Finding Their Place
So, Nashville FINALLY did it. The new lease for the Nashville Predators is a done deal and the immediate future of the team is looking good. The question is what took so long? I understand not wanting to give away the farm and making sure the deal is “right” for Nashville, but you know what would have been absolutely WRONG for Nashville? Letting a Pro Sports Franchise leave town! Folks they don’t come around often and when they leave, believe me it leaves a stigma on the community. Nashville would have looked a failure.
I am not here to tell you that you have to support the team and you have to like hockey. Soccer’s been trying to tell the U.S. the same thing for 50 years, it just doesn’t work that way. I’m simply here to say this, if you like the Preds, great. If you don’t, that’s great too. Hockey doesn’t have to be for everybody, it just has to simply be for “enough”. What is enough? Enough to keep it financially operating. The Predators averaged well over 13-thousand paid this season and while that does need to improve it’s certainly not an “empty” arena and it certainly doesn’t make the team a failure. Do the math, 14,000 times 41 games equals almost 600-thousand fans showing up this season.
This afternoon I spent an hour with the students at Rutland Elementary in Mt. Juliet and one young man asked me a question I’d never been asked before. He asked, “why do we have 4 News stations?” My answer, “because we can”. The Preds are very similar. We don’t have to have them, but we can and in this day and age it’s a privelage, just ask Kansas City!
I’m big on the future Middle Tennessee and I think that’s something everyone has to keep in mind. Nashville is GROWING and it’s doing it every day. Industries and people move here every day and the Predators are just one more thing we have to offer as a community and one more focal point that can bring us all together. In the not too distant future Middle Tennessee will top 2-million people. As our area grows the support for the Predators will grow with it. Will they ever be the Titans or Vols? No, but they don’t have to be. They just need to be exactly what they are and last night that was a pretty good thing.
2 late goals with 17-thousand going crazy, it was absolutely thrilling and tremendous drama. It was a great moment for Jason Arnott, for the Predators AND for the city of Nashville and you don’t have to be a hockey fan to admit that.
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