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The
Philadelphia Flyers are my favorite hockey team, and really, the only sports
team I follow with any sort of sustained enthusiasm. Despite my professed
fandom, I don’t see the world through orange-tinted glasses - even though the
room I’m currently sitting in is painted in bright Flyers orange.
When the Flyers do something dumb,
I like to think I’ll call them on it. For example, giving Andrew MacDonald a 6
year, $5M per season contract. Paying that much money for that many years to a defenseman
who at best seems to be regarded as stunningly mediocre and at worst is the
front-runner for worst defenseman in the league, well, that was probably
ill-advised.
However, the Flyers have recently
found a way to make grossly over-paying a meh hockey player seem like shrewd
business in comparison. Behold, the strange and troubling saga of the Flyers
ice girls.
In case you’re unfamiliar, the
Flyers ice girls are a team of scantily clad ladies who greet fans on their way
into the area and scrape snow off the ice during TV time outs at games. All
while scantily clad. It’s very important you remember this point.
They’ve been compared to
cheerleaders, but I’m not sure that’s the best point of comparison. The ice girls don’t do a ton of cheering
during the game, at least not in my experience, their function is far more
utilitarian than that. The ice girls actually perform a useful, albeit
sorta-menial task at games (cleaning the ice surface).
A better comparison would be to
ball girls at baseball games who have to chase down foul balls so the millionaire
athletes on the field don’t have to sully themselves with such a task. The major
difference between ball girls and ice girls being ball girls aren’t expected to
do their job while wearing a hot pants and a halter top.
Over the summer, a story came outwhich painted the Flyers treatment of their ice girls in a less-than-positive
manner. The word torture was used and while that’s probably an exaggeration – I
can’t see Ed Snider taking time out from plotting world domination to bother
torturing anything – the conditions the story mentioned weren’t ideal. Girls
weren’t allowed to eat in uniform, they wear little and do their job outside
and near ice, both of which are known to be cold, they’re paid $50 for about
seven hours’ worth of work.
This was all in addition to the
fact that the ice girls as an institution are just dumb. The Flyers employ some
ice dudes as well and guess what? Unlike their female counterparts, the dudes get
to wear fleeces and warm-up pants. They’re not walking around flashing ball cleavage.
Anyway, the Flyers’ response to criticism?
Burn it all down. Burn everything. Rather than address the problem and, I don’t
know, correct it, it was easier to just disband the ice girls. The Flyers
reaction was like if a person woke up one morning and said: “God, I really hate
those drapes. Well, I guess I better move.” No! Change the drapes!
In place of the ice girls, the
Flyers gave us more dudes in fleeces and warm-up pants and those dudes were
booed mercilessly during a preseason game, likely for committing the crime of
not being that thing people were used to. The Flyers reaction to this? Sorry!
Here’s the ice girls back!
Brilliant decision, Flyers. Bend to
the whim of the dumbest section of your fan base. The group who can’t be
counted on to make pleasant conversation with the people around them during TV
time outs and instead needs someone to jingle a set of keys – or in this case
boobs – in their face to prevent a riot.
As is often the case, that dumbest
subgroup of fans also happened to be the loudest and so the ice girls are back
and the ice dudes will once again be relegated to supporting players or
something.
My problem with this is
several-fold. Obviously, the logical reaction would have been to ease up on the
regulations a little and maybe even let the girls dress like people who work
near ice in the winter.
How hard would it have been to let
the ice girls wear fleeces and warm-up pants? Would it have ruined anyone’s
game experience that much? If so, just go to a damn strip club and leave the
sport where grown men chase a rubber puck around and beat the snot out of each
other to us cultured folks.
Or, better idea than letting the
girls dress like the guys, why not have the guys dress like the girls? Yeah
buddy, let’s see us some men in hot pants and muscle shirts. I want to see some
rippling pecs out there on the ice pushing shovels. Equality mother-effer. That’s
what Abe Lincoln went to war for.
And what would be so wrong with
scantily clad men cleaning the ice alongside scantily clad females? Can we stop
pretending that only straight men and lesbians go to sporting events? Where’s
the eye candy for the gays and the ladies?
Oh what? You’re worried that the
sight of scantily-clad men on the ice might illicit offensive cat calls from
the stands? So does a fully-clothed Sidney Crosby and yet no one wants to ban
him from the Wells Fargo Center.
Equality. It’s all I’m asking for.
I’m not a hero. I’m just a man who wants to see slightly fewer women in provocative
clothing. Or slightly more men. Look, you just find me a balance somewhere and
then I’ll go back to whining about the refs and bad contracts and Gary Bettman
like a real hockey fan.
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