Midwest Guest readers, those who follow me on various Social Media channels and folks who simply know me well in real life know of my love of hockey and particular affection for the Plymouth Whalers.
The Plymouth Whalers are part of the Ontario Hockey League (OHL), a Junior Major team based in the Detroit metro area where many major league athletes started their professional careers as 16- to 20-year-old players.
If you follow me on Instagram, you've seen lots of shots from Whaler games, many of them featuring the team's mascot, Shooter T. Whale. Shooter, born on December 11, 2003 and hailing from the Arctic Ocean, according to a poster I have of him on in my basement stairwell, has long been one of the most visible faces of the Whalers and always has a smile or high five to share with you whenever you see him at a game.
We've had season tickets to Whalers' games for more than 20 years, and we've enjoyed every minute of every period of every game, but we've found that, like all too many good things, our relationship with Shooter and the Whalers soon must come to an end.
The team celebration of its 25th season is a bittersweet one as the last few games left in this season mark the end of the team known as the Whalers, which I suppose means that Shooter will soon lose the job that he seems to love so much.
Whalers ownership sold the team franchise to a group in Flint, Michigan that will move the team to a new home an hour or so north of here and plan to go forward under a new name.
I've long touted the team as a fast, fun, high-quality, affordable and family-friendly alternative to other astronomically priced "Big League" games, but the Whalers never seemed to be able to catch on with a "Hockeytown" crowd spoiled by easy televised access to hockey and what are, for most of us, all-too-rare chances to see a live NHL game.
Don't get me wrong, I've long loved the Detroit Red Wings (Tim and I had one of our first dates at the Wings' home opener at Detroit's Joe Louis Arena), but watching the Whalers always gave us an opportunity to see great hockey live at a price that didn't involve something just short of re-mortgaging our house.
Watching the Whalers all of these years allowed us to see many great players before they became "big league" players, and I've said that it almost always meant that we had "a dog in the fight" when it came to watching things like the Stanley Cup play-offs whenever the Wings did not make it to the final rounds.
One of my favorite memories in recent years of watching the Stanley Cup finals came in 2011 when former Plymouth Whaler Tyler Seguin played with the Boston Bruins during their run to a Stanley Cup.
Besides Seguin, we've seen players like David Legwand, Chad LaRose, Pat Peake, Todd Harvey, Robert Esche, Fred Brathwaite, James Wisniewski, Steven Weiss, James Neal, Jared Boll, Chris Thorburn and Bryan Berard at the early stages of their professional careers as Whalers before they made it as players for the National Hockey League.
We're very sad to see this era of our hockey-loving time end, but we'll always remember the team and look for players as many of them move forward into the NHL.
We wish all of the best for the players and all of the folks that worked for the team that gave us so much pleasure over the years.
For Shooter, who the arena announcer always introduces as "The killer whale without a tale", we bid a fond farewell as we thank him and his team for so many hockey great memories.
© Dominique King 2015 All rights reserved
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