By around 10:20 p.m. Sunday night, the crowd of thousands standing shoulder to shoulder amid the honky-tonks has cleared out, and a makeshift memorial appears. A catfish lies in the middle of Broadway beneath a discarded sign that reads, “Go Preds.”
A security guard, silhouetted against the glow of neon bar signs, aims his camera phone at the fish: “I’ve gotta document this.”
It made for a pretty good picture, and not a bad one by which to remember this historic season for the Nashville Predators. One image would have been better, of course — a bearded man in a gold sweater hoisting the Stanley Cup. But that wasn’t to be.
Twenty minutes earlier, the clock had run out on the Predators’ season in devastating fashion, and the Pittsburgh Penguins had claimed the cup for the second year in a row. The crowd of gold-clad hollerin’-and-swallerin’ hipsters and rednecks and suburbanites and city folks who’d turned Nashville’s most famous street into its biggest backyard started trudging home. And someone left the catfish to lie in state some 150 yards from Bridgestone Arena. I stared at it, pretty sure I’d kissed the same fish two hours earlier.
Is this what a real hockey town is like when its team makes a run to the Stanley Cup Finals? I don’t know, but this is what Nashville is like.
“Act like you’ve been there before” is a favorite wise-sounding remark of stuck-up pundits and sneering opposing fans. But Nashville hasn’t been here. Not since the Tennessee Titans made a Super Bowl run in 1999, and that didn’t happen right in the middle of our city in weather warm enough for folks to stand in the streets for hours, cheering on a team.
In Round 1 of these playoffs, the Preds — who had scraped their way into the postseason as the last team in — became the first eighth seed to sweep a No. 1 seed in professional sports history, when they took four games in a row against their hated rivals, the Chicago Blackhawks. They went on to win two more series — matching the number of playoff series wins this city has seen in the Predators’ 18 years as a franchise — securing the Western Conference championship and advancing to their first Stanley Cup Finals.
And all the while, an increasingly wild scene was developing off the ice. As the playoffs went on, fans began to crowd the plaza outside the arena to watch games, home and away. And then into Walk of Fame Park. It’s a funny thing about being a sports fan. When your team is doing something like this — even if they’re playing half a country away — there is an irresistible urge to be as close as you can get. If that means huddling around screens outside an empty building with thousands of fools who feel the same way, then so be it.
By the time the Preds made the conference final, the crowd spilled out of the plaza and onto Broadway, a street that will host a crowd almost any time of day or night, but rarely hosts one like this. These weren’t primarily tourists (although there were some of those) or bachelorette parties (although there were actually quite a few of those). This was us. These people hadn’t come from a hotel or the airport, they’d come from Inglewood and Sylvan Park and Franklin and Gallatin. This was us. And we were right at home. By the time the Preds closed out the Anaheim Ducks to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals, local writer Steven Godfrey noted on Twitter that the crowd was so loud the honky-tonk bands had simply given up.
For Preds fans, the final really began a few minutes into the second period of Game 1. With the Preds down 3-0 in Pittsburgh, Jake Waddell tossed a catfish — which he’d snuck into the arena in his pants — over the glass and onto the ice. Waddell was quickly ejected from the arena, but the act ignited the fans back home and, it seemed, the team. The Preds scored three straight goals, and although they ultimately lost the game, Nashville had officially arrived in the Stanley Cup Finals. Waddell enjoyed 15 minutes or so as a local celebrity, helped along by some ham-fisted charges from the Pittsburgh police department, and a lot more catfish started making their way into the stands. (Later, during Game 6, the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast would feature a “catfish counter” at the bottom of the screen.)
Predators fans didn’t start throwing catfish on the ice just this year. In fact, throwing dead animals into the rink has a long history in the NHL. The Preds tradition is an adaptation of one observed by Detroit Red Wings fans — they throw octopuses. Think of it like a cover song. We didn’t write this tune, but we do a pretty fun version of it.
And once it became evident that folks in Pittsburgh and elsewhere were looking down on this behavior, Preds fans dialed it up to 11. More catfish appeared on the ice, on signs in the stands and in large plush form on the streets. As the Game 6 broadcast blared from large screens in the middle of the street, a man in Predators gear walked by me with a real one. When I stopped him to take a picture, he thrust the fish toward my face, and given the atmosphere, I did the only thing that felt reasonable — I kissed it.
I know of no better way to sum up what it was like downtown these past two weeks. Even when the team was in Pittsburgh, the gold horde massed on the streets. During Game 2, a capacity crowd watched on screens in the plaza, and fans swarmed the Stanley Cup as its handlers paraded it up and down Broadway. In Robert’s — the best honky-tonk there is and a bar with no televisions — one middle-aged woman leaned over toward another at a two-top, peering at her phone and shouting over the band to update her companion on the score.
