[CHICAGO, IL] -- The man finds a
piece of paper in the bottom drawer of a built-in system of shelves in
an unfamiliar closet.
The wood of the drawers and shelves
is dark, and the space is vast between the racks of suits on one wall,
and the haphazard collection of blouses and dresses on the other.
The man finds himself disoriented
because the size and tone of this room is not his mother's taste but
his stepfather's, and he is only in the closet because she asked him
to retrieve a gift she had tucked away for the man's own daughter. He
thinks it very much like his mother to have a little sanctuary where
she stores the prizes she keeps for her granddaughter next to the
things she treasured about her own son at a similar age.
He has never held the paper before, but when he sees his mother's
distinct handwriting in faded green marker he knows what he has in his
hands. She has never shown him this paper, but she has told the story
of its contents often. It tells the tale of the first pro game he went
to when he was not quite four years old -- how he came home from the
game assuredly overwhelmed by the sight of flashing blades and the
aroma of greasy hamburgers and the noise of a beautiful game. What he
could relay, at that tender age, was the song at the beginning. He
came home wanting to know the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner"
which he called "The Hockey Song".
It was easy to fall in love with at the old Chicago Stadium, even
before the fans shouted first their patriotism, then their allegiance
to the Blackhawks from the their insides rather than their throats.
The anthem was the final movement of a pregame symphony.
The first notes sounded as the
Blackhawks climbed the steps from their locker room to the ice --
nineteen steps in all, enough so that as former Hawk
turned-broadcaster Darren Pang said, "The goalies would get tired
about halfway up, but then you'd see the fans leaning over the
railings and it would give you another surge of energy to get to the
top."
Even then, the anthem was largely just an anthem, until it first
became an event in a brawling playoff series in 1982. The Blackhawks
had slugged their way out from the bottom of the Norris Division to
reach the Campbell Conference Championship against a Vancouver team
that rode hot goalie King Richard Brodeur out of the dregs of the
Smythe Division to make a run into mid-May. The series turned nasty in
game two in Chicago, with blood spilling everywhere in a series of
fights so violent that Canucks' coach Roger Neilson waved a white
towel in surrender. It stayed vicious for two games in Vancouver, so
that when the two teams returned to the Stadium with the Blackhawks
running out of fairy dust for their unlikely run, the fans lustily
booed O! Canada, and exploded in cheers for the entire length of the
American anthem. The Canucks bare-knuckled their way to a series win
in that game five. The Blackhawks were gone, but in subsequent years
the anthem cheering remained. From something ugly, came something
wonderful, something unique.
Throughout the 1980's and into the 1990's, the Blackhawks had
excellent teams with superstar talent including three current
Hall-of-Famers with at least two more on the way. But their raucous
fans and their throaty cheers couldn't help them overcome the
machine-precision of Wayne Gretzky's Edmonton Oilers. Three times in
that era they lost to the Oilers, falling one step shy of the Stanley
Cup Finals. 1985 may have been their best opportunity, when they won
games 3 and 4 in Chicago, after which the fans started partying from
the opening strains of the anthem and took it postgame to the streets,
honking their horns and singing with such abandon that the minority
tenants of the cold-water public housing apartments around the stadium
leaned out of their windows in wife-beater t-shirts to see what was
going on.
But where most teams were intimidated by the anthem in those days, the
Oilers just soaked it up.
"We loved it," Gretzky says now with
a laugh. "We knew that crowd was going to make for a great atmosphere,
and we knew we would have a lot of fun playing in a game like that."
The Oilers were at their best having
fun. They won games 5 and 6 to win the series, and wasted the Hawks
again a few years later.
Gretzky's Oilers aside, most teams lost "at least a goal,
goal-and-a-half" playing in those conditions, says exiled former
Hawks' super-star Jeremy Roenick.
