This is just a beautiful mug! There's no other way to describe it. All glass in the shape of a skate. Truly Canadian!
Hockey Night in Canada has been a Canadian tradition for Canadians since 1952!
Features
• 20oz skate mug with HNIC logo
• glass construction
History of Televised Hockey and way before the internet
It was September of 1952 and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
was about to launch the first television stations in Canada. In
anticipation of this, Imperial Oil, sponsor of Hockey Night in Canada on
radio, had been engaged in talks with the CBC to begin televising
hockey for the 1952-53 NHL season.
Although hockey on television was new to most Canadians, transmission
of hockey games had occurred as far back as October 29, 1938 when the
2nd and 3rd periods of a game from Harringay arena in London, England
were aired. On February 25, 1940, an experimental TV station in New
York, W2XBS, broadcast a hockey game between the New York Rangers and
the Montreal Canadiens to 300 fans. In November of 1946, KTLA in Los
Angeles aired games from the Pacific Coast League and in the 1946-47 NHL
season, the Rangers were the first NHL team to have their home games on
television.
In preparation for the televising of hockey in Canada, an
experimental video transmission of a Memorial Cup hockey game from Maple
Leaf Gardens in April of 1952 took place. This telecast was a closed
circuit viewing for the benefit of executives from CBC, Imperial Oil and
the MacLarens advertising agency and all were impressed by Foster Hewitt's call of the game.
But not everyone was convinced that televising hockey games was a
good thing. In a March 9, 1949 edition of the Hockey News, NHL President
Clarence Campbell charged that the new entertainment medium (TV) was a
definite threat to hockey and would keep fans at home instead of at the
rinks. Campbell also thought that television's limited field of view
would not be able to capture the fast end-to-end rushes that made hockey
exciting to watch. However, according to an Imperial Oil Review article
from the Spring of 1952, Conn Smythe, the president of Maple Leaf
Gardens, disagreed that televising games was a menace to game attendance
and he believed that hockey on television would eventually be a great
salesman for the game. Even so, due to the potential for a slide in
attendance because of televised games, HNIC would sign on at 9:30 pm
each Saturday night that first season – one hour after the opening
face-off. Games were picked up in progress midway through the second
period.
For the 1952-53 season, Smythe asked Imperial Oil for only $100 as a
fee for each televised game from Maple Leaf Gardens as he wanted to see
how successful the new venture would be. After the great success of the
first year, Smythe then sold the rights for $150,000 for a 3-year
contract. By the early 1960s, the rights sold for $9 million over six
years, or about $21,000 per game. Today, the rights per game can cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
