louis Blues star, after he blurted out this heresy: "I wouldn't pay to come watch us. The whole style of the game is terrible."

   But for all its institutional drawbacks, the NHL is certainly wise to seek Olympic exposure. Already, media coverage--domestic and international--has soared, including articles in such normally un-hockey periodicals as George, Vanity Fair and YM. Rosie O'Donnell had Gretzky on her show. Hockey was so quaint and dense (and often, as well, corrupt) that it had no idea how to take advantage of the single most stunning American Olympic event of all time--the U.S. upset victory over the Russians in 1980--when that bonanza was dumped in its lap.

   So, now may be the NHL's hour, delayed. Unlike the nonpareil U.S. basketball Dream Team, which performs more like a rock show than a tournament, hockey promises to present a superb international competition with drama enough to capture attention and future fans alike.

   Now, if only you could see the puck.