Jets’ Shenkarow ready to trade tears of sadness for joy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/04/2011 (5602 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There were tears in his eyes and his voice was cracking on May 4, 1995, when Winnipeg Jets president Barry Shenkarow told a news conference the team would have to be sold.

Or so the Free Press reported.

At the time, Shenkarow said he’d been warning for years the team needed a new arena of its own if it was to remain in the National Hockey League, but no one had listened.

“I never thought this would happen,” Shenkarow told reporters.

I’m doubting Shenkarow ever thought this would happen, either — ‘this’ being the prospect of the NHL returning and perhaps even our old Jets. Last Friday, I called Shenkarow and left a message for him to call.

At the time, I was composing, shall we say, an emotional column on news the NHL will be testing Winnipeggers to see how much we really want the league to return by seeing how many of us are willing to commit to buying season tickets. If, that is, the NHL grudgingly grants us one of its failing American franchises.

I’ve since learned that kind of show-us-the-season-ticket-money demand has been a standard ploy, even as far back as 1996 when the Jets left and the Edmonton Oilers were expected to go from 8,000 season tickets to more than 13,000 if they wanted millions in Canadian dollar-equalization from the league.

Last Friday’s phone call to Shenkarow was a search for some unemotional perspective. And that’s sort of what I got when he returned my call Monday. At least, his voice was unemotional, as was his answer when I asked what it was like for him to hear an NHL team could return and that it might even be the old Jets.

“Well,” he began, “it’s been 15 years.”

But, as reserved as he was, I could still sense Shenkarow’s joy, or at least his enthusiasm, when I asked if he thinks a team could make it today.

“I think so,” he said. “I really do.”

He went on to say part of the reason he thinks it will be “doable” is the obvious; the economic factors are different today than they were back in 1996 when the Canadian dollar was far from par with the American buck, and there wasn’t a collective agreement with the players and a salary cap that goes with it.

Shenkarow didn’t mention another economic factor that’s changed.

The one he and his partners were so in need of in the mid-1990s: a team owner-owned arena and all the revenue the 15,003-seat MTS Centre generates for True North, the company that would bring an NHL team here.

This in a city where the average attendance in the last few years of the Jets was between 13,000 and 13,500.

In any event, that’s part of the dollars-and-cents argument for an NHL franchise succeeding now when it couldn’t a decade and a half ago.

There’s more.

Shenkarow said people will have to do more than simply say they want an NHL team. The fans will have to buy tickets. One season ticket could range from around $1,500 to $7,000 as they do in Calgary; or $40 to $250 per ticket as they do in Edmonton.

Plus GST and agency fee.

Still, Shenkarow sounds positive.

“I think people will rally around this.” Then he explained why.

“It’s part civic pride. It’s part emotion. It’s part hockey. And I think the city will support it. They want the team.”

Which brought Shenkarow to what the city also lost when the team left.

A certain pride of self. Shenkarow didn’t use those words. Instead, he expressed it in positive terms and what we would gain.

“I think it would be great for the city. The spinoffs are unbelievable. Both emotionally and economically. Especially for young people. I think everybody would be really happy.”

Well, maybe not everybody.

But Shenkarow is right about that feeling of civic pride, that sense of big-league “can do” we’d get back in this Canadian small market. This place at the heart of the continent where our big hockey heart has never stopped beating.

In the end, I asked Shenkarow if he would support a team by purchasing season tickets himself. This time, he let out a little of his long-buried emotion. “Oh, yeah, I’d support it wholeheartedly,” he said.

OK, that’s two for Barry Shenkarow, two more Mayor Sam Katz says he’s committed to. And I know one guy who’s been buying season tickets to the Moose for years in hopes the NHL would return one day.

So that’s six we know are sold.

Just 14,997 more to go.

If a team ever really gets here.

gordon.sinclair@free press.mb.ca