Dartblog

If you haven’t been to an NHL game recently, let me give you one more reason to enjoy hockey at Thompson Arena. For motives that are quite beyond me, the powers in the NHL think that the fans of their sport have short little spans of attention. The son et lumière avalanche that awaits you at a big league arena is overwhelming. This treatment even extends to local teams like the Manchester Monarchs.

Each home team goal is signaled by an ear-splitting blast of a central air horn, and the generalized strobe lighting, rock ‘n roll music and Jumbotron commercial/charity pitches seem to go on endlessly. At each gap in the game, some promo appears on the big screen at high volume, as if the fans are unable to keep themselves busy discussing the game or enjoying what has just occurred.

In fact, the Jumbotron seems hypnotizing to many spectators. At a Washington Caps game a few years ago, as Alexander Ovechkin played before us, I turned away from the game to watch the fans. The puck was inside the blue line right in front of us (we were in the sixth row) and Ovy was fighting for it like mad — yet all around me, fans were looking up at the big screen instead of looking straight ahead at Alexander the Great. Geez. They should have stayed home and watched the game on a flat screen in their living room.

At Thompson, except for the replacement of the organist by about a dozen pop music fight songs, the atmosphere is as it should be: old time hockey. The acoustics are good, so you can chat with your friends about the last great play, and almost every seat in the house lets you feel close to the action.

Come join us. We sit right next to the goal judge in the visitors’ end for both men’s and women’s games.

Addendum: George Potts ‘60 writes in to point out a feature of modern pro hockey that is happily absent from Thompson except on rare occasions:

In the 1970’s, I used to share season tickets to NY Rangers games (Madison Square Garden). I would take my young son (sometimes daughter) and enjoy the old-time way of playing the game (usually with the Bruins stomping the Rangers). This would usually include a beer (or two) and a good cigar. A few years back, my son reversed the tables and took me to a Bruins game here in Boston. What a change! Obviously no cigar … and generally, whenever a face-off was to occur, the players would skate to their respective benches and lean against the rail for a minute or two until (apparently) the TV commercials were finished. What a downer! For me the flow and continuity of the game had been ruined. Mammon is sometimes a monster.