The Canucks’ scouts then pulled off a reconnaissance coup worthy of a Cold War spy novel. “We had procured the Red Army game sheets,” said Vancouver’s director of hockey operations Brian Burke. “They were in Cyrillic, but you could see that Bure’s number was in the lineup on the sheets for those eleven games.” The night before the 1990 NHL draft, Ziegler changed his mind and informed the Canucks that their selection of Bure from the previous year was legitimate after all. Bure officially became a Canuck. He went on to play seven seasons for Vancouver as an electrifying goal scorer and then four more seasons with the Florida Panthers, before concluding his career in 2005 after a short stint with the New York Rangers.
THE BIG HOLDOUT
Leading up to the 1991 NHL Draft, there was no more highly touted prospect than Eric Lindros. He even drew favorable comparisons to Wayne Gretzky, earning him the nickname “the Next Great One.” Some thought his career might burn even brighter than Gretzky’s because along with Lindros’s skill and speed, he had something #99 was lacking: size. Lindros was four inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than Gretzky.
The underachieving Quebec Nordiques, who had the top pick in the 1991 draft, felt Lindros was the perfect player to help rebuild their team. There was one problem: Lindros did not want to play for the Nordiques. His agent suggested that he would earn a lot more in endorsements if he played for Toronto or one of the large-market U.S. franchises. But even though the Quebec franchise got advance warning of Lindros’s attitude (from Eric’s parents, no less), the Nordiques went ahead and selected him. Lindros reported to the draft podium but refused to put on the Nordiques jersey that was handed to him. The slight caused an uproar in Quebec where it was seen as not only a rejection of the team, but of the entire culture—regional headlines read “Lindros Snubs Quebec.” Even Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, a native Quebecer himself, publicly questioned Lindros’s decision.
But Lindros stuck to his guns, refused to report to training camp, and didn’t play in the NHL the next season. Instead he developed his hockey chops in international play, participating in the Canada Cup, the 1992 Winter Olympics, and the World Junior Hockey Championship. In June 1992, the Nordiques relented and traded the disgruntled superstar-to-be to the Philadelphia Flyers in a blockbuster package that brought Quebec Peter Forsberg and Mike Ricci, among others. By 1995 the Nordiques franchise was sold and relocated to Denver…where it became the Colorado Avalanche and, in its first season, won the Stanley Cup.
Lindros went on to play for three more NHL teams before injuries forced him to retire in 2007. (He suffered six concussions between March 1998 and May 2000.) He was named an All-Star seven times during his career and won the Hart Trophy as the league’s MVP in the lockout-shortened 1994–95 season. But he never won a Stanley Cup.
ANIMAL ICECAPADES
You’re not actually supposed to throw things onto the ice during hockey games, but sometimes fans just can’t help themselves…and that’s when things get messy.
LEGEND OF THE HOCK-TOPUS
Team: Detroit Red Wings
Animal Hurled: An octopus
Detroit Red Wings fans began the oldest, most venerable—and perhaps most disgusting—creature-lobbing custom in hockey. When the Wings make an appearance in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, someone always tosses a dead octopus onto the ice during each home playoff game. The tradition began in 1952, when the NHL included only six teams and the Stanley Cup playoffs featured just two rounds. Back then, a team needed to win eight games to claim Cup victory. So brothers Pete and Jerry Cusimano, who owned a fish market on Detroit’s east side, decided it would bring good luck if they threw onto the ice one of their octopi (whose eight-tentacles represented the eight victories required). The Wings won the Cup that year, and the Cusimano brothers became local folk heroes.
The tradition was revived in the 1990s and has continued every postseason since, despite the fact that in the post–expansion era, a team needs to win sixteen games in order to hoist Lord Stanley’s Mug. In 1991 Detroit Zamboni driver Al Sobotka added his own twist to the ceremony: after he retrieved the octopus, he twirled it over his head to rile up the crowd. Subsequent Zamboni drivers followed Sobotka’s lead, and the cephalopod swinging became a time-honored tradition in Detroit. But then in 2008, NHL Director of Operations Colin Campbell stepped in to spoil the fun, expressly forbidding Zamboni drivers from twirling octopi, stating, “Matter flies off the octopus and gets on the ice.” So now, Zamboni drivers must perform their seafood spin next to the ice at the Zamboni entrance.
