Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (20 page)

Some old-timers claim that some of the finest hockey ever played was in the war years. In fact, various areas of the military tried all sorts of deals to land the best NHL players in their units, in order to build the strongest hockey rosters for competition in the service leagues. During the basic training periods, most bases iced teams. But during both wars, disputes often arose over which team had first call on players' services: the service club or the team back home. Training schedules and mobilization calls forced major lineup changes or even pullouts from competition.

DODGING BULLETS

World War I broke out in late 1914, and by the 1915–16 season, as many as 17 service teams were in competition, most of them at the senior amateur level. With several military training bases in the area, Winnipeg was a hockey stronghold. The Winnipeg 61st Battalion team, led by future Hockey Hall of Fame inductee “Bullet” Joe Simpson, won the 1916 Allan Cup as Canadian senior champions. All players of age on the superlative Winnipeg
Falcons senior club, including Hall of Famer Frank Fredrickson, enlisted as a group—training with the 233rd Battalion in Portage La Prairie and traveling to Winnipeg for games in the aptly named Manitoba Patriotic League. At the end of the 1916–17 season the entire battalion was shipped overseas.

DUKE DISPUTE

A wartime dispute over star player Duke Keats led to the formation of the NHL. A member of the Toronto Blueshirts in the National Hockey Association, Keats and other players enlisted in the 228th Battalion, which entered a team in the NHA for the 1916–17 season. Blueshirts owner Eddie Livingstone, who fought a never-ending battle with rival owners, won an appeal that forced Keats to play for the Blueshirts until the battalion went overseas in February 1917. Fed up with Livingstone's antics, the other owners then formed the NHL as a way to shed the troublesome Toronto owner.

HORRIBLE LOSSES

Winnipeg senior hockey was hit hard by the war as several players lost their lives in Europe. Frank McGee, the great star of the Ottawa Silver Seven, died in France in 1918 and Scotty Davidson, leading scorer with the 1914 Stanley Cup champion Blueshirts, was killed in Belgium in 1915. Hobey Baker, the top U.S. amateur player at Princeton University, where he was captain of both the hockey and football teams, became a fighter pilot. A member of the fabled Lafayette Escadrille fighter unit, Baker survived the war missions but shortly after the armistice was signed in 1918, he took a plane up for a “farewell flight” and died in a crash.

SMYTHE HEROICS

Among the first hockey men involved in World War II, which started in 1939, was Conn Smythe, owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. As a player, Smythe captained the University of Toronto team that won the Ontario junior title in 1915, just before he and many teammates enlisted in the service for World War I. A strong NHL owner from 1926 on and builder of Maple Leaf Gardens, Smythe, who earned a Major ranking, formed the Sportsmen's Battery of the Royal Canadian Artillery with many sports stars in
its ranks and took it overseas, seeing heavy combat himself in the anti-aircraft battery. He was badly wounded in 1944.

KRAUTS IN THE RCAF

Many players were drafted or enlisted in World War II, and the two top teams in the prewar years—the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers—had their rosters depleted. As in World War I, service hockey teams were strong. The Bruins' brilliant Kraut Line of Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, and Bobby Bauer played for the RCAF team based in Ottawa, winning the Allan Cup in 1942. A year later, the Ottawa Commandos army team, assembled by Frank Boucher of the Rangers, won the senior crown.

ON THE HOME FRONT

In the early years of the war, a draft for home defence with a 30-day training period gave players a chance to remain in the game. That changed as the war progressed, when training was lengthened and the athletes shipped overseas. Because Canadian military health standards were so high, many players with hockey injuries were rejected. Some scorn was heaped on players not healthy enough to serve but still able to play pro hockey. Because the Quebec government fought the compulsory draft, the Canadiens retained a powerful roster through the war years. Although many Maple Leafs enlisted or were drafted, the club stayed strong; the hockey hotbed of Toronto had many junior and senior players the Leafs could use to stay in contention.

COMING HOME TO A DIFFERENT NHL

The New York Americans folded after a 1941–42 season and other U.S. teams, especially the New York Rangers, Chicago, and Boston, struggled to fill their lineups. The Rangers used Saskatchewan senior goalie Steve Buzinski for nine games in the 1942–43 season, in which he surrendered 55 goals. He became known as Steve “The Puck Goes Inski” Buzinski. Overtime in schedule games was ended to allow teams to catch trains on time and the introduction of the center red line allowed the use of long clearing passes. When the war ended, the veterans returned and combined with a big crop of young players who had had a chance to play in their absence. The NHL entered a period of prosperity.

The NHL Entry Draft is an exciting annual event for young players entering the Bigs and for teams looking to the future. But sometimes things don't go as planned.

F
ROM RUSSIA, WITH DELAYS

In 1989, to get Russian phenom Pavel Bure, the Vancouver Canucks had to do a lot more than simply call his name from the draft podium. Most NHL clubs knew about the potential of the dazzling 18-year-old scoring sensation from Moscow, but they considered him ineligible since, by most accounts, he had not played enough elite-level games in Russia to qualify. Also, in 1989, before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, most teams thought it risky to draft a player from Russia because there were no guarantees he would be able to defect. The Canucks took a chance, though, and selected Bure in the sixth round. Representatives from other NHL franchises immediately cried foul, questioning Bure's eligibility. The Washington Capitals and the Hartford Whalers officially filed complaints with the league and the NHL president John Ziegler ruled in their favor, disqualifying Bure. But the Canucks felt they could prove Bure's eligibility based on the 11 major games he'd played in as a member of the Russian military team, the Central Red Army. The only question was how.

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.

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.

L
EGEND 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.