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When Ottawa entered the modern National Hockey League in 1992 the newly re-minted Senators played their games at the modest, centrally-located, and civically-titled Ottawa Civic Centre. The cozy little rink was home to the young team until 1996, and it’s where I witnessed my first-ever NHL game.
Then the Sens moved out to a peach-coloured spatially-inept arena that they built beside the highway several miles outside of the capital, a building that was initially called the Ottawa Palladium. I’ve often wondered how much effort they put in to coming up with that name, knowing full well that whatever they came up with would last only until the first corporation stepped up with an adequate amount of arena-naming money, after which the Palladium name would disappear from everything but the trivia books.
In this case the first corporation that stepped up was Ottawa’s own hi-tech darlings Corel. They wrote a cheque and just like that instead of attending events at the new Palladium we were now all going to the Corel Centre. When Silicon Valley North went south the same thing happened that always happens when things go bust: a big-time bank moved in. Suddenly we were all buying tickets for concerts and games at Scotiabank Place. Hooray.
Goodness only knows (and who really cares?) how and why Scotiabank bowed out of their contract, but when they did the money vacuum was immediately filled by the upper-ups at Canadian Tire and then, ladies and gentlemen I give you: The Canadian Tire Centre. This is where things currently stand, but I sure won’t rule out going to future games and shows at the Shopify Stadium or maybe Tim Horton’s Hockey Palace or some such thing.
It’s so bloody stupid. For years I stubbornly continued to write “The Palladium” in my ticket albums after attending concerts in the Kanata arena.
“But corporate sponsorship helps keep the ticket prices down,” goes the argument, which falls on deaf ears to anyone who has actually bought tickets to any of these events. If the ticket prices were any higher nobody would go to the games…rest assured that hockey tickets are priced according to what the market will bear, and not on a price-versus-expenses formula. What these naming rights do is help make the team owners richer. If it keeps ticket prices down at all it’s only because without a naming rights cheque the owners would simply add a buck to each ticket in order to keep their pockets overflowing.
It’s greed, plain and simple. The reason why Deer Creek is now the Klipsch Music Center and Knickerbocker is called the Times Union Center is nothing but greed, on all fronts. Believe it or not, in America right now you can go to Arm & Hammer Park, BancorpSouth Arena, Fifth Third Bank Stadium, TicketReturn.com Field, Rent One Park, Whataburger Field, KFC Yum! Center, Guaranteed Rate Field, Taco John’s Events Center, and (oh, the irony) Dignity Health Event Center among, many, many other similarly un-named event buildings.
The glaring paradox with this whole Make America Great Again garbage is that every single great thing that (North) America has lost has been stolen by corporate greed, and of course it is exactly these rich, greedy corporations (and the people who run them) that the MAGA policies tend to cater to.
(North) America was greater before there were billboards polluting every available roadside view, greater before service fees started getting piled on (and on and on) to every event ticket, every utility bill, heck, every service that you were already paying a fee for. Things were greater before the tickets in the front rows cost more than tickets at the back (heck, America has been so ungreat for so long that I sometimes forget that every ticket in the room used to cost the same price).
Things were greater when they played cartoons before movies instead of commercials. Greater when a house wasn’t a thirty-year financial prison. Greater before people were somehow convinced that paying a fee would actually offset their emissions. Greater before product placement in the movies. Greater when a corner store didn’t have to compete with mega-bulk purchasing superpowers like Wal-Mart. Greater before there were a dozen robocalls a day telling me how lucky I am to have my name randomly selected, or that I’ve won a cruise.
None of these examples speak of someone trying to earn an honest buck. In fact, every single one of these little unjoys of life have become tainted simply because rich people want to become richer. It’s a sickness, a disease that the entire world has signed on for, and it’s incredibly sad.
And so it was that on April 4th, 2009 I went to the Scotiabank Place to see the Sens beat the Flyers four-to-three in a shootout. It was a pretty good game too.
Todd Man Out 