Maksim Mayorov (Photo: Syracuse Crunch)

Lindsay Kramer of the Syracuse Post-Standard is one of my daily must-read journalists. He is not only one of the most prolific hockey journalists in the US (he also has a regular NHL.com beat in addition to his newspaper work), but his dedication to covering minor league hockey exceeds that of many of his counterparts on NHL beats.

My favorite part of Kramer’s coverage are his Notebooks of leftover material from Syracuse Crunch games. The following was buried at the bottom of his Friday night Notebook from Syracuse’s 5-4 shootout win over San Antonio:

(Starting Crunch right wing) Maksim Mayorov’s father, Oleg, is still visiting from Moscow, although Maksim has stopped being all warm and fuzzy about it.

“I’m so tired of him already,” Max noted. “You have these problems with parents. I just want to come home, sit on the couch, relax for a couple of seconds. Sometimes he asks me some questions. But that’s OK. I think everyone has those problems.”

Isn’t this quote felt at some point in every teenager’s life?

And where does basketball fit into all of this? Is there a particular team that people in Western New York prefer to root for? I’d imagine that the Knicks–not even factoring in their past seven seasons of futility–represent everything that upstaters hate about downstate. There is the connection between the old Buffalo Braves and L.A. Clippers, but not even the most ardent fan of the A.B.A. would retain that kind of loyalty.

Now, I have been in quite a few relationships in my day, including some of those of the on-and-off, back and forth, toxic variety.  (Who hasn’t in their day?  The degrees of severity vary, but everyone’s had at least one.)  But none come close to the toxic back and forth relationship that professional basketball has had with my home region of Western New York.  Professional basketball took Western New York and toyed with its emotions – “You want an NBA Championship? Here you go. Oh, wait – you aren’t “big enough” to support professional sports!  Sorry, let’s move the team away.” – until a whole generation and their children decided enough was enough, and ceased following the NBA all together.

Professional basketball of the CBA, ABA, and NBA variety has awarded six franchises to the Western New York area since 1925.  It began in 1925, when the Buffalo Bisons and Rochester Centrals started play in the American Basketball League.  Both franchises were short lived – the Bisons lasted one season and Centrals lasted until 1931.

Rochester would get another stab at a professional basketball team in 1945 with the Rochester Royals of the National Basketball League.  The Royals – still spoken about in Rochester to this day – were very successful, winning the National Basketball League regular season and championship titles each year from 1945-57.  Due to a series of league mergers, the Royals found themselves in the NBA in 1948.  They maintained their success, winning the 1951 NBA Championship over the NY Knicks – a victory which some Rochestairans (my father among them) still hold near and dear to their hearts, ingraining a dislike of the Knicks to their kin.  Despite continued competitiveness, the Royals moved to Cincinnati in 1957, with the NBA claiming that Rochester was not considered “major league” enough to continue supporting a team. (And Cincinnati is?)  The franchise eventually ended up the Sacramento Kings.

Meanwhile down the Thruway, the Nationals had called Syracuse home since 1939.  Originally an independent team, the Nationals joined the National Basketball League in 1946. After the series of league mergers that took place in the late 1940s, the Nationals became members of the NBA in 1949.  The Nationals made the NBA Playoffs every year of their membership (1949-63), winning the NBA Championship in 1955.  Despite their massive success, in 1963 the Nationals franchise was purchased by brothers who wished to move the team to Philadelphia in an effort to replace the recently departed Warriors franchise.  Yet another NBA Championship winning team had left Western New York for a more “promising” location.

