Detroit Hockey Town USA

Welcome to Detroit: Hockeytown, USA.

By John Rosengren

The Scene: Joe Louis Arena, downtown Detroit, during a second period break in the action of a Red Wings home game. Cue the music and enter the bald Stooge. Curly shuffles across the scoreboard, followed by a live shot from the arena's lower bowl where Mo Cheese—a hybrid Three Stooges and Red Wings fan—wiggles through his knockoff version known as the Cheesy Shuffle.

Meanwhile, the Knitting Lady, a season-ticket holder for as long as anyone can remember, knits away in her seat behind one of the nets, a sort of modern-day Madame Defarge. Ghosts of Red-Wings legends hover above the ice in the jerseys of Number 1 (Terry Sawchuk), Number 7 (Ted Lindsay), Number 9 (Gordie Howe), Number 10 (Alex Delvecchio) and Number 12 (Sid Abel). Elsewhere amidst the rafters, Octopus Al, a 30-foot Styrofoam purple octopus, watches over the crowd, having had his moment in the spotlight when he was lowered to the ice for pre-game introductions.

Welcome to Hockeytown, the copyrighted nickname of Detroit, home of the National Hockey League (NHL) Red Wings and their colorful fans. They love their hockey here in the Motor City. Even though Detroit is also home to the World Series-winning Tigers ('68 and '84) and NBA champion Pistons ('89 and '90), two Stanley Cup victories ('97 and '98) have made the Red Wings the team of the decade in Detroit. "The success of the Red Wings has been the overriding success story in the past five years," says Don Shane, WXYZ-TV sports anchor. "The Pistons had their glory days in the '80s, but now it's the Red Wings' time."

Hockey Fervor

The city has certainly rallied around the Wings and, in turn, the team's success has been a source of civic pride. When the Wings won the 1997 Stanley Cup (by sweeping the Flyers in the finals)—the team's first since 1955—more than one million people lined the victory parade route through downtown Detroit. "That kind of outpouring of emotion and love doesn't exist in other places, "Shane says. "A lot of those people probably never even saw them play, but just felt good about them."

Mo Cheese, a.k.a. Scott Stebbins, 38, a fertilizer salesman by day, rode in that parade on the Miller Brewing Company float, wearing his signature Wings jersey with the name Mo Cheese (from a Three Stooges line) on the back. He also wore his Stanley Cup hat, a nearly three-foot Styrofoam replica of hockey s most treasured prize. A regular attraction at Red Wings home games and a celebrity of Joe Louis Arena, Stebbins says the parade "was like nothing I'll ever experience again." But the moment when Red Wings Captain Steve Yzerman received the Stanley Cup on the ice after game four causes him to swell with pride. "I still get goose bumps when I think about it," Stebbins says.

It's fitting that Detroit should be known as Hockeytown. The blue-collar city that produces over one-fifth of the nation's cars and trucks has fallen for the blue-collar sport, in which kids from mining towns and industrial cities often excel. Indeed, just about every car in the Motor City—all of them American—bears a red-and-white Wings sticker on its bumper. That's Detroit.

In the low-profile city on the west bank of the Detroit River, originally a trading post and fort founded by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1701, Red Wing hockey players enjoy an elevated status. Their legendary coach, Scotty Bowman, is practically worshiped as a deity (see story on page 18). Sports—and hockey in particular—occupy a special spot in the hearts of the hard-working citizens found here. "This isn't Hollywood," Shane says. "You're talking about a hard-nosed, hard-working town. Sports is their biggest diversion from daily existence. In other places, athletes aren't revered as much as they are here."

Wings owner Mike Ilitch, of Little Caesar's wealth, built a commercial shrine to the city's current legacy in the form of the Hockeytown Cafe. The restaurant opened at the beginning of the 1999-2000 hockey season in the Second City building (owned by Ilitch) on Woodward Avenue and Montcalm Street—across the street from Comerica Park, the new home of the Detroit Tigers (Ilitch also owns both the Tigers and their new park). Fans who can't get tickets to home games (read: the majority of the Detroit population) can watch games with live audio feeds from Joe Louis Arena at the Hockeytown Cafe. They can also cool their drinks on a bar of ice here and pay homage to goaltending greats, including Detroit's own Terry Sawchuk, in the third-floor bar called the Five Hole.

