NHL 2004-05: R.I.P.

On the Saturday before Valentine's Day, Joe Tomon, Jr. and his wife, Patricia, headed toward Pittsburgh for an evening out.

While their date-night outing might not have been unusual for them, their destination was.

"Usually, we would be going to a hockey game on Saturday night," says Tomon. "Instead, we're going somewhere else."

When the NHL held its work stoppage, it blew a 40-night hole in the Tomons' social schedule. Joe Tomon has been a hockey fan since before there was a Pittsburgh Penguins and he followed the minor league Pittsburgh Hornets.

Not only that, but he is a major memorabilia collector. In recent years, he has had an arrangement to receive the Penguins' game-used jerseys, some of which he sells.

Others — like the one Jaromir Jagr wore when he scored his first NHL goal — he keeps at his residence, which also houses his business, Joseph A. Tomon, Jr. Funeral Home and Crematory in Ellport, PA.

Considering the state of hockey, it's fitting that one of this country's largest collections of NHL memorabilia and jerseys is in a funeral home. When the league finally gets around to burying this hockey season in the furnace, at least the corpse will something nice to wear.

Tomon also has an impressive collection of jerseys ranging from the second NHL All-Star Game in 1939 to the now-defunct California Seals to the 1992 Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins. Tomon says he has about 100 jerseys on hand and probably sells that many more every year.

Needless to say, his collection of NHL game-worn jerseys hasn't grown much in recent months.

It's all but official that the 2004-05 NHL campaign will be put to rest Valentine's Day week, and with the league's nuclear clock nearing midnight, both ownership and the players' union have staked out mutually exclusive and non-negotiable positions, Penguins' player/owner Mario Lemieux is more likely to use food stamps than see action in a hockey game this season.

And even if all the stars and planets moved into perfect alignment and the two sides reached an agreement, the resulting regular season would be a 28-game mockery.

Both sides bear some part of the blame, but it speaks volumes about this particular dispute that two of the four major professional sports leagues have hard salary caps and agreements to share most revenues.

Not coincidentally, those two leagues — the NFL and the NBA — are in the best shape, both in terms of competitiveness and finances.

Meanwhile, the two that don't have salary caps and revenue sharing, the NHL and Major League Baseball — ask most of their fans to spend money watching teams that have no chance at winning championships because they don't have the financial resources to attract the top talent.

The problem is worse in baseball, because intangibles mean a lot more in hockey. But teams like the Detroit Red Wings have been able to spend more and spend smarter and have the recent titles to show for it.

And while the players and the owners debate about such issues as cost certainty, and while both sides are losing money, a lot of fans are getting on with their lives.

Tomon not only believes that the work stoppage is hurting the sport — as a fan who is learning to get through a winter without hockey, he's proving it.

"After a while, we got used to not going," says Tomon, a Penguins' season ticket holder since 1975.

Tomon's collection includes more than recent NHL jerseys. He also has 70-year-old uniforms from the New York Americans and the Montreal Maroons, as well as Lemieux's rookie contract and one of Jagr's old paychecks.

One of Tomon's most prized jerseys — an autographed Alex Delvecchio — came with a story about the difference between today's NHL and the league back in the during Delvecchio's Hall of Fame career with the Red Wings from 1953 to 1974.

When he got Delvecchio's autograph, Tomon asked if the former player ever collected any of his own memorabilia. Delvecchio said that the players of his day didn't keep anything. All the sticks, gloves, uniforms, pads, and jerseys were the property of the team.

The players, Delvecchio told Tomon, were fearful that, if they took anything, they wouldn't be asked back the following season.

"What belonged to the Norris family, stayed with the Norris family," says Tomon. "With what the players get today, it says something that these guys were afraid of their boss."

Tomon admits that, as a fan of a team on the wrong side of the large market-small market equation, he realized the need for a salary cap and initially agreed with the owners view. But with a season cancellation imminent and no foreseeable end to the work stoppage, he is changing his outlook.

"The more it went on, I think they're both hurting the game," he says. "There's such a small fan base, and there's no TV contract to speak of.

"I don't know if it's going to recover."

Hockey will come back, if only because there are too many people like Tomon, who are passionate about the sport. But there is a question about how healthy it will be when it does.

Ultimately, it will be Tomon and other people like him — the fans — who make that determination. And, as the owner of a funeral home, he would know better than most about what happens when a person, or a sport, fails to recover.