According to Alphonse Arnone, a fishmonger in Detroit’s Eastern Market, preparing an octopus for Red Wings games requires some finesse: Ideally, the creature should be boiled for 20 minutes beforehand to yield the optimum consistency for absorbing the impact of the ice. Otherwise, Arnone said, “They just splat.”
ICE FISHIN’
Team: Cornell Big Red
Animals Hurled: Fish
Athletic rivalries among Ivy League schools are steeped in tradition, and the animosity between the Cornell Big Red and the Harvard Crimson ice hockey teams goes all the way back to 1910, seven years before the NHL even began. It wasn’t until 1973, though, that the rivalry acquired its signature ceremony. That year, during a game at Harvard, hometown fans taunted the Cornell goaltender by throwing a dead chicken at him—supposedly as a dig at Cornell’s agricultural college. Later that year, during a game at Cornell, Big Red fans responded by throwing fish on the ice—a rebuttal to mock Boston’s seafood industry (mercifully, they did not throw clam chowder). The chicken toss never caught on, but the fish fling continues to this day, though hurlers do so at their own risk: if caught, they are immediately thrown out of the game.
RAT TRICK
Team: Florida Panthers
Animals Hurled: Plastic rats
Before the Panthers’ home opener of the 1995–96 season, Florida winger Scott Mellanby saw a large rat darting around the Florida dressing room. “Guys were jumping out of the way and screaming,” said Mellanby. Following his hockey instincts, he grabbed his stick and fired the stunned rodent across the room. “I one-timed it and it was dead.”
In that night’s game, Mellanby scored two goals in a 4–3 victory over the visiting Calgary Flames, and as stories of his pregame rat encounter circulated, he became the hero of the day—both on and off the ice. Florida goalie John Vanbiesbrouck quipped that Mellanby had scored a “rat trick.” Rat-mania intensified when fans read about Mellanby’s pregame “extermination” in the papers the next day. Two home games later, a fan threw a couple of rubber rats onto the ice. At the game after that, 16 rubber rats rained down…and the one after that, 50. By the time the Florida Panthers—a third-year expansion team that most hockey pundits expected to fail—headed for the playoffs, as many as 2,000 rubber rats were being hurled onto the ice at home games. And it seemed to work: the Panthers made it all the way to the Stanley Cup finals that year, only to be defeated by the Colorado Avalanche.
But the mountains of rubber rats were so disruptive to the progress of games that the NHL made a rule prohibiting the ritual, and by the time the Panthers moved to a new arena in 1998, the tradition had faded altogether. Mellanby himself later said he regretted that the one real rat that started it all was harmed: “I did apologize to the animal rights activists,” he said. “I didn’t mean to kill the rat. I just reacted.”
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COME AGAIN?
For those who thought that baseball legend Yogi Berra cornered the market on puzzling sports double-talk, consider the words of Jean Perron, former coach of the Montreal Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques:
“I think that we took care of the issue at the beginning of the end of last season.”
“The day when the Nords will stop losing, they’ll win much more often.”
“The Nordiques should trade to get some rookies with experience.”
“This type of injury is very painful. Especially when it hurts.”
“When
Stephane Richer plays as per his talent, he could play with both eyes tied to his back.”
“We’re finally starting to see the train at the end of the tunnel.”
HOCKEY HERO
The award to the top U.S. college hockey player honors the first great American puckster and flying ace Hobey Baker.
Hobey Baker could have been a character created by a fiction writer: a handsome, dashing, risk-taking member of a wealthy Philadelphia family who became an exceptional hockey player and a World War I flying ace. But that’s exactly what Baker was, the first homegrown star of U.S. hockey, and exactly why the annual award for the top player in U.S. college hockey carries his name.
