Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011, will forever be known in Ottawa as the day country music killed hockey.
Senators fans are up in arms about the trade of center Mike Fisher to the Nashville Predators, but they’re not mad at the player; they’re mad at his wife.
Country music star Carrie Underwood, a former winner of American Idol, likely wasn’t living in her target market up in Canada, and a move to a country music hotbed like Nashville probably made her one happy lady. The fact that The Tennesseean referred to Fisher as “Carrie Underwood’s husband” in a headline for the story announcing the trade only drives that point home.
The only problem is that Fisher’s departure has left a whole lot of angry folks up in Ottawa, to the point where her music has been banned from the city’s biggest radio stations.
The station now insists that it was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying goodbye to Fisher and Underwood, “Ottawa’s first couple.”
While the radio station may have been trying to be funny, folks on Twitter were not, calling Underwood the Yoko Ono of hockey. While it’s a stretch to try to say the Ottawa Senators (second-worst record in the league) are The Beatles, and while it’s just as big a stretch to say Fisher (82nd in the league with 14 goals) is like John Lennon, the fans are nevertheless outraged.
Underwood’s probably not aware of much of it, as she once called Twitter a form of “organized stalking.” Given how obsessed hockey fans can be (particularly a Canadian fan base of a team at the bottom of the league), that philosophy’s really paying off for her right now.