Hockey History in Detroit

Detroit's love affair with hockey dates back to 1926, when the Detroit Cougars entered the NHL. The team changed its name to the Falcons in 1930, when a group of media members thought a new name might bring better luck, as the team had missed the playoffs the year before. The name-change trick didn't work that year, but the Falcons did make it back to the NHL playoffs the following season.

In 1932, American industrialist Jack Norris bought the team and rechristened it the Red Wings, after the Winged Wheelers, Canadian team he had played for. He also gave the team its logo—an automobile tire with a flying wing attached. Detroit's luck improved dramatically: the Red Wings won the regular-season NHL title and reached the Stanley Cup final in 1933-34.

From the 1948-49 season all the way to the 1954-55 season, the Red Wings became one of the NHL's most powerful dynasties ever. Led by "The Production Line," as they were known, of Gordie Howe, Sid Abel and Ted Lindsay, Detroit won seven consecutive regular-season titles—still an NHL record— and four Stanley Cups during that stretch.

In the 1990s, Hitch and Bowman built another dominant team, including Hall of Fame-bound Yzerman—second only to Howe on the Wings' all-time scoring list, All-Star defenseman Niklas Lidstrom, inveterate defenseman Larry Murphy—who has played more NHL games than any other defenseman ever, and the Russian delegation of Sergei Federov, Vyacheslav Kozlov, Igor Larionov and Yan Golubovsky. In addition to their two Stanley Cups in the past decade, the Red Wings won the President's Trophy —awarded to the team with the best regular-season record—four times. This season they are widely regarded as the strongest contenders to the defending Stanley-Cup champions, the Dallas Stars.

Hockey is so hot in Detroit that through the end of October the Red Wings had sold out l4l consecutive regular-season home games. That doesn't leave Hockeytown's fans out in the cold, though. The Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League (IHL) are a smaller-scale version of the Wings who play for reduced ticket prices in the Palace of Auburn Hills. They have enjoyed success befitting a Hockeytown team, winning the Turner Cup, the IHL equivalent of the Stanley Cup, in 1997 and twice capturing the conference championship. On some nights both teams host sellout crowds.

The Vipers, who joined the IHL in 1994, became a Tampa-Bay affiliate when team owner Bill Davidson bought the Tampa Bay Lightning last year. They do, however, have a couple of hometown favorites in goalie Tim Thomas, who hails from Davison, Michigan, and forward Matt Elich, who is from Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Whether it's the Vipers at the Palace or the Wings at Joe Louis, if it's hockey, count on the people of Detroit to be there. Mo Cheese, a dedicated baseball and football fan, as well, perhaps speaks for all of Motown when he explains why hockey is his first love. "[It's] the greatest sport there is," Stebbins says. "It's nonstop action. There's never a dull moment."

Sidebar:

Flying Octopi!

As crazy as it may sound, the fanaticism of Detroit Red Wings fans is embodied in a curious-looking marine mollusk—the octopus. In the mid-1990s Red Wings fans gained a reputation for heavy-handed applause with their tradition of heaving octopi onto the ice for good luck after their boys scored a playoff goal. The tradition's far-flung influence has journeyed to the Calgary Olympics, as well as to Tampa's Ice Palace, where Detroit faithful threw an eight-legged tribute to Coach Scotty Bowman's 1,000th NHL career victory.

This bizarre seafood-stinging custom began with the Cusimano brothers, who tossed out the first eight-legged pitch—an octopus they'd lifted from their family fish store—on April 15,1952 as a good luck omen back in the days when a team needed only eight victories to win the Stanley Cup. Pete Cusimano chucked the mollusk onto the ice to celebrate the Wings' first goal in the third game of the finals against the Montreal Canadiens. The Red Wings won that game and went on to become the first team to win the Stanley Cup—hockey's most coveted prize—in eight straight games. In an already superstitious sport—where the members of some teams won't shave throughout the playoffs—another strange tradition was born.

