Go Hawks
The Chacago Blackhawks begin the Stanley Cup final against Philadelphia on Saturday.
The year before I was born in 1962 it last happened. The Chicago Blackhawks won the most coveted trophy in all of sports – The Stanley Cup.
Since then I have seen everyone of my pro sports teams win a championship. In college football I’ve seen Notre Dame win several times. When I first started knowing what a football was, the Green Bay Packers ruled and then again in 1996. The Chicago Bulls won six times and the last one was the Chicago White Sox, the ONLY major league baseball team in Chicago, win in 2005.
But never the Hawks. They went to the final in 1992, but lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins. This one would mean more to me than any of them.
When I was small and growing up in Chicago, my parents wouldn’t tell me a bedtime story, they’d let me listen to the Blackhawks game on the radio. Jack Drees was the announcer and he’d tell the play-by-play of some of the greats like Bobby Hull, Dennis Hull, Stan Mikita, Eric Nesterenko and goalies Glenn Hall and Tony Esposito.
The Hawks were never a terrible team throughout the years, in fact, they were always one of the better teams of mine. But never won it. The worst was letting the great Bobby Hull go to the WHA. It was a sad day in Chicago.
Now many of the non-Chicagoians feel the Bulls or the Cubs are more important. But for many years, the Hawks were Chicago’s team. They always had that lunchpail mentality of play that signifies Chicago. Even the greats who played on the Hawks were not really the fan favorites. When Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita were there, Hawks fans were more prone to admire guys like Keith Magnuson, Whitey Stapleton or Chico Maki.
In the 1980s, Denis Savard was the outstanding finesse player on the team, however Al Secord was everyone’s favorite – including mine. For me, Secord was my all-time sports idol growing up. He played left wing like I did, played without a helmet like I did and you have to admire a guy that scored 52 goals in a season and had more than 350 minutes in penalties in the same year. Think about that. Not many have scored 50 goals in a season and guys like Wayne Gretzky did it with about 20 minutes in penalties over a season. Secord missed six games, basically sitting in the penalty box.
In the 90s, guys like Chris Chelios and Jeremy Roenick were the tough-as-nails guys. In fact, I once saw Roenick, then with the Flyers, playing against Tampa and he took a shot to the mouth. Broke his jaw. It was only the first period. In the second period, Roenick was back on the ice.
Now you have these guys like Duncan Keith, who last Sunday in the game against San Jose take a puck to the teeth – lost seven of them and continued on. Dustin Byfuglien has been the hero for the Hawks this year with several game-winning goals in the playoffs. The man stands 6-foot-6 and is 257 pounds – that’s immense for a hockey player. One San Francisco writer called him a “freezer” of a man.
Then there’s the goaltending of rookie Antti Niemi who has been huge in the playoffs. One church in Chicago has a sign out front “Jesus Saves and so does Niemi.”
Go Hawks, let’s see your names on the Cup. By the way, what other trophy in all of professional sports – NBA, NFL or MLB, puts the entire names of the teams who win on the trophy? Only the Stanley Cup.
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