My only requirement, not that anyone asked, is a complete and utter willingness to keep the team here in Nashville. As usual, Nashville Post has the story on who might fit the bill:

The caliber of people the sources are talking about in Nashville include people such as Tommy Frist, who co-founded HCA, Cal Turner or maybe even Al Gore. Any one of them could operate under the model Martha Ingram, another who clearly has the resources, used in raising the funds for building the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, writing a big initial check but tapping friends in the community for the rest (to the chagrin of non-profits around town).

Frist has the financial resources to buy the team and could well convince some of the healthcare entrepreneurs HCA has spun off over the years to buy corporate tickets and sponsorships. And though Gore couldn’t carry the state in his presidential election bid, he may have enough clout to be the front man on a group.

I was thinking of Martha Ingram even before the news broke that a local bid was being discussed, so I’m not surprised to see her name pop up. Martha, I don’t (seriously) expect you to fund anything and everything in Nashville, but we need you and the rest of the crew above on this one. If you’ve somehow avoided falling for the Preds, at least help Nashville avoid a black eye from a franchise departure.

The entire hockey universe will be focused on Columbus, Ohio, tomorrow and Friday for the NHL draft. As scores of hockey reporters, team owners and executives, league officials and fans converge on the home of the Blue Jackets, The Tennessean reportedly will not have a presence there.

This is despite the fact that Southwest Airlines offers a $65 roundtrip fare from Nashville to Columbus and, oh yeah, our beloved Nashville Predators may very well be sold to a Canadian billionaire and shipped up north within a year or two.

With nearly everyone with any power and influence in hockey conveniently camped out a mere 379 miles from Broadway, wouldn’t it make sense for someone on the paper’s staff to cover the event and talk to insiders who may be hearing more rumors about the Predators’ future?

There’s a rumor that Richard Lawson of Nashville Post may visit Columbus because of the power brokers who will be present at the draft. Nashville Post has been all over the Preds sale developments since breaking the news in May, so I think this is an encouraging sign.

It can’t just be the fact that they share an elephant as their mascot. Is Ronald Reagan emerging as comparable figure in conservative politics to Bear Bryant in Alabama football?

It hasn’t hurt Republicans the way the Bryant’s legacy has impaired Tide football, particularly its coaching struggles in the 1990s and the 2000s, but could it? Could Reagan’s legacy ultimately cast a shadow so long and so deep that it prevents innovators and new ideas from emerging? Will it be a bad thing in the long run if the GOP becomes stuck in the 1980s philosophically?

Maybe it won’t. I think Reagan was a good president, and I would have voted for him twice if I had been of voting age. (I got my first chance to vote for a president in 1992.) But is slapping the “Next Reagan” label on every promising candidate doing more harm than good?

Maybe it isn’t Bear Bryant but Michael Jordan that I should be asking about. I have no love for the NBA, but the second coming of his highness via the “Next Jordan” has been rumored for nearly 20 years now. Has it helped Kobe Bryant or Lebron James to saddle them with this label?

At least on the topic of the future of the NHL in Nashville, Taylor Redden speaks for me. This comment was posted on ESPN.com today, and I couldn’t have said it better:

Hello my name is Taylor Redden and i just signed up so I could comment about this article and the happenings in general. From this point on I will not use proper capitalization, spelling, or grammar, so don’t flame me for it, its just the way I type.

i was born in hendersonville, tn, just 20 minutes from nashville. the earliest memory of hockey i can remember is writing a poem about hockey in the first grade for my teacher mrs. parker, which means i must have started playing roller hockey around kindergarten, and started skating before that. waaaaayyyy before the predators were a glint in your mothers eye. yes i remember the nashville nights at the municipal auditorium back in the day, but not quite old enough for the DIXIE FLYERS.

yes i grew up playing ’street’ hockey, the equivalent to your notherners ‘pond’ hockey. you guys have little one foot bar things for goals, we have trash cans. yours ponds are my parking lots. and all of this street activity lead into an actual roller hockey league. after all that happened, then we got the preds, and we rejoiced.

unfortunately, in high school i was forced/shamed into playing football, a sport that holds little meaning to me at all. if you didn’t play, you were a wus and not cool, and peer pressure is a witch… it was hard to swallow. but i still played some roller hockey….

luckily, BECAUSE OF THE PREDATORS, in my senior year we established a high school ICE HOCKEY team. i immediately quit football and any other extra curricular activities to focus on ICE HOCKEY. i was even fortunate to be the first ever captain of the hendersonville ice commando ice hockey team, a title a hold proudly to this day. it was a dream come true, something i had worked hard all my life. in my basement, the streets, everywhere i practiced hockey.

yah, in my teams first year, we sucked, BUT IT DIDNT MATTER TO ANY OF US, BECUASE WE WERE PLAYING REAL HOCKEY FOR OUR SCHOOLS PRIDE. there were barely 12 teams in the league at the time, now we have 20-something teams in the high school league, with three or four of them being from my hometown.

i feel like its been a blink of an eye since i wrote that poem, much less time since that opening night in october of 97.

