Interview footage: Dr. Clark Haptonstall, Part 2

LENNY: ...a good bit better now. So we'll begin because--this actually kinda ties in quite nicely--half the reason I'm calling back is because I ended up--long story short I managed to not record the first half of the last interview.

DR. CLARK: Oh gosh.

L: Yeah. We were--I had one interview going into the next interview, and I just kept going--I just kept the thing running, so i didn't end up actually looking to check if it was even recording. So I missed the entire first interview I was doing, and then...

C: Oh boy.

L: ...yeah, I managed to make that up, and then i nudged the mouse later, and was like "wait a sec, that didn't record and of that! GYAHHH!" So the first half of that, the Hornets chunk, I ended up losing, but there were a couple of bits that--now that I've talked with some of the other people as well, Ernie Salvatore and Don Hatfield in particular, I was wanting to plug some of them into there, because one thing I had remembered from when we were talking the other day was you had mentioned how--the Fieldhouse basically being a gift from the local and state politicians, and Ernie had mentioned it basically being patterned after all the big sports "gardens" of the time, like Madison Square Garden, like Chicago Stadium, and stuff like that--were they really--was that basically their intent, they were going to give them the most state of the art arena they could find?

C: At the time, it definitely was, and they wanted--they were hoping that the arena would be a complete oval that would seat about 8,000 people. What they ended up having was a steel strike during the building of the arena, and what it did is it made prices really almost cost-prohibitive for steel, so they went from an 8,000 seat oval to about a 6500 seat horseshoe, and they made the seats a little bit smaller than they had wanted to in order to be able to reach that attendance number.

L: And then when the hockey team actually came in there, something that Hatfield had mentioned was they had essentially done a learn-the-game scrimmage, and I was just kinda--this kinda plugs in more to the Blizzard, but did they do anything like that when the Blizzard came into town? Anything to kinda get people acquainted to the sport?

C: Um, I don't remember so much a scrimmage that was designed for that purpose, but I do know that first year especially that they would go out of their way to explain hockey rules, whether it be in handouts or the game program or the PA announcer trying to explain what icing was or hooking.

L: There was something else--ah yes, I just remembered the other thing that came up when I was talking with Hatfield was attendance, which was--attendance wasn't that great, but I know they were basically--they spent the whole time they were there trying to compete with Marshall's basketball team, which at the time was fan-freakin-tastic. But Hatfield was mentioning that as the season progressed, they started to get more and more fans, and I was just--I guess a little something to tack onto that, if you could possibly...

C: When they first started the season, there was certainly a lot of confusion about hockey because it was just not a location that there was any hockey news, that hockey just hadn't made an impression in Huntington. So I think once people found that it was exciting, and that the team was pretty good, that it carried on, and attendance grew toward the latter half of the season.

L: From there I wanted to move on to slightly more present-type matters, and I was--one thing I had forgotten I was going to ask from last time was something I'd noticed from looking through things is there was kinda like this nice little curve--I'm not sure if nice is really the right word--but basically--I mean, the beginning of the decade you had the Huntington Cubs come up...

C: Mmhmm...

L: ...then you have the Blizzard come in, you have the Hawks, I think it was, the football team...

C: Right.

L: ...and that kinda like peaked at about mid-decade, then just--pretty much the same fashion, it just all kinda comes--everything just leaves all, not really at once, but in that kind of same downward slope. I mean, is there anything--I'm just kinda wondering, like, what factors were in there, I mean was it just Huntington's decline, or was it just the natural cycle of minor league existence...

C: That's something that is, even to this day, is frustrating to me, just because I've been involved with some of those projects, you know--I had worked at Marshall for a number of years, but I was also in on the ground floor at getting the Huntington Cubs, I worked there for the first three years of that organization. I saw the Huntington Blizzard. I was good friends with Bud Bickel, who ran the Huntington Hawks, and it seemed--it seems as if Huntington would support a minor league team for a few years, and then it's almost like flipping a switch. So it's--it was frustrating from my experiences with the Cubs to see a team do well and average over 2,000 people per game for the lowest level of minor league baseball, and then after a few years the--there's just not the committment there from Huntington, and I don't--I haven't been able to put my finger on why that would necessarily be the case.

L: It was something that confused me a little bit, because I'm thinking like on the one hand, Huntington--particularly on the jobs front--kinda declined around that time, but at the same time, there's--minor league teams, I don't have this as like a mathematical figure, but it seems like they only, on average, they'll stick around for about five years anyhow.