The NBA would give Western New York one more franchise – the Buffalo Braves, who were part of the 1970 expansion of the league.  Playing at the old Aud, the Braves struggled for a few years until finally earning a playoff spot in 1974, losing to the Boston Celtics in the conference semifinals.  The Braves made the playoffs for the two following seasons.  In 1976, the team’s ownership, lead by founding owner Paul Snyder, started shopping the Braves around to cities in Florida, claiming that Buffalo was a “hockey town” who couldn’t support the team.  The City of Buffalo (rightly, in my opinion) put up a significant fight, and got the Braves to agree to a multi-year lease at the Aud.  However, a clause in the agreement gave the owners an escape option if ticket sales fell below a set amount.  So what happened during the next two seasons? The team tanked, trading its best and most popular player, Bob McAdoo.  Ticket sales dropped due to the poor performance, and the agreement with the Aud could be voided.  In 1978, the team’s leadership, then lead by John Y. Brown Jr. (who would soon become Governor of Kentucky), switched teams with then Celtics owner, Irv Lavin. Brown had a hand in the very successful Celtics, and Lavin, in the Braves, had a team that he could now move to his home state of California.  The Braves became the San Diego Clippers.  Western New York had lost their third NBA team in nearly twenty years.

Rochester tried two times after the loss of the Royals to reestablish a professional basketball team in their city.  The Rochester Colonels played eight games in the Continental Basketball Association in 1958 – a fact largely unknown until three years ago, when Rochester sports historian brought their existence to light. In 1977, the Rochester Zeniths joined the All-American Basketball Alliance, eventually moving to the Continental Basketball Association.  Attendance for the Zeniths was some of the highest in the CBA.  Although winning the league championship twice and making the playoffs in every year of their existence, the franchise would fold due to financial issues in 1983. (In a random note, in researching this post, I realized that as a teenager, I taught the Zenith’s founding owner’s daughter dance.  It’s a small, small world. My parents bought TVs from him, I taught his daughter dance, and his wife made my solo costume one year. Why didn’t anyone bring this up earlier?!)

Rochester is still flirting with professional basketball – they are currently home to the Rochester Razorsharks, who have spent time in both the Premier Basketball League and American Basketball Association, setting attendance records and winning championships in both. (Using my analogy, one could say that Rochester is that girl who, despite having finally broken up with a guy, keeps semi-stalking him, hanging out with his friends, and dating guys that look just like her ex. Yep, Rochester is that crazy girl.  Gotta love my hometown.)

Essentially, Western New York and professional basketball had a toxic relationship in the 20th century.  Despite success on the court and fan support, the NBA told Western New York three times that they weren’t a large enough market to support a basketball team.  Back and forth, the cities of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse kept showing support and fandom for basketball, and the NBA kept breaking their hearts by allowing their teams to move.

Professional basketball had little influence on me and my friends growing up in Rochester in the 1980s and 1990s – we had no team to idenitfy with, and our parents were still bitter over what happened in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  This is why I say Western New Yorkers could care less about the NBA.  The NBA showed that it never cared about them, so why should a Western New Yorker return the favor?

TO: The Collective Population of New England (especially the Citizens of Massachusetts)

FROM: A Disgruntled Western New Yorker Turned Bostonian

RE: Geography of New York State and the Sports Fandom it Dictates

DATE: November 2, 2007

I feel it prudent at this time to provide you with a refresher geography lesson of New York State (or for those of you who did not pay attention in social studies, a first lesson.) This lesson was spurred on by the absolutely drunk (and I believe underage) Bruins fan and native New Englander who sat in front of me during Thursday evening’s Bruins-Sabres game. This fan proceeded to taunt all the Sabres fans (of which there were many, including myself) by telling us that the “Yankees suck,” and that A-Rod does several unrepeatable acts of a sexual nature. He then decided to mention that “Look, who won the World Series this year – the Red Sox, not your stupid (insert-bad-word-here) Yankees.”

Oh, Mr. Underage Drunk who was using a fake ID to provide his even more underage girlfriend with beers, which proceeded to cause her to do several imitations of various Family Guy characters for all of us to enjoy throughout the evening (not well, by the way – they were clouded by her Jimmy Fallon-esqe fake Bostonian accent circa the Saturday Night Live “Billerica Knights of Columbus” sketch.) If the Massachusetts school system had taught you anything, you would know that true Western New Yorkers couldn’t give a darn about Major League Baseball, seeing that many of us go our entire lives without seeing a MLB game live. This, of course, because we live no where near a MLB team worth merit. Of course, we could cross the border and watch the Blue Jays, but no one has wanted to do that since the mid-1990s. Anyway, we are too busy with football, hockey and lacrosse – baseball would over extend our sports focus.

