Hurricane Stanley: Raleigh is Hockeytown South

DUNN, N.C. - Hockey is played on ice, but was a hot topic of local conversation last week in North Carolina.

The Carolina Hurricanes won a lot of new fans for themselves and their sport when they won the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup in a heart-stopping seventh game.

I have not been to a hockey match in some time, and I had forgotten how fierce and fast the action is and how few breaks there are during play. Like many others, I don't know all the rules of the game. Frankly, I don't care. The only time in my life I have been this excited about hockey was when the American team beat the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics. (We also did it in 1960, but I don't remember that the celebrations were as great as 20 years later, but I was in the Navy then, and a bit out of touch.)

Hockey is like soccer, tennis and some other sports in that television can't do it complete justice. It's pretty hard for even the best cameras to follow that little puck around.

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., my parents and I went to every kind of sports event at every level of competition. For hockey, we saw the Washington Lions, members of the Eastern League, play in musty old Uline Arena, located next to the railroad yards and meat markets behind Union Station and also home, for four seasons, of pro basketball's Washington Capitols.

The Eastern League was a minor circuit, two steps down from the National Hockey League. The Lions played against teams like the Baltimore Clippers, Atlantic City Sea Gulls and clubs located in Johnstown, Pa., Clinton, N.Y. and New Haven, Conn. It was hockey ... barely.

Chicken Salad?

On a visit to relatives in Providence, R.I., I saw the Rhode Island Reds of the American Hockey League take on the Cleveland Barons at the Rhode Island Auditorium, which was like a big barn.

Many Providence fans were of French ancestry and, to say the least, ardent.

I hadn't paid much attention when a man sat down two rows in front of me with a good-sized box in his hands.

Midway through the game, however, there was a bad call against the Reds and fans in my area started yelling "Poulet, poulet."

I knew enough French to recognize the word for chicken. Seconds later, the man opened his box and threw a very dead chicken onto the ice.

Blood, feathers and body parts scattered all over the surface. Fans cheered, then booed and whistled as the man was escorted from the arena. There was a delay while the pitch was cleaned up. Cleveland won.

Covering The Robins

In 1972-73, I was with the Petersburg (Va.) Progress-Index and we covered some of the home games of the Richmond Robins.

The Robins were in the American Hockey League, just a step below the NHL. The NHL had played for over 20 years with just six teams until expansion began in the late 1960s. Previously, four of the six teams qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Every year, the postseason was a battle between Montreal, Toronto and Detroit with the New York Rangers, Chicago and Boston playing for fourth place. Sixty games to eliminate two teams. Two additional sides, the Montreal Maroons and New York Americans, had folded during World War II.

Now, the league was growing, and the Robins were the top farm team of the Philadelphia Flyers. Within a few years, many of them would help the Flyers to the top of the NHL heap, taking the Stanley Cup in 1974 and 1975 and reaching the finals in 1976.

The Robins were playing home games in a new downtown Richmond arena and featured several good promotions, including 6 p.m. Family Night games on Sundays. But that area wasn't ready for hockey and the franchise went down the tubes in a few years. People were not coming out to see the Robins face off against Hershey, Providence, Cleveland or Springfield, Mass.

I was one of many who thought the New England Whalers were making a good move in coming to North Carolina nine years ago. They didn't have a good shot sandwiched bewteen Boston and New York.

The oldest trophy competed for by professional athletes in North America now sits only a few miles from us. "Hurricane Stanley" has been one "storm" that we can all enjoy.

("Timber" Dan Richards covers ACC football and basketball, as well as numerous prep sports for The (Dunn, N.C.) Daily Record. He can be reached at drichards@mydailyrecord.com.)