A Blast from the Past

While it might be hard to believe based on the relative lack of coverage it receives on Caught Looking, while growing up I went to more hockey games than baseball or basketball games. Last season, I only went to two hockey games - one at HP Pavilion in San Jose and one at the RBC Center in Raleigh - but as kids my friends and I went to Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York to see the Islanders play multiple times each hockey season.  On Friday, I made my return to the Coliseum after a multiple-season absence to watch the Islanders play host to the New Jersey Devils.
   

Even back in the late 1990s the Nassau Coliseum was considered one of the worst venues in professional sports, and it doesn't seem like any real capital improvements have been made on the arena in the last decade.  As always, from the outside the Coliseum looked like a drab ball of concrete, although now most of the signage for the now-defunct New York Dragons of the Arena Football League has been replaced with cheesy ads for Optimum cable internet and television.  The concourses were still simultaneously barren and crowded (there was a surprisingly respectable crowd at the game, probably because a lot of people were in town for Thanksgiving).  The sponsors whose ads lined the boards of the hockey rink were far from the marquee national advertisers that you'd find at a New York Rangers or San Jose Sharks game - companies like New York Community Bank and CompressionStockings.com (whatever that is) even had their logos embedded into the ice itself (see below).

 NYCB and CompressionStockings.com are low budget on-ice sponsors.

I was, however, pretty impressed with the fans who came out for the game.  Even though the team gave the crowd absolutely nothing to cheer about (and a whole lot to boo about), the fans were relatively energetic and loud.  There was the usual suite of anti-Rangers chants, which happen during every Islanders game regardless of opponent, which always puts a smile on my face.  It was great to see the Islanders only "super fan" - an overweight Long Islander who sits in the first row behind one of the nets and wears a gold wig under an Isles hat - retaining his usual seat and working tirelessly to pump up the crowd.  The game proved that, despite what you might read in the local papers, there will be plenty of angry people if the team does ever move to Kansas City or Canada as is constantly rumored. 

Despite the extreme crappiness of the Nassau Coliseum (it rivals the Oakland Coliseum and Candlestick Park as the worst venues that I've visited in recent memory) and the even worse performance of the team itself (the Isles lost 1-0 to a weak New Jersey team and blew a golden opportunity to tie the game with a penalty shot in the third period), I still had a great time.  Isles games take me back to a time in my youth when the Nassau Coliseum was the only venue that my friends and I were allowed to visit without our parents, since Uniondale was a lot closer and less intimidating for a group of young teenagers than the Bronx or midtown Manhattan.  For that reason, the Coliseum and the Islanders will always hold a special place in my heart, no matter how incredibly dilapidated the Islanders or their home arena get.