HOBEY KNOWS HOCKEY
From 1910 to 1914, Baker used his formidable athletic ability to captain both the football and hockey teams at Princeton. He was an excellent running back and, newspaper reports from that time claim, even better at hockey as a rover with dazzling speed and agility and splendid stickhandling. When he led Princeton to an undefeated season in his sophomore year and scored 92 points, Baker drew big crowds everywhere the team played.
HOME OF THE BRAVE
When Baker graduated, the pros were eager to sign him. But he didn’t want to leave the east to join the Portland Rosebuds, and not even a salary of $3,500 could lure him to the Montreal Wanderers. Because money was no problem, he joined the amateur St. Nick’s team in New York, a good club that beat a few top Canadian sides in exhibitions. When World War I started, Baker trained as a fighter pilot and was among the first members of the fabled Lafayette Escadrille Squadron that was shipped to France in 1917. He painted his one-seat Spad fighter orange and black Princeton colors and was as natural at airborne dog fights as he was at hockey. Bakey is credited with shooting down three German planes.
ONE LAST FLIGHT
When the war ended Baker was at loose ends without flying or sports. A month after the armistice, he drove to the airfield and said he was going “on one last flight.” He reached 2,000 feet when the engine went dead and his efforts to glide back to base failed. The plane crashed and Baker died at age 26. But the memories of him are preserved in an impressive trophy.
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“I just don’t know what to think. I play in Colorado, they tell me they like me, and I get traded. I play in Calgary, and at the end of the season the GM tells me he likes me, and I get traded. I just hope my fiancée doesn’t tell me she likes me.”
—Chris Drury, forward, Buffalo Sabres,
Colorado Avalanche, Calgary Flames
“We have to get families back in the game, get back where Saturday night, everything stops. A case of beer comes out and a bottle of rye and anyone who comes to the house, they better want to watch hockey.”
—Bobby Hull
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THE UPSIDE OF CONCUSSIONS
“One good thing is that when I forget something, maybe I could tell my wife that it’s brain damage.”
—Murray Eaves, the Minnesota North Stars forward
after a second concussion in 3 months
* * * * *
“Listen fellas. I’ve got to tell you this. I’m not the greatest coach in the world. But if you look around this room you’ll see that I don’t have the greatest players either.”
—Bernie Geoffrion, former coach,
New York Rangers and Atlanta Flames
HOW TO MAKE ICE
Uncle John goes to Florida to find out how they manage to keep the ice frozen in that heat.
FREEZING IN FLORIDA
If a city is granted an NHL franchise, it naturally must have an arena to host said club. How much would a city have to shell out to build, from scratch, an NHL arena? According to 2005 economics, the price tag would range from 200 to 250 million American dollars.
A good chunk of that money would go to the building and maintenance of the ice surface and its necessary parts. Mandatory NHL ice arena building figures, for all rinks, are that they be 200 feet long, 85 feet wide, and that each “corner” (though technically there are no corners) have a 28-foot radius. International hockey arenas are the same length, but are 100 feet wide. But how is an NHL ice surface built? How does the ice stay frozen? To answer these and other questions, Uncle John caught up with Ken Friedenberger, Director of Facility Operations (that is, ice maintenance) for the St. Petersburg Times Forum, home of the 2004 Stanley Cup champions Tampa Bay Lightning.
Friedenberger explains: First comes a sand and gravel base; then comes another sand and gravel base to prevent permafrost (perpetually frozen subsoil). “Permafrost,” said Ken, “will eventually crack the piping and turn it into a big mess, which would look like spaghetti.”
A WHOLE LOTTA ANTIFREEZE
“The piping” Friedenberger mentions might be the most important part of the building. A massive chilled concrete slab, with five to ten miles of antifreeze-filled piping in it, keeps the ice frozen. In Tampa the pipe is made of steel, though it can be made of other materials (high-density plastic, for one). “Our concrete is 60,000 pounds per square inch, which is very dense,” said Friedenberger. In Tampa the antifreeze is chilled by two massive air-conditioning units, generating about 200 tons of refrigeration. Some NHL rinks have as much as 300 to 400 tons of coolant.