Mr. Underage Drunk and your fellow New Englanders, to best argue my case, I present a map of New York State.

The red part of the map represents New York City, Westchester County, and Long Island, aka, the parts of New York that Western New Yorkers and New Englanders mutually loathe. The orange part of the map represents a few counties that think they are Upstate, but are really lumped together in our disdain with New York City residents. The green part is indicative of the Adirondacks region of New York State, a part that I’m surprised has yet to be annexed and split in half by the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. People here don’t pay attention to sports that are not represented in the Winter Olympics. The rest – the yellow – represents true Upstate New York.

Upstate New York can be further divided into four separate areas:

1. Western New York (of which I am biased towards, being raised here.)
2. Central New York (another place I am somewhat biased towards, as I went to school here.)
3. Albany/Capital Region
4. Poughkeepsie, or the Land of Downstaters-Who-Aren’t-Really-Downstaters, therefore we like them.

Within these four regions, sports team devotion is quite varied. Those from Albany and Poughkeepsie definitely tend to like the Yankees or Mets, because of their proximity to New York City. However, for football, while those from the Poughkeepsie area tend to like the Giants or Jets, I have found that those from Albany like either the Bills, Giants or Patriots, but not the Jets. The Giants hold their training camp at SUNY Albany, the Bills are considered the team of all of Upstate New York, and the Patriots are somewhat close by (2 ½ -3 hours) and for a few years now, have been quite popular to follow.

Central New Yorkers seem to split when it comes to liking baseball – half seem to not realize the sport exists, while the other half either like the Mets or the Yankees. When it comes to football, this region is all over the map – while you will find your fair share of Bills fans, I have come across Philadelphia Eagles fans (for example, Binghamton, NY is on the Pennsylvania border, and is maybe a 3 hour drive away from Philly – thus the Eagles fans there) and Giants fans. Strangely, I rarely found a Central New Yorker Jets fan. It is important to note that the further North you travel in Central New York (Syracuse and Utica, for instance) you will find mostly Bills fans, while in the armpit (Broome, Delaware, and Chenango counties), you find the most diversity.

Now we come to the land of my birth, Western New York, where you are a Bills and Sabres fans upon your conception. Besides my Uncle Sean, I know of no Jets fans in Western New York, and I certainly have never met a Giants fan from here either. (Although, if I remember correctly, there is/was a bar on West Ridge Road in between the Kodak complex and the retail Candy Land that is Greece, NY that advertised as being the Giants fan hangout on Sundays. It is in that strip mall with the Abbots and, I believe, Buffalo Bill’s Tavern that has the white, hot pink and ’80s teal awing. Those of you who know Rochester know what I’m talking about.) The only other football team represented in the area are the Cleveland Browns – a small contingent of their fans exist throughout the area. These fans tend to be older in age and hawken back to the day before the Bills existed, and the Browns were the only team nearby. Strangely enough, this leads to a weird mix in Erie, Pennsylvania (just over the Buffalo border) where you have a pretty divided mix of Browns fans and Bills fans, with a smattering of Steelers fans.

However, baseball fandom in Western New York tends to be highly personal in nature. I know three devoted Red Sox fans in the area and two Yankees fans. When I was in tenth grade, I knew a few guys in school who aligned with the Red Sox because it was, in the words of one of them, “the team that college kids like.” I don’t recall their fandom going any further than the purchase of Red Sox hats. The majority of Western New Yorkers really do not align themselves with a particular baseball team. For example, when I was growing up, I once asked my father, who I looked to for all of my sports knowledge, what baseball team I was supposed to root for. He shrugged and answered, “I don’t know – the Blue Jays?”