C: But it's--part of the frustration I experienced was why can't Huntington support a minor league baseball team when Bluefield, WV's had one for 70 years? You know, or Bristol, or Johnson City, TN--how come these towns that are much smaller than Huntington have had minor league baseball successfully for 70 years, and Huntington can't seem to keep a minor league team for more than five?

L: And the Johnstown Chiefs are still playing...

C: Right...

L: Another thing, something--as I kinda alluded to earlier, I was somewhat discombobulated in our previous interview, but I had asked what it would take to get another team successfully back here. You had mentioned that the first thing would be local ownership. I don't think I actually followed up on what it might take!

C: I think that it would take--it would definitely take local ownership and local investors. Each one of the minor league organizations, or most of the minor league organizations that we've talked about have included people who have come in from out of state. And I don't know if there's a lack of trust from Huntington consumers towards that ownership, or they feel that money that they're spending is perhaps leaving the area, but I think with local ownership there's a much better chance of succeeding. In sports, one of the things that makes teams successful is the personalities of the people who compete. And people often want to feel as if they know who the athletes are, and they feel that they can relate to them somehow. I think the same thing is true with ownership. I think if some of the most successful people in the Huntington market were able to combine their efforts, combine their investment, and bring in a minor league baseball team that had a successful stadium--for instance, if they had a shared stadium, shared baseball stadium that they shared with Marshall somewhere in the 3rd Avenue area, I think it could be, I won't say a goldmine, but it would be successful. I think they would have a very good chance to succeed. Marshall's been talking about building a baseball stadium for at least 20 years, so I don't know when that's going to happen, but for minor league baseball to succeed in Huntington there needs to be a new stadium and there needs to be local ownership. I mean, I try and think back to 1990 when I started working with the Huntington Cubs, and now that I think about how much fun that was, and how much Huntington rallied around that for a time, that it's very intriguing to think what a new stadium and what local ownership could do for a minor league baseball team in Huntington.

L: As far as the puck game--baseball, obviously, is a bit more natural to the area, baseball being baseball in general--how much more difficulty is there in that? Granted, there is that small base from when the Blizzard were still here, but...

C: I think with baseball, one of the things that made it nice in Huntington was the low cost of attending, where the cheapest ticket was $3.25. And also, it was during late June, July, and August, which were a time when no other Marshall sports were going on. So in that instance, short-season minor league baseball was a good fit. As for hockey, the thing that you would hope that you wouldn't compete--you would be competing with Marshall football and Marshall basketball with a hockey season. The thing that I have found in seeing minor league hockey--and I see this even here in Houston--is that people who are big fans of the hockey team don't necessarily cross over to other teams. There will be--if we're talking about the biggest fans, people that are fans of the Huntington Blizzard aren't necessarily the same people that are going to a Marshall basketball game or a Marshall football game. It almost seems to be a whole different section of the population.

L: That was actually something that came up in some of the earlier interviews is that they ended up getting a lot of the fanbase from outside Huntington--a lot of Ohio people, a lot of Kentucky people. One of my best friends is from Logan County, and her family would come out for Blizzard games.

C: Wow. Yeah, that's quite a committment, and what's interesting about that is Huntington--er, I mean Marshall hardly draws anything out of Ohio and Kentucky, so for people to come to see a minor league hockey game, that's a big committment in time, if nothing else.

L: Well, I've expended my mental reserve--anything else you'd like to tack on about hockey, attendance, minor league sports, anything in between?

C: Um--achoo!--sorry, I'm finishing up with the flu, I'm trying not to cough during my quotes.

L: It's quite all right, I actually had a call come in and the corresponding beeps were while you were talking, but it was in between words...

C: (laughter)

L: ...so it's quite all right.

C: No, I think you've done--I'm telling you, you've researched this well, and you've got--you talked to Hatfield and Salvatore, I'm sure that they did a nice job. When I wrote my article, I talked to Salvatore for a long time. He's pretty passionate about it, too, I bet he was an entertaining interview.

L: Oh, he was a great interview. Ernie was a great interview, I actually talked to him twice...

C: Yeah...

L: ...he was quite fun to talk to, I talked to some of the old Blizzard players, didn't actually talk to as many people as I was kinda hoping I was going to end up talking to, but at the same time I'm kinda wanting to turn this into--I'm basically wrapping up the graded project, I've spent half the time thinking about, like, how to go further from here...

C: Right, right...

L: ...do I want to do more about Huntington, do I want to do more about hockey, and, like, the general region--I had one idea to try and start writing a book about hockey in the South. It's always kinda intrigued me--being from Michigan it's always been an intriguing concept.

