It's Hockey, eh?

Spending the Christmas and New Year's Holiday time period in London, Ontario, Canada - a long way from Southern California not only in terms of distance and climate but also in sports interests.

In London, as well as all of Canada, the entire sports world has been focused on the NHL Strike and the World Junior Hockey Championships. These two issues are somewhat related in that one of the consequences of the NHL Stoppage is that Canada was able to send their very best junior aged players to these World Championships.

The Canadian Juniors waltzed through the preliminary round undefeated, received a bye into the semi-finals and met the United States today to determine who would play in the Gold Medal game. Canada had already defeated the USA in the round-robin 2-1.

Well it didn't end well for the Canadians - the USA dominated in their 5-1 victory and put the entire Dominion in mourning. The long knives are out this evening as every news show - not just the sports talk shows - are wondering what went wrong.  Yet if you switch to an American station (even ESPN) there is no mention whatsoever of the "great" victory of their U-19 squad.

The other major topic of interest in Canada is the NHL work stoppage. Desperation rules as a countdown has begun towards a deadline beyond which there will be no NHL hockey this season. News of this labor strife is barely noticeable in the USA outside the hard core sports networks. Life in many of the southern NHL venues has continued with little, if any, mention of a lost season.

At the same time the Canadian sports networks give some mention to NBA basketball, the NCAA Football Bowl season and the winter meetings of major league baseball. By "some mention" I mean that it gets a few minutes of each broadcast after the majority of the time is spent analyzing the NHL & World Juniors at a level commensurate with the American  Cable News Networks' coverage of the "fiscal cliff".

Who would have thought that a thin line like the "49th Parallel" would create such divergent sports interests. These countries operate in two different sports universes.