Sam Fels - Madison St. Station

Madison St. Station

Sam Fels

Copyright @ 2017 by Sam Fels

-all rights reserved

For Laughing Boy, Geezer, and Pias.

Epiphany

A pril 13, 2008

San Jose v. Calgary (Game Three)

I know. It seems weird that a book about the Blackhawks and being a Hawks fan (at this point you're probably thinking supposedly) starts off with a game between the Sharks and Flames. Well, it is weird. But this is the night that started this silly little journey of mine, that would give me a unique seat to the rise and conquering of the NHL by the Chicago Blackhawks. All of it viewed from my cold little post outside Gate three or from the empty-can-littered desk at which I'm writing whatever this is.

I was living in Los Angeles at the time, half-heartedly claiming that I was there to do stand-up comedy but already figuring out that I didn't really have the stage chops to go anywhere with it. I had been out of work for a couple of months at this point, having decided that working overnights in various California casinos was taking too much of an emotional toll on me (that is if you gauge your emotional well-being by the regularity of crying in your car at dawn, which I think is a pretty handy way to do it). So needless to say, I was certainly at a prime point for a major pivot in my life and for whatever might cause it.

And even from L.A., I had caught Hawks fever again. This was after Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane's rookie season. It was a season that proved how futile our hopes had been in the seasons before, all of them bestowed on kids never worthy of it, such as Mark Bell or Tyler Arnason or whoever else was a synonym for tomato can. This was after the season that Bill Wirtz had died and the shackles that held held the organization back for so long had come off. This was after the first season Rocky Wirtz and John McDonough took over and ran the Hawks like an actual organization in the twenty-first century (which is about the extent of what they did despite all the claims of geniusness coming from their own offices, but that's for much deeper into this book). This was after the season during which the Hawks ever so briefly flirted with actually making the playoffs, even if they would have gotten fustigated by the Red Wings in no more than five games that year. This was right after the season that Patrick Sharp netted thirty-six goals, the kind of total no Hawk ever dreamed of approaching for years even if they'd been allowed to shoot on their own goalies. This was after the season when a bevy of other young players came up for a look, and it was easy to see that something was bubbling here, like some witches brew from some Shakespeare play I wrote a middling paper about in high school.

I'll remember the moment exactly for the rest of my life. I was walking back from the kitchen in our apartment where the carpet was dirty enough to create a new element or two and suddenly I froze, standing behind the couch, with the Sharks and Flames on the screen. I think the Sharks had just scored to go up 3-0, a lead they would eventually blow to lose 4-3. Randy Hahn, the Sharks play-by-play man, was losing his mind on the call and perhaps it was the volume that snapped my mind into gear (for once). And suddenly it felt like something hit the natural frequency within me. You don't get a lot of these moments in your life, so you tend to notice when they happen. I couldn't move. My muscles basically froze. I'm guessing not a lot of people get such a clear vision of what they are supposed to do with their lives so immediately. Let me tell you something: it's better than coke.

I was going to bring back The Blue Line.

Well, that's not exactly how it went in my head. At such stupidly dramatic moments like as this, your thoughts don't spill out before you so well spelled out. It was more a bunch of words crashing into each other like souped-up bumper cars, but I was able to decipher what it all meant in the cavernous space between my ears. I saw the words Blue Line and you and write and Hawks and could put it together. Toss in a fuckstick because that word is generally always just below the surface in my mind. To the point that every phone I've ever had has memorized it within ten text messages written.

I had to sit down after a few moments, basically to come to terms with everything and in the hopes that the numbness within me would subside. Of course, being a Fels meant I had to see what could go wrong with this plan. Like, in painstaking fashion. Not just light musing or introspection, but a full out audit of all the ways I would fuck this up, even just mere minutes after thinking of it in the first place. The first challenge, of course, was finding the people who did the original program to see if they had any interest in doing it again. I dont know if I thought I would just write for them from Los Angeles or if Id come home to take it over. I just knew I had to talk to them.

But what if I did have to do it on my own? Were there enough people like me who read The Blue Line who would want to read another version? Or had they all given up their Hawks fandom, never to return (like those on the Night Train)? Were they all Chicago Wolves fans now? Did they all die (if you spent any time in the standing room in the old Chicago Stadium, you know this was a reasonable question)?

I quickly began crunching numbers in my head, even though I had no concept of what the term crunching numbers actually meant and still don't, which is probably why I ended up making up a job instead of getting a real one. How many per night would I have to sell to make this work? How much were these to produce? It didn't seem like it took too many sales to at least break even. Even with all the different disasters I could conceive of, like dragon attack or bail money for when the Younger Wirtz would assuredly have me arrested, I couldn't find any angle that made it seem impossible or not worth going for.

The coming days included calls to my father and brother to see what they thought. I searched out Mark Weinberg, who wrote The Blue Line, through various message boards. It all eventually added up. That one night, watching the Flames and Sharks, sprang the next nine years that saw me standing in the snow selling my booze-addled thoughts on the Hawks to my fellow drunks. What follows is my story, their story, and maybe just a little bit of your story too, even if you're not a Hawks fan. All told through the fuzzy vision of your intrepid writer.

So with all apologies to Nick Hornby for parroting (or outright stealing) his Fever Pitch model, let's go for a ride, shall we?

Indoctrination

D ecember 20, 1987

Bruins vs. Hawks

Of course, the seeds were planted much earlier than that spring day in 2008. Everyone has their first game. This was mine.