Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (45 page)

Devil's general manager, Lou Lamoriello, tried to appeal his coach's suspension, but the decision could be overturned only by NHL president John Ziegler. Lamoriello, NHL higher-ups, and even the curious press all tried to find Ziegler but came up empty. According to rumors, the NHL president was in the South of France on vacation…or maybe he was hiding out to deal with family problems…no one knew, and even though many people now believe he spent the time in England, Ziegler's absence during the crisis has still never been officially explained.

Meanwhile Lamoriello, angry about his coach being denied a hearing, went to court. Anxious to get a decision before game 4 began, the Devils' lawyers rushed the case to a judge. Judge J. F. Madden of the Superior Court of New Jersey heard the case, agreed that Schoenfeld deserved a hearing, and granted a restraining order against the suspension.

At 7:20 p.m., just 25 minutes before Sunday's game 4 was to start, the NHL learned that the Devil's coach would be there after all. But when the ice officials scheduled to work the game saw Schoenfeld (whom they believed had shoved their colleague), they
walked out in support of Koharski. So before a sold-out audience for a Stanley Cup playoff game, it looked like the NHL would have no one to officiate…and still nobody could find Ziegler.

YELLOW SUNDAY

Bill Wirtz, the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks and chairman of the NHL board of governors, ordered game 4 to go on. While the crowd and cameras waited, the NHL's representative at the game quickly rounded up some nonunion officials and sent them onto the ice. But the men weren't your typical NHL types: Paul McInnis, an ice rink owner, became a playoff referee. Salesman Vin Godleski and retired cop Jim Sullivan were the linesmen. All three had to scramble to find equipment—they skated on to the ice wearing green sweat pants. Godleski and Sullivan couldn't find regulation striped shirts so they wore yellow jerseys, which led the press to dub the game Yellow Sunday.
Sports Illustrated
called the men's presence “theatre of the absurd” and later included Yellow Sunday in a list of the NHL's most embarrassing moments. Still, the game went on, with the Devils winning 3–1.

WELCOME TO WAYNE'S WORLD

The following week, Ziegler (who refused to tell anyone where he'd been) returned and granted Schoenfeld the hearing he wanted…and then Ziegler suspended the coach for game 5. The Devils lost that game, and although they played the full series, the Bruins went on to win the playoffs, face the Edmonton Oilers in the final, and lose 4–0.

Schoenfeld and Koharski eventually met, talked things over, and made peace. Both went on to long, respected careers in hockey. But the ABC “doughnut video” has become one of the most viewed moments in hockey history. It's replayed almost every time there's a problem between a hockey coach and an official, and Internet clips of the exchange have been viewed more than 100,000 times. Fans didn't let the coach or referee forget the argument either. Koharski was teased about it so often that he once thought of cashing in by opening a doughnut shop. In 1992 the doughnut joke even made it into the movies—in
Wayne's World
, a cop named Officer Koharski hangs out at a doughnut shop.

How a coach's quest to rescue his tough guy started a chain reaction that led all the way to the Stanley Cup finals.

F
ERMEZ LA BOUCHE MONSIEUR TIGRE

Sometimes things happen that nobody can explain…like crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle, and the 1982 Vancouver Canucks, in those garish flying-V yellow, black, and orange jerseys going all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Canucks head coach Harry Neale surely wasn't aware of what he was getting into when he waded into the stands to prevent his forward Dave “Tiger” Williams from getting ambushed during a March 20, 1982, game at Quebec City. Williams had made some disparaging remarks about French Canadians in an interview prior to the game. Tension had been mounting and now Williams, who was being pinned to the boards by Quebec's Wilf Paiement, was also in danger of being sucker-punched by a fan reaching over the glass. Neale wasted little time in charging into the stands himself, followed by a pair of his players. “He had been a mouthy fan,” Neale recalled years later. “I'd known him from the World Hockey Association days when I coached Hartford. I ran off to try and get him. I never quite got to him and I think Marc Crawford and Doug Halward and I forget who else—three [players] came with me—so I was going to be alright if a fight started.”