The Obama Method

Forgive me if I insert a political reference, but the title there is my quick-and-dirty name for getting a lot of money in small amounts out of a lot of people. In the context of this page, a similar endeavor was attempted to keep the old IHL Hornets in town, but I'm invoking it right now because Dayton Bombers owner Costa Papista is trying a similar approach in readying his franchise for a 2010 return:

Papista plans to[...] offer minority investors the opportunity to buy into the team at the $5,000 level through a private placement memorandum.

The plan calls for the team to secure 230 of these investors within 60 days, along with a new majority owner. The makeup of ownership would thus be 50.5% new guy, 10% Costa Papista, 39.5% everyone else--for those counting, that means that to feasibly run an ECHL franchise costs around $3 million. For comparison's sake, let's set the WABAC machine for 4 January 1957 (from the Raleigh Journal, courtesy of the always awesome NewspaperArchive.com):

Huntington Group Nears Hornets Purchase Price

HUNTINGTON (AP) - A local group headed by promoter Dick Deutsch today was within $10,820 of the reported $35,000 needed to buy the Huntington Hornets International Hockey League club from its present Fort Wayne, Ind. owners.

Deutsch announced after a public meeting last night that Huntington business and private individuals had pledged to purchase 2,418 shares at $10 a share in a proposed "Huntington Hornet Corp."

Deutsch holds an option to buy the club. He says he wants the people of Huntington to feel that it is their team. The option expires Monday.

Evansville, Ind., also has made overtures to purchase the club and move the franchise there. The club was moved here from Grand Rapids, Mich., only last year.

Per the US Government, that would amount to an IHL franchise costing shade over a quarter-million dollars in 2009 money. One of those shares would be $75; Papista is taking season-ticket deposits at $50. My, how things change...

I seem to update this weekly

Hope that's not too slow for you kids.

Calling Don Hatfield (former Huntington Advertiser hockey writer circa 1956) this afternoon. In the meantime, putting together a first cut of the final product. We're in the home stretch, kiddos...

This week's action

2 hours from now: ring up Ray Edwards in Albuquerque

Tomorrow: Paul Pickard in Kalamazoo

Rest of the week: talk with Todd McCormick, reschedule Ernie Salvatore, ring up Dr. Haptonstall again, transcribe interviews, find some notable namedrops to try and interview

I feel like I'm less done than I should be, but I'm actually pretty well along. It's weird. I think I'm just not used to actually completing major projects.

Upcoming interviews!

I have two interviews lined up on Thursday afternoon with David Walsh, Herald-Dispatch sports writer who was on the Huntington Blizzard beat, and Dr. Clark Haptonstall, head of Rice University's Sports Management program and a Marshall alum--he had written a piece in Goldenseal magazine in 1993 on the Huntington Hornets that served me quite well in my preliminary research, and in addition was in town during the early stretch that the Blizzard were here, AND he has a Ph.D. in Sports Administration. So we'll have all our bases covered there.

When the interviews are done, I will have transcripts up ASAP on here.

Good day to all who've ventured thisaway

This will be the new home of updates on the research and progress of an as-yet untitled documentary on the ice hockey history of Huntington. It is a remarkably rich history, dominated by the seven-year tenure of the East Coast Hockey League's Huntington Blizzard (1993-2000), whose time also heralded the construction of a local ice rink, the Tri-State Ice Arena (1995-2005). Huntington also had a very brief stay in the now-defunct International Hockey League with the Huntington Hornets (1956-57). Even before them, there was a team--which I have found little on--known as the Huntington Aces (1940?-45?), which was an amateur/semi-professional outfit stocked primarily with off-duty factory workers.

As much as there was going on on the ice, Huntington's ice hockey history has been equally tumultuous, if not moreso. Absentee owners, financial difficulties, relocation threats, cult followings, all the fun of small-market hockey south of the Mason-Dixon, with a cameo by Mike Killbreath too (If you've never heard of Mike Killbreath, these links should help)!

I've got lots of different roads to go with on this one. As I said elsewhere, there's going to be a "director's cut" of this ultimately, as I want to include everything somehow. I intend to get deep with this, looking as much at the off-ice situation as on-ice play. I'm especially intrigued at looking into what problems Huntington has in terms of hosting a hockey team--or any team, for that matter. Economics, fan patterns, facilities, the works.

This page will be a place for me to A--make announcements on progress, and B--solicit ideas and help. Anything anyone can contribute would be colossally appreciated.

--Lenny