Carrie Underwood’s hockey-playing hubby is tossing around the puck closer to the couple’s home in Nashville, but the former American Idol’s getting a tough lesson in just how seriously Canadians take their hockey. An Ottawa radio station has banned the playing any of Carrie’s charttoppers after Mike Fisher, the sportsman she married last summer, was traded from the Ottawa Senators to the Nashville Predators earlier this month.
Fisher spent his entire professional hockey career in Canada until Carrie came along, and the folks at KISS 105.3 FM aren’t exactly leaping for joy after he “was lured away from Ottawa by a country-music superstar.”
Their words. Not ours.
Branding Fisher and his blonde bride is “a betrayal to our community,” program directors at the station have effectively banned Carrie from their airwaves.
“Since Mike Fisher is getting traded to Nashville … we are banning Carrie Underwood from our radio station!” the station wrote in an angry posting on its website this week.
Fisher is defending his move and his wife. He denies the accusation that his trade to Nashville was because of Underwood. In fact, he argues that he’d been hoping for such a move for ages.
“I heard about it right away and Carrie heard about it and she was extremely disappointed and frustrated – I think they meant it as a joke that really wasn’t funny….Obviously Carrie had nothing to do with the move or the trade or anything, so to imply something like that was just wrong,” he told The Vancouver Sun this week.
The fact that Fisher does find funny is that KISS 105.3 FM is a pop music station — not a country station. Translation: They weren’t playing much of Carrie’s music to begin with.
The always gracious Underwood put out her own carefully-worded statement about the move this week: “Mike has been such a big part of the Ottawa community, and I will never forget how they welcomed me with open arms. We obviously love Nashville, and the teams’ decision for him to now play with the Predators is an exciting opportunity for Mike.”
