Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (16 page)

Derek Sanderson:
The Bruin center wore a piece of Italian ram's horn, given to him by a friend, on a chain around his neck, and had few injuries after he started wearing it.

Steve Shutt:
If anyone touched the carefully prepared sticks of the Montreal Canadiens sniper before a game, he immediately changed to other “untouched” sticks. Asked why, Shutt had a simple explanation: “I just don't like anyone touching my sticks.”

Mike Palmateer:
The nickname for the Maple Leaf and Washington Caps goalie was “The Popcorn Kid,” because he liked to eat a large box of freshly popped corn brought to him by the team's trainers just before the warmup.

Gordie Howe:
The 32-season veteran felt that his pre-game preparation wasn't complete if his midday meal was not a steak with a coating of blue cheese and a baked potato. “No special reason,” No. 9 said. “I just liked it that way.”

Bruce Gardiner:
After this Ottawa Senators center had a bad game during the 2007 Stanley Cup playoffs, his teammate Tom Chorske cryptically suggested he was treating his stick too well. Gardiner sought to change his luck by dunking his stick in the toilet before his next game. After playing well that night, Gardiner dipped his blade before every game from then on.

The thing that makes ice hockey the elegant, fast, beautiful sport it is? Skating. It's a wonderful thing to do all on its own—especially in amazing places. Here are a few that you might want to put on your “frozen bucket” list.

1. SOMERSET HOUSE RINK (London, England).
This rink is made by flooding the courtyard of Somerset House, an 18th-century mansion overlooking the River Thames right in the heart of London. (Once someone's home, it's now a music and art center.) Since the rink opened in 2000, skating here has become a hugely popular winter event in London, especially at night, as you can skate directly below the mansion's imposing and colorfully illuminated facade. (Skating season: November to January.)

2. SOHO SQUARE ICE RINK (Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt).
You went snorkeling in the Red Sea, stepped into the blistering heat of the southern Sinai Peninsula, gazed across the water to the hazy desert mountains of Saudi Arabia—and now you could really go for some ice skating. And you can, at the indoor ice rink at Soho Square, an entertainment complex built on the coast in this world famous resort city. Guaranteed to be the finest desert ice skating you'll ever experience. (Season: Year round.)

3. EIFFEL TOWER ICE RINK (Paris, France).
In 2004 the Parisians decided the Eiffel Tower wasn't spectacular enough as it was—so they built an ice rink into the tower's iron lattice work, 188 feet off the ground. The rink is pretty small, but who cares? You're skating inside the Eiffel Tower! And looking out over Paris! (Season: November to January.)

4. CURRY VILLAGE SKATING RINK (Yosemite Valley, California).
Yes, you can actually ice skate in the shadow of the famous Half Dome, while looking out at the grandeur that is California's Yosemite National Park. It's been a tradition since 1928, when the Yosemite Winter Club, a group formed that year
to promote winter sports in the park, flooded a parking lot in Curry Village (the park's hub) for a skating rink. Bonus: They keep an outdoor fire going in a pit—and a nearby store sells ingredients for making s'mores. (Season: November to March.)

5. BONDI BEACH ICE RINK (Sydney, Australia).
This 1,600-square-foot ice rink is built right on the sand at Sydney's famous Bondi Beach. You can actually ice skate while watching people surf nearby waves. The rink was first built in July 2011 as part of the Bondi Winter Festival, but organizers promise it will be a regular feature of the annual event in the future. (Festival runs for two-and-a-half weeks every July.)

6. FLEVONICE (The Netherlands).
This winding, curving, looping, 16-foot-wide, three-mile-long ice skating track winds around a small, rural lake in the Dutch province of Flevoland. And it's artificially cooled—so it operates even during warm spells. The rink offers public skating and is also the site of speed-skating competitions every year, including one that goes for 124 miles. (Season: November to March.)

7. FUJI-Q HIGHLAND (Fujiyoshida, Japan).
Fuji-Q Highland is an amusement park about 50 miles southeast of Tokyo on Japan's Honshu Island. Every winter, a 3.8-acre pond in the park—known as the “Crystal Lagoon”—becomes a skating rink. You can skate around little garden islands and beneath gigantic roller coasters and other amusement park rides. Oh yeah—and it's right at the base of Japan's highest mountain, Mount Fuji, so it offers some breathtaking views. (Season: December to February.)

