Bulldog Hockey Mania: The Only Show in Town

DULUTH, Minn.--At first, you don't really notice them.

They are hardly over-whelming--little yellow signs, maybe a foot square that read "UMD I" in crude maroon letters.

They are the kind of little signs you might slap together at home a few minutes before a big hockey game to wave between periods.

The UMD I placards are not just waved between periods of hockey games here. These little signs are on everything in Duluth.

Every business downtown has at least one, maybe three or four. Private homes have them. They are taped to the rear windows of half the cars in town.

You half expect people to have them strapped to their pets.

There are 130,000 people land who knows how many dogs) in the Duluth. Minn., Superior, Wise metropolitan area, so there must be at least 130,000 signs.

The city also has its share of bigger and more intricate signs and banners strewn about. Anything you want with UMD scrawled on it is yours here--for a price.

Dealing in UMD merchandise is big business.

Almost nothing has succeeded in Duluth over the past three or four years. A once great port, which sent the resources of the Iron Range to the rest of the world via the massive are boats that ply Lake Superior, has faded.

Ten thousand people fled the city in the last couple of years.

There is not much to brag about here.

Except the Bulldogs.

At the very top of the page in a sea of red, the headline in today's News-Tribune A Herald is: "Harvard a classy foe for 'Dogs."

The series doesn't start for two days and the Dogs are front-page news.

To get a ticket for this weekend's NCAA quarterfinal series, you essentially had get right in line last Saturday night after UMD best the hated Gophers of the University of Minnesota proper.

Tickets went on sale Monday morning--two bitter cold nights later.

Some people who spent only one night out on the street in the Minnesota winter were accommodated but not all.

MTV here is punctuated by ads for Tim and Larry's Sports Cards, featuring a 30-card set of hockey cards, featuring all the Bulldogs.

Since UMD plays at the Duluth Arena (it has no rink on campus) and since there is nothing else happening here, no other sports and little appreciable culture, the community finds its communal satisfaction watching the Dogs.

Home games this year were 99.6 percent sold out, with a couple of contests against Northern Arizona and Alaska Fairbanks falling a few dozen fans short of the 5639-seat capacity of the Arena.

Hundreds of citizens figured out an angle on tickets and called Harvard to order them through the Harvard Ticket Office, which means the Crimson rooting section will have 250 fans, 200 backing UMD.

This weekend's games will be televised by the local NBC affiliate, which has covered almost all Bulldog road games this year and some of the home contests as well.

The television deal ensures that riots don't break out in the ticket lines.

At Harvard the lack of support for the hockey team is sometimes frustrating. Neither of the FCAC quarterfinal games at Bright sold out, and RPI produced twice as many fans at the Boston Garden than the Crimson did.

However, it is the richness of the Harvard community that fosters the disinterest.

Here, hockey is king and it is more than a little disturbing As wonderful a sport as it is, it is eerie to see over 100,000 people be up their fate in 20 local heroes of UMD.

And pathetic to see a town so consumed over so little.

There are no town-gown squabbles here.

In Cambridge, the University fights with the Cantabridgians over turf and the fruits of the city.

In Duluth, there aren't any such struggles.

There isn't anything-but admission to a Bulldog hockey game--left to fight over.