Preds in 7?

April 12, 2011

Wow, look – somebody in the major media is picking the Nashville Predators to finally pick up a playoff series victory this year!

Since he put his email address up there at the end of the video, I felt compelled to write to Mr. Buccigross. Here’s what I sent him:

Hi John,

I’ve been a Nashville Predators fan ever since my friend Charlie Tuttle first took me to a game downtown in the team’s third season. I was in my mid-20s then, mostly broke and taking my time finishing out a useless degree at a state school in Clarksville, Tennessee. I remember Charlie telling me about going to a few games and having a blast in the half-empty arena. Tickets were dirt-cheap and more often than not you could move from the third level to the lower bowl and find an empty seat with a better view. After a while, Charlie had begun listening to the games he couldn’t go to in person on the radio and the call-in shows afterward, watching NHL 2Night, reading prospect reports, learning everything there was to know about the team – really getting into it. It was clear he was having a blast, so it wasn’t long before he convinced me to come along for a game. Of course I had a great time. I think I’ve probably been to something like 60 or 70 Preds games in downtown Nashville since that time, easily the most time I’ve invested in a sports franchise since I was young in the 1980s and my dad punished me for what I can only assume were my crimes against humanity in a previous life by making me an Atlanta Braves fan. Thankfully I recovered from that malady long ago, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be a Predators fan decades after the team has been moved to Moose Jaw or Yellowknife and the presence of a franchise in Nashville is just a footnote in NHL history.

Back in those lean early years when human sieve Mike Dunham and little man Cliff Ronning were our best players and Cale Hulse was one of our strongest defenders, I grew to love the Preds, as did more than a few of our mutual friends. We would drive the 40 miles or so from Clarksville to Nashville just to catch games and drive back home. I got excited when the good young players we’d drafted started to show up on the ice and I could see how we were only a few years away from making the playoffs. I was giddy when they unloaded Dunham on the spendthrift Rangers and gave my all-time favorite Predator, Tomas Vokoun, the starting job in goal. I remember the thrill when the Preds made the playoffs for the first time in 2004, and the unbelievable intensity of the Gaylord Entertainment Center when I caught Nashville’ second-ever home playoff game and watched Vokoun carry the team to a 3-0 win in his finest hour. (Charlie had caught history in person two days before when we beat the Wings 3-1 for the team’s first playoff victory.)

Perhaps most vividly, I recall the satisfaction of moving back to the Nashville area after two years in Knoxville and buying season tickets with my new wife and Charlie, right up at the front of the upper bowl – they had such a fantastic view! We got to tour the arena, meet Terry Crisp (who has GIGANTIC hands) and some of the coaching staff, check out the locker rooms and the ice – it was fantastic. Then that satisfaction was shredded into disappointment when the team’s then-owner, Craig Leipold, decided to push the league for the player lockout. To say the following year was a letdown would be a world-class understatement. We got the chance to catch an AHL matchup and some NCAA Division II hockey during what should have been the most exciting Nashville Predators season ever, and we even caught some ECHL “action” during a trip to Atlantic City in March of 2005. (Our heckling of Johnstown’s goalie from the glass and his subsequent meltdown in the third period – in two consecutive games in a 24-hour period, no less – is still a legend in my mind.) But Leipold’s “business decision” meant that Charlie never saw any more NHL hockey: he died of complications from osteosarcoma in June of that year at the age of 26, just a month and a half before the league concluded its new CBA with the players.

I caught a few games the next season, but it wasn’t the same without Charlie. It took me a while to regain a sense of excitement about the game and the team after the disappointment of losing him and them so closely together. But when the interest and excitement returned I had finally moved to Nashville and the team was beginning its respectable run of playoff appearances, giving me something to hang on to even if the experience was different than it had been in the early years. I’m not going through the archives to try to confirm this or anything, but I don’t really recall anyone in the major press thinking the Preds had a shot in any of their matchups with the Wings, Sharks or Blackhawks. (I thought they had a fantastic chance last year after watching from the upper bowl as they made the ‘Hawks look ridiculous in Game 3 last spring, but then it was all downhill from there.) So today when I pulled up your “vlogumn” today and saw you picked the Predators to beat the Ducks in 7, I felt compelled to write to you.

I’m sure there have been a few random picks of the Preds in a given playoff series over their last five trips to the playoffs, but I don’t remember any of them coming by anyone of your renown in a year where I actually thought they had a solid chance. It’s going to be a tough series, to be sure, but when you unexpectedly said “Preds in 7″ instead of everyone else’s “Ducks in 6″ I got all warm and fuzzy and reminiscent and willing to take 30 minutes to write an email to a guy I’ve never met. So thanks, John, for picking the Preds to win. It doesn’t mean a thing to most of the world, but Charlie would’ve loved it and knowing that makes me really happy.

Jason Kirk

Nashville, TN

The post Preds in 7? by Jason Kirk, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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