8. RIDEAU CANAL SKATEWAY (Ottawa, Ontario).
The Rideau Canal flows through the city of Ottawa, and every year, a section about five miles long becomes a public skating rink—the largest natural rink in the world. You can skate under bridges, through old neighborhoods, and past some of Canada's most historic structures, including the Parliament Buildings. Every winter, the Skateway is full of friends and families on leisurely skating outings, stopping at ice-side booths to buy hot chocolate and beaver tails, a fried pastry. (Season: January to March.)

The Memorial Cup, awarded to the Canadian junior champs, is a competition with a history and tradition as long as the Stanley Cup.

C
anadian junior hockey, a mainstay of the game as the leading producer of talent for the pro leagues, takes a multi-pronged approach to prosperity. The competition factor of the three leagues for young men between 16 and 20 is strong, the caliber of play at a high level and the deep rivalries have existed for decades. The development of prospects for the NHL, selected via the annual entry draft, provides a large discussion point for the juniors. Players are not only motivated to outshine their opponents in order to get ahead in the standings, but also to individually get a step up on the draft ladder.

BIG-LEAGUE PROSPECTS

Situated in many middle-sized cities, most teams are their town's “big-league” sports franchise, many attracting close to capacity crowds in arenas that have from 4,500 to 10,000 seats. The 2005–06 hockey season will see the Canadian Hockey League, the umbrella organization for the Western, Ontario and Quebec Leagues, operate with 58 teams stretching from St. John's, Newfoundland to Vancouver, British Columbia. Nine of those are in the northern U.S.—Erie, Pennsylvania; Saginaw and Plymouth, Michigan, in Ontario; Lewiston, Maine, in the Quebec League; and Spokane, Seattle, Everett and Tri-Cities in Washington plus Portland, Oregon, in the Western League.

ROUND-ROBIN RULES

Each spring, four teams play in the Memorial Cup championship tournament, an event that has national television exposure with strong audiences in Canada. A host city is selected several years in advance and the team in that town has an automatic berth in the Cup event. It is joined by the three league champions for the
round-robin tournament. If the host team happens to be the league playoff champs, the other finalist from that loop is the fourth team. This tournament approach started in 1972, replacing the longtime east-west final for the trophy.

ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN: SCHOOLS VS. PATRICIAS

The juniors have been a strong part of Canadian hockey for more than 100 years. The Ontario Hockey Association, to oversee all levels of the game, was founded in 1890 and within a few years, the first Ontario junior champs, the Kingston Limestones, were crowned. When the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association was created in 1914, various provincial leagues were formed under its banner. The true Memorial Cup, in memory of those who had died in World War I, was first contested in 1919—won by the University of Toronto Schools in a two-game, total-goals series against the Regina Patricias. The Ontario junior league donated the OHA Memorial Cup Trophy for the Canadian championship. Originally, the trophy was donated by John Ross Robertson, one of the early OHA presidents, who is in the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder.

WHO WOULD WIN: GRANITES OR LIMESTONES?

A member of that UTS team was defenceman Dunc Munro, who performed a unique feat in his hockey career. Not only was he part of a junior championship team, Munro won two Allan Cups (1922–23) and an Olympic gold medal with his senior amateur team the Toronto Granites, and the 1924 and 1926 Stanley Cups with the Montreal Maroons. To demonstrate the value the junior leagues, especially championship teams, could have in producing top players for the NHL, the 1920 Memorial Cup winners, the Toronto Canoe Club, were led by goalie Roy Worters, defenceman Lionel Conacher, and forward Billy Burch, all Stanley Cup winners in the NHL and Hall of Famers.