HOCKEY’S LIFEBLOOD
Just as blood must continually flow through a person’s veins, an NHL arena must have this antifreeze (or other forms of coolant; brine water was commonly used until it was discovered that the salt corroded piping) constantly flowing through its pipes so that the ice does not melt. The water is processed through the piping so that the surface of the concrete is below 32°F—the temperature at which water freezes.
TWENTY-FOUR LAYERS OF GOODNESS
Players skate on ice, not concrete, so now comes the long process of putting layers of ice atop the concrete. “Here in Tampa we have 24 layers of ice. Each NHL arena will be different, according to what temperature each arena is kept at, as well as other factors,” explained Ken. The first layers of ice in Tampa atop the concrete are “50 percent city water and 50 percent de-ionized water,” stated Friedenberger. “This seems to cause very little ‘snow’ [from skate blades] and the ice holds up well. Some cities use well-water, others different forms of water. Each NHL arena has its own mixture.”
KEEP IT COOL
The first layer of ice is given time to freeze on the concrete. Then the other layers of ice can be produced. At the home rink of the Lightning, six to eight new layers of ice are put down before the lines are painted. Each layer of ice varies in depth. When all of this is finished, the ice surface temperature runs between 22°F and 26°F. “We like to keep the temperature in the Forum anywhere from 60°F to 63°F with about 40 percent relative humidity. That’s about what everybody in the NHL does,” Ken said.
AND FINALLY, THE ZAMBONI
Zamboni machines resurface the ice before practices and between periods. Once the entire ice surface system is built, the chief duty of NHL ice maintenance folks is to keep the system operational. It is an unfortunate twist of fate that NHL ice maintenance chiefs’ work—like that of referees—only gets noticed when a mistake or problem occurs.
DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK
How a hockey coach was intimidated by Gordie Howe even when Ol’ Elbows was wearing his pajamas.
Harry Neale spins the story with a smile and respect in his voice for the man many feel is hockey’s greatest, Gordie Howe. Neale, who had a solid career as a college, junior, WHA and NHL coach and manager, was 40 when he coached Howe with the WHA New England Whalers in 1977–78.
STILL A FORCE AT FIFTY
Howe realized his longtime dream of playing with his sons Marty and Mark when he ended a two-year retirement from the Detroit Red Wings and joined the WHA Houston Aeros. The Aeros won the WHA playoff title in 1974 and 1975 with the Howe family in a prominent role. After two more seasons the Houston club, losing money despite on-ice success, allowed the Howe gang to shift to the Whalers, based in Hartford, Connecticut. “C
oaching Gordie—a hockey legend and a wonderful man, a force on the ice at 50—was a great experience,” Neale said. “He intimidated people, including me, even when I couldn’t see him.”
DEPRIVING AN OLD MAN OF SLEEP
The Whalers had a veteran club, players with considerable hockey mileage, who, occasionally, enjoyed life’s pleasures well into the evening. Late in the season when the team had a shot at catching the leading Winnipeg Jets, Neale wanted his club at its best in an important game.
“I had no bed checks that season but a few guys stretched the late-night thing a bit and we needed the two points, so I told them I would drop in at 10:30 the night before the game,” Neale said. “I checked some rooms—everyone was in—then I found myself at the door of Gordie’s room. Cripes, I was like a grade three teacher on a field trip and I was checking a kid ten years older than me. I stood there a minute or two, raised my hand to knock but couldn’t make my knuckles hit the door. I must have put my hand up a half dozen times but I just couldn’t do it. So I left and went to bed.
“The next morning at breakfast, Gordie said to me, ‘Where the hell were you last night? I thought there was a bed check so I stayed up to answer the door. If I knew you weren’t coming, I’d have been in bed at nine.’”
* * * * *
BLOOD SPORT
“This is the most excited you can be as a hockey player. As much as you hate a team like Colorado, you love to play ’em. The juices will be boiling, and the blood will be flowing. Let’s clarify that; flowing through your body. Not on the ice.”
—Kris Draper, 2004 Selke Trophy winner
(Best Defensive Forward)
“It’s going to be good to be on his side for a change. I’ll save a lot of energy since I don’t have to concentrate on whacking him. I’m pretty excited about that.”
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores Page 15