And no team could have been
intimidated more than Dynamo Riga, which was the younger and weaker of
two Russian teams which toured the NHL for a series of exhibitions in
1989. After stopping in St. Louis on a Tuesday night, the foreigners
dared enter the Madhouse on Madison on Wednesday. They fairly beamed
on the blue line as the crowd stood silent and appreciative while a
local baritone sang the anthem of their homeland. But as the organ
trounced through the opening strains of the Star-Spangled Banner, the
young Latvians fairly shrank into their powder blue uniforms, beaten
back by the fans at the organ end of the building each of whom waved
miniature American flags. They were never in a game which the
Blackhawks won easily.
The anthem's signature moment in Chicago came at the NHL All-Star game
in 1991, mere days after the launching of the first Gulf War, in a
year in which the Blackhawks would win the President's Trophy as
regular season champions. It was then, and perhaps only then, that the
way Chicagoans do "The Hockey Song" was brandished for a national
audience. Marv Albert, announcing the game for NBC, concluded the
moment by calling it "a stirring rendition of the Star-Spangled
Banner, no doubt in homage to America's troops." The War may have
upped the ante a trifle, but mostly that was Blackhawk fans happy to
be at the center of hockey's universe and basking in the attention.
The man lived all those moments, but then moved away, pulled out of
the anthem's orbit by the routine of life. He came back once, for a
game in March of 1994, the last year in Chicago Stadium's storied
existence. He was ready to sing at the top of his lungs, to shout for
that song as he had hundreds of times, when he realized it would be
his last chance to experience the spectacle. This team. These fans.
This place. That song. All of which had been ever-present in his
cognizant life. And that realization sent his soul careening into the
corner as if it had been hip-checked by Chris Chelios himself. The
sounds caught in his suddenly swollen throat. His eyes overflowed. But
thankfully, his ears worked perfectly, and through them he drank in
every note to store forever in his soul.
The man subsequently went back to the East coast. The Blackhawks
slipped away as well, first to a new building, and then after a series
of bad seasons, into irrelevance on the Chicago sports landscape. Many
fans followed, mostly burrowing out of sight within their own
community. A few fans endeavored to keep the tradition alive, gamely
applauding the anthem from the cheapest possible seats of their
largely empty palatial arena, but making minimal impact on the game or
the experience.
And then in the last year, something new. The franchise reached out to
fans with new ideas and a competitive team. On New Year's Day, a day
fresh with the promises of rebirth and renewal, the Blackhawks were
back again in an old stadium -- this time outdoors in a baseball
stadium. The man was there, too. He walked up to Wrigley Field to see
hockey fans everywhere. They wore Blackhawks and Red Wings jerseys
over their layers of course, but he also saw the sweaters of teams
from Vancouver and Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Edmonton, Washington and
Winnipeg. The ballpark held 40 thousand, but there were at least twice
that milling about the grounds. They let their cheeks get rosy as they
laughed and they sang and they celebrated a game they all so clearly
loved.
An hour later, the man is standing in the center field bleachers, the
players mere dots on the ice far away. Soldiers hold a supersized flag
four feet off the ground in right field, pumping their arms to create
waves in the fabric. The anthem starts, and the fans rise with it,
straining to drown out the basso profundo with their whistles and
shrieks and the thunder of their clapping gloves. Their roars go up in
volume on the phrase "And the Rockets Red Glare" as fireworks shoot
off from the warning track across the expanse of the outfield power
alleys where so many Cubs sluggers have sent bombs bursting in summer.
The smoke clears just as the singer hits the final lines and the crowd
matches him a final time. There is another volley of fireworks against
the slate-gray sky, and then the roar of two F-18's flying over the
ballpark. The man follows the path of the planes over the grandstand
and off into the horizon where the city meets the sky.
And now he is back in the unfamiliar closet. His eyes come back from
the clouds and rest again on the faded green ink and the 35-year-old
piece of paper in his hands. He reaches out and gets the gift his
mother intended for his daughter. Then he closes the drawer without
replacing the paper. That he puts in his pocket, a gift of his own
that has served him all his life, ready at last to be shared.
Josh
Mora,
a Columnist with TheFourthPeriod.com, is an Anchor and
Blackhawks Reporter with Comcast Sportsnet Chicago.