JUST LIKE CANADIAN IDOL

A year later, the first team from western Canada, the Winnipeg Falcons, won the Memorial Cup in a two-game, total-goals series, 11–9 over the Stratford Midgets, whose star Howie Morenz was a teenager with dazzling skill and speed on his way to a splendid
NHL career with the Montreal Canadiens. Thus, the tradition was established for just about every Memorial Cup final to provide a showcase for a future star, or sometimes several, some finals matching two teams with as many as nine future NHL players. The 1934 champion Toronto St. Michael's College Majors had eight players who became NHL regulars.

LOOKING UNDER EVERY ROCK

Until the first NHL expansion in 1966 when the universal draft was established to distribute talent, most junior teams operated as amateur “farm clubs” of the original six NHL franchises. The big-league teams' scouting concentrated on players younger than 16 years of age who were channelled to Junior-B teams as part of their education to top level junior play. NHL clubs often paid a sizeable sum of money to a town's minor hockey system to tie up all the players on those teams, often to land one or two outstanding prospects. The NHL teams engaged in serious pursuits of midget (16 and under) age players. Bobby Orr, a 13-year old star in Parry Sound, Ontario, was courted by all six NHL clubs before he joined the Boston Bruins' organization through their Oshawa Generals junior team. Wren Blair, the general manager of the Generals under the Bruins umbrella, joked that he spent so much time in the Orrs' Parry Sound home that the family considered adopting him.

TRIUMPH TORONTO

Because the Toronto Maple Leafs were perched in the area with the most registered minor hockey players anywhere and the team was a big favorite across Canada because of Foster Hewitt's Saturday
Hockey Night In Canada
broadcasts, the Leafs' junior teams, St. Mikes and the Marlboros, were perennial contenders for the Memorial Cup until the universal draft took the Leafs out of the teenage scouting business. In fact, Toronto teams, with 14 victories by five different teams, hold the one-city record for Memorial Cup titles. The Marlboros won the Cup a record seven times, their last triumph in 1975, before the team left Toronto to be become the Hamilton Dukes. Toronto was without major junior hockey until St. Michael's returned to the Ontario league in 1997 after dropping out in 1962.

LONDON GETS ON THE MAP

The 2005 Memorial Cup in London, Ontario, provides a splendid example of the tournament's clout. All seats for the May event at the new 9,200 seat John Labatt Center were sold by January 1. The combatants were an ideal combination of teams and with no Stanley Cup playoffs because of the NHL labor dispute, the tournament received significant media attention. Of course, that the host (and eventual winners) London Knights were the Ontario champions and the top-rated CHL team was a great start. The defending Memorial Cup champs, the Kelowna Rockets, represented the Western league, and the Rimouski Oceanic, led by phenomenal golden-boy-to-be Sidney Crosby, provided a huge attraction. As Ontario League finalists, the Ottawa 67s coached by Brian Kilrea, a Hall of Famer for his more than 1,000 wins in junior hockey, were the fourth team.

OF COURSE, HIS OUTLOOK IS BIASED…

Dave Branch, the CHL president who doubles as head of the Ontario League, is one of the forward-thinking, marketing-oriented executives who has helped to lift the junior game to a high level. “Of course, my outlook is biased but I don't think any other sports competition in Canada matches the Memorial Cup,” Branch said. “Our teams represent every area of the country and no other sport has such a sustained level of interest as the Memorial Cup over the nine days of the tournament.”

17-YEAR OLDS TAKING OVER THE WORLD

The juniors have not lagged behind the big leaguers in their international outlook. The annual world junior championship in the Christmas-New Year holiday period now is a major global event with more than a half-dozen serious contenders every year. Canadian junior teams recruit players in the European countries, with players from Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, and Finland raising the standards of play to higher levels every season. A competition for teenagers? The Memorial Cup is that but those lads just happen to play the game at a grand level.

The Philadelphia Flyers dominated through grit, determination and just a little bit of stick-work.

W
hen the Philadelphia Flyers started NHL play on October 11, 1967 (they lost 5–1 to the Oakland Seals), they were strictly a “pass-and-shoot” team. Two men—head coach Fred Shero and center Bobby Clarke—would lead a conversion from “pass-and-shoot” to “bump-and-grind.” This, in turn, would evolve into a form of play where the Flyers would so thoroughly intimidate opponents that they would deservedly become remembered as the “Broad Street Bullies.”