BUT WHO WILL PROTECT US FROM THE FANS?

Neale paid dearly for his excursion into the stands. The coach was handed a lengthy suspension by the NHL, a punishment that would carry over into the postseason. But his action would also begin a strange momentum that the Canucks rode all the way into the finals. Many from that team still point to the incident in Quebec City as the catalyst for a playoff run that would see the Canucks beat Calgary, Los Angeles, and Chicago before ultimately losing to the powerful New York Islanders dynasty in four straight. It was the first trip to the finals for the Vancouver franchise, which wouldn't make it there again until a dozen years later.

Until March 20, 1982, however, the Canucks were having a
forgettable winter. Despite going unbeaten over the final 10 games of the regular season, they still finished with three more losses than wins. Nobody expected much out of them in the postseason.

CAPTAIN VIDEO TO THE RESCUE

While Neale's suspension pushed him off the Canucks' bench, it also meant that Roger Neilson, the head coach in waiting for the next season, took over a few months early. Neilson's systematic approach to the game proved to be the perfect fit for the Canucks, who collectively bought into his plan—for one postseason, at least. Neale, who during his suspension had scored a cozy seat as a CBC-TV
Hockey Night in Canada
analyst, was smart enough to realize that Neilson and the team had stumbled upon some kind of crazy chemistry. Neale stayed at
Hockey Night in Canada
.

“When Roger had won the last three games of the [regular] season and the first three of the playoffs, I didn't have to be [Montreal Canadiens' GM] Sam Pollock to figure out this guy's got something going with this team,” Neale said. “We were going to make the [coaching] change anyway, so we made it then.”

A KING IS BORN (FOR A VERY SHORT REIGN)

Canuck players from that team give a lot of credit to goaltender “King” Richard Brodeur, who was brilliant for Vancouver during the playoffs. But at least as much credit goes to the late Neilson, who motivated the first- and fourth-line players with equal success and guided his unlikely group of skaters farther than anybody could have imagined. “I think that run was largely due to the gentleman who was coaching—Roger Neilson,” defenceman Rick Lanz would later say. “He basically took a group of players that really nobody expected a whole lot from, especially a playoff run like that. And you know, the players who came in to help because of the injuries we had did a fantastic job…Everybody got kind of caught up in the emotion of it all and subsequently were playing at the peak of their abilities. That was largely due to Roger who kind of rallied the troops.”

“We got on a roll and played over our heads,” Neale said. “No matter who got hurt, the guy coming in, even if he hadn't played, did a good job and we were getting some excellent goaltending…It was just a perfect example of a team that got on a roll.”

Hockey's most intense competition takes place…in a gymnasium?

T
he 2011 world champion in men's hockey was Denmark's Bjarne Axelsen, as your family was no doubt discussing around the dinner table the other…What's that? The
Canadian
team won gold at the 2010 Olympics? Please, that's old news—we're talking about table (or air) hockey.

CANADA'S GAME?

There are numerous table hockey tournaments held in North America, including the U.S. Nationals in Chicago and regional tourneys throughout Canada, but since 1989 the World Championships have been held in northern Europe and played without fail on Swedish-made Stiga game sets. Yet table hockey was invented by a Canadian and brought to international prominence by Canadians! The denizens of the Great White North must truly wring their hands and wonder—as they have when other nations triumphed in that version of hockey played by actual people on sheets of ice—“What happened to
our
game?”