By the 1990s, when the Red Wings brought home another two Stanley Cups, Detroit fish markets were hauling in the eight-legged mollusks by the truckload to keep up with fan demand. The Superior Fish Company in Royal Oak even sold an Octo-Kit, featuring a cooked octopus (which didn't stain the ice with ink and jiggled better than the raw variety), two latex gloves and two wet napkins in a sealed bag. Fans set an unofficial record by putting 54 octopi on ice at Joe Louis Arena during game two of the 1993 Stanley Cup finals.

A pattern of copycat crimes around the NHL—most notoriously the Florida Panther fans raining fake rats on the rink during the 1996 Stanley Cup finals—prompted the league brass to squash the practice of allowing fans to throw anything on the ice during a game. The following season, referees were authorized to assess a two-minute minor penalty to the home team if its fans delayed the game by hurling objects on the ice.

But they couldn't kill octopus fever in Detroit. Local bars still host octopus bowling nights, bakeries feature octopus cake, sports memorabilia stores sell eight-legged souvenirs and highway billboards depict an octopus cradling the Stanley Cup. These days, Octopus Al, a 30-foot purple model that hangs from the rafters of the Joe—as locals call the Red Wings' arena—is the only octopus to make legitimate ice appearances: he's lowered from the rafters during pre-game introductions to hype up the crowd.

Sidebar:

The Sporting Life in Detroit

The Brown Bomber, Georgia Peach and Barry all left an indelible mark on the Detroit sports scene, but these days, the city's sports landscape is being shaped by two business moguls, Bill Davidson and Mike Ilitch. Between them, they own or operate six of Detroit's professional teams and three sports complexes.

In addition to hosting the NHL Red Wings and IHL Vipers, the Motor City is also home to the MLB Tigers, the NFL Lions, the NBA Pistons, the WNBA Shock and the NPSL Rockers. With the city's insatiable sports appetite, there's a wide enough offering to appeal to fans' varied tastes. Their support and their teams' success led The Sporting News in 1998 to declare Detroit the country's best sports city. Detroit earned that distinction in large part due to Davidson and Ilitch.

William Davidson is a basketball Jones. He has owned the Pistons since 1974 and has operated the Shock since the team's inception in 1998. Both teams have enjoyed enviable success, with the Pistons winning two NBA championships (in '89 and '90) and the Shock finishing its inaugural season 17-13, the highest first-year winning percentage of on expansion team in any professional sport.

Davidson built their playground, The Palace of Auburn Hills, in 1988, it is also home to the Vipers, another one of his businesses. In addition, he runs his family business, Guardian Glass Company, along with several other business enterprises from the Palace facility. Last year, Davidson added the Tampa Bay Lightning and its Ice Palace to his portfolio.

Meanwhile, Mike Ilitch, of Little Caesar's fame, owns the Red Wings and Joe Louis Arena, as well as the Tigers. He's building his Tigers a $240-million open-air ballpark, Comerica Park, where they'll throw out the first pitch this April.

Next door to the new Comerica Park—and, surprisingly, independent of Ilitch and Davidson—the Lions broke ground in the fall on a $225-million domed stadium. The two complexes will anchor a sports and entertainment district built around the city's existing theater district.

When Ilitch pulled out as owner of the National Professional Soccer League Rockers last year, the team nearly folded. It required a heroic effort from fan-favorite Bryon Finnerty, or "Goose," as the team's starting goalkeeper is better known, to rally a strong showing of community support sufficient to win over a new group of investors at the last minute. This season, which began October 31, the Rockers moved from the Ilitch-owned Joe Louis Arena downtown to Davidson's Palace of Auburn Hills to be closer to suburban soccer supporters.

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