AND YOUR GOING TO TELL ME REPEATEDLY I DO NOT DESERVE A TEAM? YOU GIVE ME 9 YEARS THATS IT? WHAT ABOUT THE KIDS I COACHED IN ROLLER HOCKEY? THEY AREN’T EVEN OLD ENOUGH TO BUY THERE OWN TICKETS YET!

you say you care about this sport, and you want it to grow, AND YOU WANT IT TO GET BETTER RATINGS THAN LAW AND ORDER RERUNS? then give it some time, the seed has been planted, now its time for some watering and care, then you might get some of these ‘rednecks’ to quit watching crappy TV and watch a sport that matters.

i dont know where this love for the sport came from (although i want to say wade redden is my long lost cousin and thats where i get my nak for the game), but i have it, and i spread it. everyone i take to a preds game down here gets addicted.

so please quit bashing the south, quit bashing nashville, and QUIT TELLING ME I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT HOCKEY BECAUSE I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN TENNESSEE, BECAUSE HOCKEY IS ABOUT THE ONLY THING THAT MEANS A DAMN TO ME!

LONG LIVE THE PREDS!

As a Nashville native, I had friends who played youth hockey when I was a child, I played street hockey in my neighborhood, I began following the NHL in 1987, and I remained a fan when hockey vanished from ESPN in the late 80s and rejoiced when it returned in 1993. I began playing hockey in 1995 (three years before the Preds arrived) because I loved the NHL. I loved the speed, the hitting and the energy, and I loved that the sport originated from some place I’d never been before. I remember the Nashville South Stars of the early 80s, and I attended the very first Nashville Knights game in October 1989.

Redden is right. Hockey is growing is this community and getting stronger by the year. The NHL has indeed “planted a seed” here, and it would be a mistake to abandon its emerging roots only a few years into the process. As younger fans who grew up with the Preds having “always” been here become adults, support will only increase.

Plenty of sound arguments can be made that Canada deserves another franchise, but that doesn’t mean it has to be Our Team. Let’s keep the Preds where they belong, here in Nashville.

Kroger may need to ban David Briley, Karl Dean and Howard Gentry from shopping at its stores, because all three of them have large full-color ads in Out and About’s current issue.

I’m proud of all three of those candidates for aiming to represent all of Nashville if elected to serve as mayor. Kroger will have to make a judgment call about Bob Clement, on the other hand, who is featured on pages 12 and 14 waffling about his stance on domestic partner benefits for gay city employees.

The Nashville Scene’s notorious Fabricator reports that Kroger is finally seeing the light when it comes to preventing gays and lesbians from brainwashing the general public:

“We’re not going to be playing any Elton John, George Michael, Melissa Etheridge or any other openly gay performers.”Most stores in the chain pipe in a selection of popular songs interspersed with promotional announcements, and until now there has been no sexual orientation test for the music. “Before, we only focused on having songs that most people like—kind of a middle-of-the-road approach,” the Kroger source says. “We’ll still do that, just without anybody who’s a known homosexual…”

“I don’t see what the big deal is about this,” the Kroger source says. “There are a million songs out there. And a lot of performers aren’t going to be missed. It’s not like we were playing a lot of Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Culture Club anyway.”

Asked if this newfound concern for prevailing social norms extended to performers who are known to use illegal drugs, the spokesman backpedals. “We’ll still play songs by those people because we don’t want our stores to go completely silent,” he says. “Performers like Charlie Daniels and Tom Petty may sing about dope, but at least they’re sexually straight. As far as we know.”

Holy cow! Does this mean Boy George is gay? The 80s are officially ruined for me now.

If I can be serious for a moment (we’ll see), Kroger’s decision to ban Out and About is silly, in my opinion. I’ve just scanned the entire current issue, and despite being an avid weekly reader of the Scene, I definitely find more material that would be likely to offend someone or be inappropriate for children in a typical Scene issue than I do in Out and About. One of these publications features several pages of racy chat line ads and personals classifieds, and one of them doesn’t. Care to guess?

My wife and I went on our first date to a Nashville Predators game, the last game of the Red Wings playoff series in 2004. We both love the Preds, and between the two of us, we attend about 20 games or more per year. The Preds really are Our Team.

We love this team and we love the NHL, and we’ve put our money where our mouths are: We have purchased two season tickets for 2007, and we’re excited about this coming season. We’ll be in section 302 right next to the mayhem in Cell Block 303.

I’ve been discouraged about the developments for the Preds during the past month, but I still believe in this team and this city. I encourage anyone with an interest in Nashville and a love of (or an open mind about) hockey to take a stand and buy tickets (full season, partial season or individual games). Let’s each do what we can to embrace this great team once again and help to firmly root its future here in Nashville.

Related: Looking for a way to get involved? Fill out the Our Team form and visit Save the Predators.com Web site.