It Was A Different Era

When you think about how professional sports teams unveil their names or new uniforms or make any big announcement, there's always a press conference and a room full of reporters and maybe a handful of die-hard supporters there for the big news. Teams have used more and more elaborate ways to reveal big news, specifically if they're expansion teams announcing their own team names, and it had me wondering how things were done in the 1970s when the hockey map exploded with the 1967 expansion in the NHL and the following expansions they went through when competing with the WHA. Yes, I wonder about the weirdest things.

That fact aside, I was off hunting for information about the unveilings by teams like the Canucks, the Sabres, and some of the WHA teams from that era, and it seems that most teams used a trusted newspaper reporter to cover all the details of the reveal. This seems pretty reasonable when you think about people got their news back in the 1970s, so seeing a lot of ink covering these announcements makes sense.

One of the biggest news outlets is the Associated Press, and they've covered stories all over the world in all situations. It was founded in 1846, and it's an unincorporated association of news outlets across the United States. According to its own 2020 statistics, the AP operates in 245 locations in 97 countries across the world. It's a huge organization when one considers that "[m]ore than half the world’s population sees journalism from The Associated Press every day" by their own admission.

Again, things likely have changed and expanded since the 1970s for the Associated Press, so I found myself chuckling at this very brief mention from the AP found in the Spokesman-Review out of Spokane, Washington on March 7, 1974 that had a major announcement for the WHA franchise located in Cincinnati.

Those five lines of newsprint are succinct in delivering their message to the people of Spokane, Washington, but hiding it at the very bottom of Page 27 below the basketball boxscores makes it seem like the editors of the Spokesman-Review didn't care at all about Cincinnati's new hockey team. Which could be entirely true, I suppose. They are three time zones away, after all.

Today, we'd see the news plastered in a prominent place in newspapers when it comes to new teams unveiling their names along with pictures of the event held by the team, but it seems it was different era in the 1970s when it came to new hockey teams popping up all over the place. I'm not faulting the AP or the Spokesman-Review for how this story was reported whatsoever, but it made me chuckle thinking about how everything seems to be hyperbolized when it comes to professional sports nowadays.

Kudos to the AP reporter who typed out the most brief team-name reveal in sports history. It caught my attention.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!