And I'm Sure Hockey Die Hards Want 1, Too

Hockey Night in Canada towel is the must-have for players

The way Shannon, a former HNIC executive producer, tells its history, the towel first moved toward its iconic state after the 1994-95 lockout ended, as the broadcast searched for better branding. “We wanted Hockey Night in Canada all over the place,” Shannon says. And since each intermission interviewee received the same two things—bottled water to drink and a towel to wipe his face—Shannon smacked the HNIC logo right on the thing present in every shot. “While simultaneously ending the practice of paying players a modest sum for the interview segments ($75 or so, Shannon says), the broadcast offered a token for their troubles.

At first, players ditched the towel like it belonged in the laundry, hurling it back to whichever associate producer stood nearby. “No, no,” they were told. “You can keep it.” Some would. Others ignored the offer. “But by the time the playoffs took place in 1995,” Shannon says, “the players weren’t only wanting the towel, but they wanted to be interviewed to get the towel.” On several occasions, public relations officials have approached Shannon asking for another towel, alleging that the player lost it. They often left disappointed. Broadcast rule holds that only three towels are brought to the rink each night—no extras.

Buzz quickly spread. At rink level, Oake found himself fielding offers from players hoping for a score. “You get the towel, you got me,” they would say. One asked Oake for his autograph. A few requested towels to give their fathers, though were often rebuffed out of the desire to maintain exclusivity. (For this reason, towels aren’t sold to the general public either.) Others earned theirs on merit. “I think Eric Lindros ended up with enough for a bathrobe,” Oake says. “He quite liked getting the towels. He said he used them in the boat house at his cottage.”

During the 1998 Stanley Cup Final, Capitals star Adam Oates asked longtime HNIC producer Kathy Broderick if she could send a towel to his friend, a professional golfer in Canada. Broderick hemmed and hawed but eventually agreed. The golfer, it turned out, was Mike Weir, who went on to win the 2003 Masters. “As a jock, you get spoiled and you get a lot of cool trinkets, and to have that with the logo on it is a really cool thing,” Oates says. “It’s the emblem. It’s something you grew up your whole life watching.”

(SI.com)