(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Frederik Andersen is a 6-foot-3 Dane great in a field that occupies a very small piece of a rather small country's sports landscape.
Skim the Web versions of Monday's sports pages in Denmark's major newspapers, and you must scroll deep to find any mention of the starring role Andersen played as his team won Sunday's Stanley Cup semifinal opener against the Blackhawks.
So if the Ducks goalie becomes the first to bring the Stanley Cup to Denmark, a populace of 5.6 million that focuses its sports interest on soccer, cycling and team handball (yes, team handball) may not understand what all the fuss is about.
"Those who know hockey in Denmark will know what a high level this is," Ernst Andersen, the goalie's father and a former goalie himself, said Monday from Herning, Denmark. "In general, we will have to explain how much it means."
Yet Andersen is among eight Danes who saw NHL action this season, a group that includes Peter Regin, who played four games for the Blackhawks. That is seemingly a disproportionate number for a country with only 4,200 hockey players of all ages and both genders, just two dozen indoor rinks and weather too mild for natural ice.
Denmark never has qualified for the Olympics in men's or women's hockey. Its best finish at the world championships is an eighth by the men in 2010, the tournament in which a 36-save effort in an upset of Finland gave Andersen exposure that led the Hurricanes to make him a seventh-round pick in that year's draft.
Making the 2010 world quarterfinals is one of the landmark achievements in Danish hockey history. The other came in 2007, when Frans Nielsen became the first homegrown Dane to play in the NHL. Nielsen just finished his ninth season with the Islanders.
"All this has come from almost nothing," Ernst Andersen said. "Now the world has opened its eyes to Danish players and seen what our skill level is."
Denmark has a 10-team top league that began in 1955 and now plays a 36-game regular season, with only foreigners and a few Danes as full-time professionals.
The Danish national team made its international debut in 1949 with a 47-0 loss to Canada that remains the worst defeat in world championships history. Denmark did not return to world play until 1962.
The country's hockey still wasn't much to write home about when Dan Jensen moved from suburban Toronto to begin a 15-year career with the Herning team in 1990.
"It was pretty terrible," Jensen said Monday from Henring.
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