FUN HOUSE MIRRORS

by CLARK GROOME

Attending the Phantoms hockey game at the Wachovia Center a couple of weeks ago was a lot like looking in a fun house mirror. You know what you're looking at but it's all out of kilter.

The Wachovia Center is home to the Philadelphia Flyers. Their American Hockey League affiliate normally plays across the parking lot at the Spectrum. A couple of times a year, when the Spectrum is booked with something else and the Center is free, the Phantoms play on the big boys' ice.

Well, this year, the folk who run the National Hockey League and their players union have decided that in order to make the game better for the fans and to save it from itself they need to have a work stoppage.

The owners, who must think that people in the Sun Belt value the game the way those in the Canadian Rockies do, have locked out the players because the NHLPA doesn't like the term "salary cap." The result: the season that was supposed to have started a month ago is on hold. What's even more distressing is that the two sides haven't sat down together to try to solve the impasse since September 8.

It's a mess, and many close to both sides think that the season is done, that there will not be any games played, no Stanley Cup contested and yet for all that the fans will flock back a year or so from now as though nothing happened.

What have they been smoking?

So, since the Flyers were supposed to kick off their home season Oct. 21 but didn't and since I really love the game, I headed out on the evening of the 22nd to see the Phantoms. I was going to a place where, over the last four years, I have watched more than 100 regular season and a couple of dozen or so playoff games. The trip, and the surroundings, were familiar.

But that's all that was.

The whole affair was like looking in that fun house mirror. When I arrived at the Center about an hour before game time, there were no lines to get into the parking lot, very few cars in the press area and no exuberant fans clad in orange and black.

The Center itself was eerily quiet. The press box was almost empty. The Flyers fine PA announcer, Lou Nolan, was there, but he was sitting in the press box, as was Flyers TV play-by-play man Jim Jackson. Ken Hitchcock, the Flyers head coach, was in the owners box rather than behind the bench.

Tim Saunders, the Flyers radio voice, was there and on the air, but on TV for one of the 10 Phantoms games this season that will be telecast on CSN. His partner for the evening was Steve Coates, who normally works with Jackson.

The invaluable Lauren Hart, called the Mario Lemieux of anthem singers by one of the Flyers beat writers, was there to sing the Canadian anthem. Then she departed, not singing, as she normally would, the Star Spangled Banner, which was left for students from Lansdale's Knapp Elementary School. Bless those kids, but Lauren shoulda stayed.

Flyers Dennis Seidenberg, Patrick Sharp, Joni Pitkanen and Todd Fedoruck were all on the roster, as was goalie-of-the-future Antero Nittymaki. These folks all played a role in last year's Stanley Cup run.

The hockey was pretty good. It was early in the season, and the cavernous Wachovia Center swallowed up the sound from the 10,152 fans in attendance.

The Phantoms are a good team, and lots of fun to watch. Under normal circumstances, the game would have been a delightful evening, something it probably was for many of the attendees who watched the hometown team top the visiting Hamilton (Ont.) Bulldogs 5-3.

For me, and for a few others in the press box (including those Flyers folk who were there), it just didn't seem right.

I left wanting two things: to see the Phantoms in their cozier confines at the Spectrum and to come back soon to the Center to see the Flyers again contend for the most coveted trophy in sport.

Considering the rhetoric, the stubbornness and the ill will emanating from both sides in the NHL dispute, it looks like we'll have to settle for just the former. This is one of those cases when one out of two most definitely is not enough.

The entire hockey world needs to get a better mirror so they can see what they're doing to their sport.