"Gloria" Hallelujah!!!
Monday’s “Danny’s Weekend SportsWrap” podcast did not mention the NHL Finals. That wasn’t an oversight. I knew that there would be a Monday night game and I don’t get the chance to write or speak much about hockey, seeing as Kansas City has no team. I don’t watch as much hockey as I would like. I have to watch so many sporting events for my work that working in more than just a few for pure pleasure likely would result in me not being married.
But once upon a time hockey was right there with baseball as my favorite sport. I will give you a bit of that flavor in this excerpt from my 2016 book “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”……
“Hockey exploded in Boston right around 1970, as I will chronicle ahead, and everybody who played any kind of sports played it. A few more ambitious folks would pack down snow in their yards and build snowbanks and then put down water and concoct makeshift rinks, but most of us played on the river.
This wasn’t just guys with a pair of skates and a stick. We had way more gear than that. Common Christmas gifts in my early teens for me and a lot of my friends were hockey gloves, shin pads and socks. Our parents also bought all of us helmets, but this was still the era when hardly any pros wore a helmet, so down at the river you could watch fifteen guys playing pickup hockey, with fifteen helmets laying by the shore.
Our neighborhood area group played in a cove on the Sudbury River. The cove would freeze solid pretty quickly in the winter, but it was a pretty big river, and it almost never froze completely out towards the middle. When it did, it was the most glorious surface ever. Black Ice, we called it, because it was thick enough to skate on, but you could still see through it. It was slick and speedy, much more so that the milky white, thicker, and yes, safer ice near shore. Most of the time however, eventually the ice that could support us enough for a game gave way to flowing river.
This created a daily phenomenon due to the fact that one goal in the makeshift rink backed up the shore, and the other had the open river behind it. But not miles behind it. We generally had a “no lifting” rule, meaning you had to keep the puck on the ice except on the rare occasions when both teams had a kid with goaltending gear. In either case, some of the shots that missed the net, and went through our snow barrier, skittered out into water, or onto ice too thin to skate on and retrieve.
On many days we ran out of pucks, but we still wanted to play, and there would be a couple out on the thin ice. Youthful stupidity taking over, we would draw straws to see who would be the guy who went out on his belly (to distribute the weight, we thought) to retrieve a last puck or two. Nobody ever went through the ice out there where the water was probably thirty feet deep, but it certainly could have happened.
Riding around through Belle Fourche, South Dakota and seeing the multiple outdoor rinks also made me think of all of the hockey games I have broadcast through the years. It kind of started as a kid, when I would roll game after game of Bobby Orr and the Boston Bruins into my reel to reel tape recorder as I watched the games on TV.
Bobby Orr is the greatest athlete I have ever watched, and I’m not so sure it’s close. He is the rarest of breeds, someone who truly changed the way a sport is played. Like Babe Ruth, who changed baseball from a slap hitting, run and steal sport, to power hitting, Orr was a defenseman, and he would once lead the league in scoring. If you had asked any hockey fan before he came along if that could happen, they would have looked at you like you had two heads.
I won’t write a chapter on Bobby Orr and his otherworldly talents, but merely a paragraph. When the puck was left behind the net by the Bruins goalie, the whole Boston Garden would rise, because there was a good chance that Orr was going to take it coast to coast through a whole team and score or assist. He once killed off an entire penalty by himself. The Bruins won the faceoff, gave it to him, and he skated around and away from the Los Angeles Kings for the full two minutes. Watch some You Tube sometime. You won’t be disappointed.”
And, of course, Orr also authored the “flying goal” which is getting a magnified reprise this year as the Bruins and the Blues play in the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since that goal in 1970. It was the only previous finals appearance for the Blues, and it was rather contrived, as the NHL had doubled its size in one season from six to twelve, and they placed all six expansion teams in one conference to create some better competition for the new squads.
Orr’s overtime goal completed a sweep against the overmatched Blues in the only close game of the series. A framed and autographed copy of the famous photograph of that goal hangs in my house. It is a special reminder of a place and time in my childhood. The Bruins are the only Boston team I remained a fan of past about the age of 15, but moving to the Midwest mitigated following the sport very closely.
The NBC slogan now is the extremely accurate “there is nothing like playoff hockey” and it is the time of year I can indulge a bit in the old passion, and in this case, root on the Bruins just a bit. Monday night was an important game four in St. Louis. After splitting the first two games at what I still think of as the “new” Boston Garden, the Bruins undressed the Blues on their home in game three. Of course the Bruins home isn’t close to new, having opened in 1995, but that is the way that I think about it. It actually has air conditioning, which the old barn didn’t. Google it and look closely in the background the of “flying goal” photo, especially the version where Orr is absolutely vertical. You will notice that more than a few fans have no shirts on. That game was played on May 10th, and it was a very warm day outside, and warmer still in.
But on a properly refrigerated rink Monday night in St. Louis, the pivotal game four took place and it lived up to any slogan that NBC could come up with. The game was a back and forth thriller, with the Blues taking the lead midway through the third period 3-2. From that moment until a empty net goal with just over a minute to play, the contest was basically a brilliantly crafted advertisement for the sport.
The Blues themselves are an advertisement for what is unique to the sport, and something fans say they desire, but really don’t, which is true parity. This year isn’t even the most glaring example since the Bruins had the second-best record in the Eastern Conference, and the Blues the third best in the west. But St. Louis did recover from firing their coach a quarter of the way through the season, and the playoffs have featured the top seed in each conference getting routed in the opening round. Such things are commonplace in the NHL, drastically different from our other far more popular sports.
But even sports fans who watch a handful of hockey games at best during the regular season, routinely are thrilled come this time of year, and the eight-minute span from the Blues lead goal to the empty net clincher is why. The Bruins frantically scrambling for the tie, leaving themselves open to counters, making for scintillating end to end action.
For the neutral fan, the result was perfect, the series is now down to three games for it all. One storied franchise seeking their seventh Stanley Cup, the Blues trying to win their first. In fact, Monday’s win was the first home Stanley Cup finals win in their history. Their most unusual celebration song, Laura Branigan’s 1982 “Gloria”, rang out through the arena and the city.
If you got one taste of the exhiliration of the sport Monday night, there are at least two more doses to come. Big time fun!