I'm going shortest to longest for the sake of my sanity--that, and because I can end with the incredible honor of talking with Ernie Salvatore while beginning with my humiliating first recorded interview. I say humiliating because I realized part-way through the interview, I had not actually started recording--which means that I also did not record a wonderful roundtable discussion with former Marshall club player and WMUL Kicksave host Todd McCormick and Herald-Dispatch writer David Walsh.
I would get them re-interviewed later on, and would get a second session with Dr. Clark Haptonstall, who, as a grad student at Marshall, wrote a piece on the Huntington Hornets that ended up making its way into an issue of the West Virginia historical magazine Goldenseal in winter 1993. He would later become sports information director at Marshall; in 2003 became a professor in sports management at Rice University in Houston, and in 2005 added a Ph.D from Florida State to his title. While my frustration over having missed a significant chunk of relevant material caused me to miss Dr. Haptonstall calling Huntington "Houston", I was lucky enough to have caught the recording right before one of the more interesting finds in my research, which is where we begin...
DR. HAPTONSTALL: ...so anybody who wanted to own a minor league, or wanted to own a professional team, often the East Coast Hockey League was where they looked, because the franchise fees at the time were very low. I used to, when I was in college, this would have been about 1990, I also worked for the Huntington Cubs, which was a professional baseball team in town. And our owner was from New York, and had the idea of bringing in professional hockey to (Huntington) 'cause he thought it would just make perfect sense, that way the same staff could work year-round, you know, summer doing professional baseball, the rest of the year doing professional hockey. And he had made some exploratory calls, but what he ended up finding was the franchise fee with the East Coast Hockey League, because it had become so popular so quick, had gone from $20,000 to $100,000. And that kinda got a little bit out of--the price tag was just a little bit too high at that point, and it only went higher from there. So there was some early, early talks, in fact he went down to the Fieldhouse to try and explore that, having never been in there. And we first walked in there--I was with him--and he was like "oh my God, this building is perfect for it!" With the seats pushed back, the rink would fit perfectly in the lower level, that way there would be close to 4,000 seats up top. It would make it a tough ticket to purchase, it would make it kind of a tight atmosphere, a loud atmosphere, a historic atmosphere, but it was--the problem was, at that point, they had had a lot of problems with the pipes for making ice, so they went ahead and cemented over everything. So if you were to move into the Fieldhouse, you would have to almost start from scratch, dig a huge hole in the dirt, in the basement there, and put the pipes in fresh. Either that, or go with a temporary ice surface. But other than that, that was the only thing I had heard of, and that was--to call that a serious attempt at bringing hockey to town would be a stretch.
LENNY: So that was it, until a couple years later when the thought was to put it in the Civic Arena...
CLARK: That's right.
LENNY: ...and that ran into relatively formidable opposition, just from having to install an ice rink there that had never been there before.
CLARK: Yeah. And--I'm trying to recall now--they went with a temporary ice surface, and a lot of the discussion was, when you went into the Civic Arena at the time, was, well, who's going to pay for it, and then who's making money off of the parking, who's making money off of the concessions, and for the Civic Arena, which really was kind of a stagnant building and didn't have a lot of events in there, to have something go in where they needed all of these dates, it was something that they were certainly not accustomed to. And so there was a lot of hesitancy about bringing a team in from really an ownership group that was out of state.
LENNY: Yeah, I forget which City Council member actually went as far as to refer to it as a "scam"...
CLARK: (laughter)
LENNY: ...I don't--again, I don't have that paper with me right now in this little cubicle here...
CLARK: Nice.
LENNY: ...but that ultimately passed, and they dropped the team in for '93-'94...
CLARK: Yeah.
LENNY: I'm trying to think of where to go, particularly on this one--I just actually had a conversation with a few people on the Blizzard, touched on quite a few points on the ups and downs of it, including--one thing in particular I was wanting to touch with you on was just kinda the difficulties of keeping--of having, and maintaining, and keeping from relocating/folding up a hockey team, or a professional sports franchise in general, in Huntington...
CLARK: Mmhmm...
LENNY: ...and particularly some of the difficulties that the Blizzard had--for most of its existence it was pretty much year to year.
