Oddly, it is the one professional all-star game that has failed to attract a single attendee. Not even parents, wives or girlfriends can be convinced to show up, but the story as to why is one of the most intriguing yet little talked about in all of sports. 

It's inception 70 years ago started with great promise and fanfare, but when it was moved to a CYO ice rink in a suburb of Ypsilanti, MI at the last moment from Maple Leaf Gardens the trouble began. 

The move was precipitated by the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus being at the originally intended venue the week before.  A fairly new roustabout charged with feeding the elephants made an ill-considered decision to augment the diet of the performing pachyderms with a hearty helping of Beef-a-reeno.  The horror that resulted and the stench that permeated for weeks afterward were the inspiration for the Jerry Seinfeld homage in his tv episode "The Rye" where Kramer feeds Rusty the handsome cab horse he's borrowed the same food with the same results. 

While Kramer's mishap occurred on the streets of NY where the odor could dissipate fairly quickly, the elephant mishap was contained in the arena and made the hockey game quite unplayable.  The last minute change of venue and a lack of social media resulted in zero attendance for the game.  Truth be told, there was a janitor at the gym during the game, but as he was not charged any admission and paid scant attention to the goings on on the ice; it would be fudging things a bit to call him a spectator. 

The game format then was for the defending champs to play an all star team.  Being as the Maple Leafs actually went on to win the cup that year the fans then took it as a good omen not to attend the all star game, so they armed themselves and prevented anyone else from attending the second all star game and once again the Leafs took the Cup.  This unfortunate/superstitious string of events led to the game never being attended by anyone, ever as everyone thought it would bring good luck not to go. 

A interesting side note is that in the mid-50s when CBS began broadcasting the games, they quickly realized that for the sake of the viewing audience they would have to do something about the empty seats at the all-star game.  In a marketing agreement with Kodak they had thousands of life-size photo images created of fans in seats taken at other hockey games that bent in the middle to make them look like they were either seated or standing, and they placed them around the arenas.  They had all the cameras shooting from one side of the arena and during timeouts and faceoffs a crew of stage hands shuffled the fans to make it look like either they were standing up for an exciting play or sitting during a lull in the action.  By the 1960s a mechanical solution to raising and lowering the cardboard fans into and out of their seats had been developed.  By the 1980s the fans were projected on white screen/seats, and of course with modern technology they are simply created with cgi.

And that is why no one has ever gone to an NHL All-Star game before.