For longtime Preds fans, the playoff run was a sweet reward for nearly two decades of support. But it’s true that it attracted new “bandwagon” fans, as well. If you’re holding that against them, though, you weren’t out there with them. These new fans weren’t taking things lightly. In East Nashville’s 3 Crow Bar, a rowdy crowd watched through a haze of smoke as Game 2 slipped away, and a man behind me was angry. Because of a delayed penalty on the Preds, Penguins goalie Matt Murray had left the net. That’s normal, but he didn’t know it. He thought it was an insult. “That’s just a slap in the face,” he said, his eyes widening as he slammed down his beer. His passion might’ve been misdirected, but it was real.
Days later, Tavern 96, the small bar attached to Bridgestone Arena, was overflowing with fans for Game 3, which the Preds would go on to win 5-1. If they couldn’t be inside the building for Nashville’s first Stanley Cup Finals game at home, they were going to be right outside the back door. The Preds were dominant that night, and the crowd was raucous, many of them sporting unofficial Preds gear that appeared fresh from the print shop. One young woman, armed with a vuvuzela that she used to punctuate cheers, sported a tank top that read, “My cup size is Stanley.” One bartender would stand on the bar to rally the crowd after goals.
Sometime in the second period, Wade Hemphill, a man in his mid-30s, walked in, squeezing through to the bar and looking up at the televisions with nervous energy. Hemphill, who’s lived in the Nashville area for 23 years, is in many ways the quintessential Preds fan, in that he’d always been a football fan until hockey came to town. The first Tennessee Titans game he ever attended was on Jan. 8, 2000 — the day the Titans pulled off the Music City Miracle. But in the decades since, what had always been the offseason to him has become another regular season, and he’s gone to nearly 100 Preds games. On this night, his brother-in-law, a season ticket holder, had gone to the game with an extra ticket, and Hemphill had sent his pregnant wife inside to take the seat.
As the rout went on, it dawned on him that his future child was in there for their first Predators game, a Stanley Cup Finals game and a victory for the Preds. “This is pretty cool,” he said, his face a mix of a father-to-be’s sentimentality and a fan’s maniacal enthusiasm. Soon he was buying us both drinks, brushing off my polite protests by recalling aloud that his late father had always taught him, “You just be kind to people.”
The unbridled enthusiasm on display in downtown Nashville had attracted glowing coverage from national reporters and even some in the Pittsburgh media. And if you didn’t believe the hype, you should’ve seen the look on Chris Menard’s face during the first intermission of Game 4 at Ascend Amphitheater. A Boston man by way of Florida, Chris was in town with his young son for a goalie camp. Although they’re both die-hard Bruins fans, as hockey lovers they couldn’t resist what had essentially become a massive party celebrating the sport.
“It’s insane,” Chris said. “It’s awesome. We started at Broadway, came over here. He wants to go back to Broadway for the third, so we’ll go back over there. It’s been outstanding.”
“Nothing like this even in Boston,” he added.
With each goal that night, a group of young men would take turns grabbing a flag and making a lap around the amphitheater to the thrill of the crowd.
It’s not often one can walk up and down the streets of Broadway and feel a warm, even affectionate feeling. But the Preds made that possible too. Smashville, it turns out, is a black man and his son, each wearing the No. 76 jersey of P.K. Subban, who had become an instant fan favorite in Nashville because of his irreverent and — gasp — fun-loving approach to the game and his wholehearted embrace of the city. It is a young girl in a Pekka Rinne shirt and oversized foam Fang Fingers. It’s longtime fans like David Wingo, who announced on Twitter before Game 4 that he’d dug up his T-shirt from the Preds’ first playoff series in 2004. And, yeah, it’s that catfish getting warm on the asphalt in the middle of Broadway.
If there was a Preds bandwagon this year, it didn’t begin just last week — the team sold out every home game this season — and it’s not likely to end any time soon. As the crowd cleared Sunday night and the Penguins’ on-ice celebration continued, a 46-year-old man named Jason sat in a lawn chair in the middle of the street. He wasn’t the last person out there, but close enough that he looked like a man sitting alone in the thoroughfare. Asked how long he’d been a Preds fan, he answered without shame: “This year.”
“I wanted to just enjoy the moment,” he said, explaining why he’d stayed in his seat long after the rest of the crowd. “It’s the Stanley Cup. … It was amazing. We have amazing fans. And they had a great year.”
The naysayers will look down on “Smashville” and say it’s a collection of mostly fair-weather supporters, not “real” hockey fans. That’s not entirely accurate — talk to Section 303 about earning your stripes as a Preds fan — but there’s something to it, and something no one around here is shying away from anymore. The masses drawn downtown over the past month didn’t learn how to be hockey fans. They learned how to be Nashville hockey fans. They learned to be proud of catfish, to love a man named Viktor Arvidsson and to thank the public-address announcer by name when he says how much time is left in a period. Hell, they tasted a bitter defeat, which may well do more to bring them back than a win. Fandom is not simply a matter of knowledge — there’s no test on the rules or strategy to become one. It’s also about experiences.
A bandwagon fan is just a fan without a story, really. And every one of the tens of thousands of people who turned Broadway gold has a good one now. They liked it. They loved it. You know the rest.