CLARK: Right. It's almost--and I say this as a Huntington native, very proud of my hometown, but it's really almost embarassing the fact that Huntington can't keep a minor league team of any kind. I've had some association with a few of them, one of them being the Huntington Cubs, a little bit with the Huntington Blizzard in terms of seeing them come through, but I think a lot of what has happened in (Huntington) is the people of Huntington are so used to Marshall University, and all of the connections that they have with that institution and those teams, that they have a hard time kind of engaging something new, meaning they have a hard time becoming part of a fan base for something where it's not consistent, where players come in and leave--they're here for a year, they're here for half a year, so it's as if they don't learn about the new players and the new team.
LENNY: As far as--we haven't had a hockey team in this town for quite a few years, there's been at least one attempt to drop one back in, it did not go very far of course, but what do you think it would take? I mean, what do you think are some things that would be needed for such a franchise to actually--at least last as long as the Blizzard did on a slightly less than year-to-year basis...
CLARK: Right...
LENNY: ...or a more than year-to-year basis, I guess.
CLARK: I think the first thing you would have to have for that market would be a local ownership group, where it's not looked at as if someone is invading the Huntington area and bringing a team in, but rather it's a commitment from local ownership to have a team. There's nobody from the Huntington area that is going to be good enough to play at a professional level, so it's not that you can't have--"well, at least we have a couple of Huntington kids on the team", so that's not going to be the case. But it almost needs to be someone who is committed to Huntington, someone who is committed to the area to see it through, where they have--where it's a priority to see it succeed.
LENNY: Okay... Trying to think of a follow-up on that one... I'm having a little bit of a brain hiccup, and the heaters going in the studio aren't helping me any here...
CLARK: No problem! Go ahead, take your time, go through your notes, whatever you need...
LENNY: I think--that was pretty much it, unless you had anything else you wanted to add as far as the situation and all.
CLARK: I was kinda curious, because you know I haven't lived there since the year 2000, I'm curious what you heard about--of a team coming in there since the Blizzard...
LENNY: Okay...
CLARK: ...you said it didn't go far, but I hadn't heard anything.
LENNY: Yeah, when--I've only been here since 2002. I think 2003 or 2004, one of the old Blizzard executives, Mark Edwards, who's now I believe head of marketing with the Fieldhouse, had looked into an attempt to put a team in the--at that time it was the Atlantic Coast Hockey League...
CLARK: Okay...
LENNY: in Huntington. They had teams in Knoxville and... a few of the other smaller East Coast League markets back when the Blizzard were still in town. In fact Jim Bermingham actually coaches in Knoxville now for that franchise.
CLARK: Oh, you're kidding!
LENNY: But it was--from what I had read, and I need to--eventually I was going to get around to interviewing Mark Edwards as well--no, it was Mark Williams, rather. But it basically--I guess the big stumbling block from what I had read was the lack of available, good dates in the Civic Arena...
CLARK: Yeah...
LENNY: ...and so that ended up falling apart, and I had read one bit--which I'll need to ask him about as well, where he had tried to put one into like a junior league, and that league just collapsed upon itself...
CLARK: (laughter)
LENNY: Dead due to ridiculously bad management. I was--I remember looking at bits on this league on message boards, and it seemed to be a league that only existed on message boards...
CLARK: (more laughter)
LENNY: ...from all the things I had been reading.
CLARK: Yeah. Oh gosh...
LENNY: But elsewise it's just been arena football.
CLARK: Okay. And there seems to be a lot of variation in that from what I've seen.
LENNY: Yeah, well if I remember correctly the Arena League has patented arena football, so everybody else just has to kind of tinker with it one way or another to keep from getting sued.
CLARK: (laughter) Yep...
LENNY: But elsewise, as far as what I have on here, that's all she wrote!
CLARK: Okay.
LENNY: I thank you very very much. I'd shake your hand if I could reach that far...
"The IIHL and the Hurricanes were brought to me by league founder Mike (can't remember last name). It was apparent after a little research that the league was not viable. I was actually looking for something to help the then operating Tri State Ice Arena. It was struggling and needed to increase revenue outside of public and private skating."
The name was Killbreath, BTW. I did talk to Williams in-studio, and that will be transcribed in due time.