NECESSITY IS THE FATHER OF INVENTION

In 1932, the Great Depression was in full swing in Canada. Donald H. Munro couldn't afford to buy his children Christmas gifts, so he built them the first-ever table hockey game from scraps of wood and metal he found around his Toronto neighborhood. Using a steel ball for a puck and wire-and-peg paddles for players, Munro's initial effort resembled a pinball game more than it did the table hockey of today, but his kids' enthusiasm prompted him to build several more, which the Eaton's department store then agreed to sell on consignment. They sold out immediately, and by the late 1930s Munro was selling several thousand each year at $4.95 per game. You may heave a sentimental sigh at the notion of being able to buy end-to-end hockey excitement for a handful of change, especially in light of how much a new game costs today, but keep in mind that $4.95 in 1939 dollars translates to about $85 today. With that sort of income, it's no surprise that the
Munro company was able to stay in the black for decades, adapting its wooden-paddle model to the more modern tin-men version in 1955 before selling its assets to U.S. manufacturer Servotronics in 1968, when market demand prompted by NHL expansion surged to more than the humble Munro could hope to meet. Hundreds of thousands of games were being bought across the continent.

RISE OF THE TIN MEN

In 1954, the Eagle Toy Company of Montreal released the first Canadian table hockey set with game pieces resembling actual players, punched from accurately colored tin and set on rods that allowed them to turn 360 degrees. This second innovation, though, had been borrowed from the Aristospel games company of Sweden, who since 1939 had been manufacturing a table hockey game that featured long slots that allowed the players to move up and down the board. In 1956, both Eagle and Munro began selling rod-and-slot versions to the North American market, and they continued to lay low all competitors over the following decades through innovations such as clear plastic above the boards, puck-droppers, scoreboards and goal lights. Eagle was the dominant company thanks to their official NHL endorsement allowing them, to fans' delight, to clothe their tin men in exact reproductions of team uniforms. Indeed, the games most likely to induce salivation in modern-day collectors feature defunct teams like the Cleveland Barons and California Golden Seals, manufactured by U.S.-based Coleco following their absorption of Eagle in 1968.

MEANWHILE, IN STOCKHOLM

The popularity of Aristospel's game grew steadily in Sweden over two decades, with sales in the late 50s peaking at 25,000 units per year. At the same time, Stig Hjelmkvist began manufacturing games under the Stiga label in the southern town of TranÃ¥s, though his efforts made little impact on the market until Swedish superstar Sven “Tumba” Johansson—the first European to attend an NHL training camp—lent his endorsement to the game in 1959. Since then, Stiga has enjoyed unrivalled success in the European market, moving 100,000 games a year. They put upstart Alga—maker of the first game with rounded corners and three-dimensional
players—out of business in the early 1960s, and gave venerable Aristospel the same treatment in 1972.

SVEN “TUMBA” JOHANSSON WOULD BE PROUD

With the rise of video games in the 1980s, the words
table hockey
vanished from Christmas lists. Radio Shack, Kevin Sports, Irwin, and Playtoy/Remco introduced new models in the early 1990s, but none could compete with Stiga's newly arrived state-of-the-art $85 model, complete with hand-painted three-dimensional players and a left-winger that could skate behind the net, making the dreaded “dead spot” a thing of the past. In 1998, Stiga acquired the exclusive NHL licence, and North American gamers can now select player uniforms from any of the 30 NHL franchises as well as six international squads. The handful of North American-made games still on the market now fall into one of two camps: flimsy tabletop models selling for $20 or deluxe table-sized games selling for around $300, though without the NHL's endorsement the best any of these models can offer is pulse-pounding action between the Red Team and the Blue Team.

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

Regardless of the physical quality of the Stiga game, it only seems appropriate that a Swedish company should receive the NHL's worldwide endorsement, as Swedes have won the most World Championships since the tournament's inception in 1989. At the 2003 tournament, Sweden swept the men's event, with the highest Canadian placing 101st. How can this be? Does Stiga's version tap unfairly into some genetic propensity of the Swedish race? Could Canada hold its own if the tournament were only played on Munro's 1936 peg-and-wire model? “Darn it,” mutters Canada….

* * * * *

Zac Bierk is a goaltender
who has played several games with the Phoenix Coyotes and Tampa Bay Lightning in the NHL as well as spending a lot of time in the American Hockey League. However, did you know that his brother, who goes by the stage name of Sebastian Bach, was the former lead singer of the rock band Skid Row?