Western New Yorkers do care about Triple A baseball, with the Buffalo Bisons, Rochester Red Wings and Syracuse SkyChiefs all in the International League and all playing each other regularly in “Thruway Series” games. But when it comes to Major League Baseball, Western New Yorkers live too far away from New York City (at least a six hour drive) to make it to a Yankees or Mets game on any regular basis. In addition, culturally, Western New Yorkers despise New York City with every ounce of their being – we equate Bloomberg, Guliani and their political counterparts with the devil for monopolizing state funding away from our region; we blame New York City for the past two decades’ influx of crime in the area due to criminals from NYC being sent to serve their time in Western New York and residing here when they are released; and overall, we hate the way Downstaters pretend we don’t exist. Truthfully, Western New Yorkers have an inferiority complex when it comes to Downstate, and we aren’t afraid to show it. Thus, the majority of Western New Yorkers would never think of adopting a New York City sports team as their own.

This disdain of Downstate New York is a reason why many young Western New Yorkers are seemingly flocking to Boston to lead their adult lives – career opportunities in our home region are so limited, but we can’t bring ourselves to move down to New York City because of our overwhelming dislike of the area. So we choose Boston, an area with similar, if not more intense, feelings towards Downstate as the ones we were brought up with. And this is why, at Sabres-Bruins games, the Sabres fans come close to outnumbering the Bruins fans – we’re moving up here in droves.

So, Mr. Underage Drunk, the next time you attempt to taunt Buffalo Sabres fans by telling us how much the Yankees suck, recall that we too, hate the Yankees. Instead, we recommend that you just singsongingly taunt, “Chris Drury. Chris Drury. Chris Drury.” or make up some taunt regarding the 1999 Stanley Cup Finals. We’ll smirk, and then, just like what happened on Thursday, some Sabres fan will remark to the other Sabres fans around him, “Never mind – the Rochester Amerks (the AHL team in Rochester) sell more tickets than the Bruins.” We’ll all laugh, proclaim the fan’s correctness, and look at the New Englanders’ confused faces.

*******

An aside added later – I forgot to add an important discussion piece in this entry. I feel that Major League Baseball had more of a fan base less dependent on geography before the most recent players strikes. In order to appeal to fans outside of a teams geographical region, a sport needs to have a momentum building that transcends geographical limitations. With baseball, when you had larger than life players like a Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and the like, ones who seemed almost mythical, the story sold in places with smaller populations like Western New York, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Iowa, even though the teams involved played far away. Once player strikes began to happen, outlying fans such as these had less buy-in than fans in the actual regions where teams existed, and thus, were the first to abandon baseball. Baseball has been back for over a decade now, but only now are they rebuilding the momentum – you had three long suffering franchises win the last four World Series, which is again news worthy for those with no baseball team in their area. It will take a bit longer for baseball fandom to reach its before strike levels, and the fear should be that they have lost an entire generation (those 22-28 or so, who were of prime fan development age during the 1994 strike) of fans. However, I have no doubt that baseball will always be a relevant and successful sport in this country.

The NFL has this momentum now, with a wide ranging appeal that defies geographic boundaries. What helps professional football is that every state in the US has a Division I college football team, which is essentially the equivalent of the farm system in baseball. Even those states with seemingly nothing else have college football (Montana State – always a contender in Division I-AA, Boise State – the surprising stars of last year’s college football season,) thus allowing fans to follow players from college into the professional ranks. This buy in increases the propensity for someone not near any NFL team to be a fan of a NFL team. The NBA had the mythical athlete appeal through the 1980s and 1990s and have lost it – thus why the NBA is increasingly suffering loss of viewership over the past view years. The NHL barely touched the mythical athlete appeal with Gretzky, but besides that, never had a reason for those not located near a team to become a fan – thus why the sport is now failing miserably. A professional sport built on a pure regional adoption of team as the sole reason for fandom model will no longer succeed in America.