HDTV Could Open Eyes to Hockey In baseball, good hitters condense the skills needed to put bat on ball into a simple stratagem: ``See the ball, hit the ball.'' If only it were that simple in hockey. A sport with a relatively small but enormously loyal fan base has traditionally struggled to sell itself for one simple reason: new viewers can't follow the action on TV, get discouraged and never watch again. Can't see the puck, can't get interested. That's where high-definition television enters the picture - an unblemished, clear-as-a-photograph, wide-as-a-hockey rink picture at that. Until now, big players, big rinks and a small puck, viewed on a 20- or 27-inch screen at an 8-foot distance, have added up to tiny TV ratings for hockey in the United States. Most ESPN games, for example, are watched by slightly more than 1 percent of all TV households. No wonder hockey is embracing high-definition television, and its highly detailed images, almost as much as it would a comeback by Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux. One week after the Super Bowl was first televised in HDTV to the approximately 120,000 U.S. homes that already have adopted the new technology, Sunday's NHL All-Star game will be the first hockey game shown nationally in high-definition. Watching sports in high-definition is eye-opening because the rectangular picture, shaped more like a movie screen than the traditional square box TV viewers are accustomed to watching, allows more players to fill the screen. And a picture approximately six times more detailed than standard, analog TV makes the puck clearly visible in every shot, from every angle. Hockey Night in Canada? Watching hockey in high-definition is more like Hockey Night at the Cinema. ``Both the pictures and the sound are more like a cinematic experience in that many HDTV sets are tied into a multichannel sound system with full surround sound,'' said Ken Michael, ABC's vice president of network engineering. ``You will be able to see the puck in ways people haven't seen before.'' ABC Sports president Howard Katz thinks high-definition TV, which should be widely available by 2006, could have a greater impact on hockey than any other sport. ``As a fan, I can tell you that the first we saw HDTV, a lot of us thought this could really revolutionize the way this sport is covered,'' Katz said. ``This format, being able to see away from the puck, is just a tremendous advantage and I think it is going to be a great experiment." The HDTV telecast will be shown on the 23 ABC affiliates, mostly in large cities, that already are broadcasting a digital signal. To add oomph to the standard telecast most viewers will see, ABC will put microphones on coaches Scotty Bowman of the World All-Stars and Pat Quinn of the North American All-Stars. Does Quinn worry he might momentarily forget his words are resonating from millions of TV sets in the 171 countries where the game will be televised? ``I am not particularly enamored with the idea. I have never seen where that works effectively ... but you can't be contrived, because it looks phony,'' Quinn said. Also, ABC and CBC reporters will wander the benches to ask players questions submitted via the Internet. It will be a nontraditional telecast, for sure, one that ABC is promoting with the NFL Pro Bowl as a two-games-for-one package it hopes will attract fans who normally tune out hockey. The NHL game will be televised at 2:30 p.m. EST, followed by the Pro Bowl at 5:30 p.m. And, appropriately enough in a year when the game's first Hispanic star, Scott Gomez, will play, the NHL game will be broadcast in Spanish for the first time. ``We don't have a problem reaching hockey audiences in Detroit and Denver and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh,'' Katz said. ``Our problem, our challenge, is to attract fans in areas that haven't been traditionally great hockey marketplaces.''