Chicago Blackhawks

by Mark Lazerus

  The feeling on the Blackhawks bench changed sharply again, too.

  “It’s not every day you score a goal with an empty net like that to tie it,” Sharp says. “That’s a huge goal to begin with. But then to score right after that shift, now the situation has completely changed to, ‘Let’s just get out of this game. The next 50-something seconds and we’re Cup champs.’ It was a pretty crazy finish.”

  After Boston called its timeout, Quenneville kept his fourth line out there, with Bolland’s head still ringing and his hands still shaking from excitement. Only now they were out there to ­preserve a lead and a championship, not just cling to a tie and get it to overtime.

  “I get to the bench and Q’s like, ‘Stay out there! Stay out there!’” Bolland recalls. “I’m like, ‘I’m not staying out there. Screw that. I’m getting off. In case anything happens, I’m not going to be the one that blows it here. I’m already on a bit of a high here.’ But I went back out there, I won the draw, we went D to D, they kicked it up to me and we dumped it in and I got the hell off.”

  Even the stoic Kruger couldn’t think straight.

  “I couldn’t calm down,” he says. “I was on the ice after that, and I felt like I needed to get off the ice because I didn’t know what I was doing. Me and Bolly were still so excited from the goal, so we changed after like 20 seconds or something.”

  With 52 seconds left in the game, Frolik dumped the puck into the Boston end.

  With 42 seconds left in the game, Toews hopped over the boards.

  With 25 seconds left in the game, Frolik kicked the puck up the wall to Toews in the neutral zone.

  With 17 seconds left in the game, Toews forced a neutral-zone turnover.

  With nine seconds left in the game, Brent Seabrook cleared the puck out of the Blackhawks’ zone for the last time in the 2013 season.

  With five seconds left, Toews stumbled down the center of the ice trying desperately for an empty-netter to seal it.

  With zero seconds left, bedlam.

  Hugs on the bench. Hugs on the ice. Hugs in the general ­manager’s box. Hugs in the crowd—most of them consolation hugs for fans in black and gold, but a smattering of them giddy hugs for fans in red.

  So much for Game 7. A loss had become a win. In a mere 17 ­seconds. A lifetime.

  “Unbelievable,” Toews said on the ice during the celebration—a mix of pure joy and utter bewilderment in everyone’s voices. “It’s even hard to celebrate right now. I’m pretty exhausted. But once we fill the Cup up, it’ll get going pretty good.”

  Would it ever.

  Cup Crawl: The Sequel

  The Detroit Red Wings gave the Blackhawks everything they could handle in the second round. The Los Angeles Kings were a bruising team with a championship pedigree. And the Boston Bruins forced the Blackhawks to summon resolve and determination they didn’t even know they had.

  But the Blackhawks’ toughest challenge in the spring of 2013? Beating Twitter.

  In 2010, the Blackhawks were able to stay ahead of the cat-and-mouse game they had with their fans, popping into bars and restaurants unannounced, and getting 30 to 45 minutes of blissful solitude with the Stanley Cup before fans tracked them down. In 2013, social media was far more prevalent, and it became even trickier to surprise anybody or any place with sports’ most famous trophy.

  But the Blackhawks were no novices. Just as experience had helped them beat the Red Wings, it helped them beat the fans, too.

  It started much like 2010—a booze-soaked celebration in the tiny visitors locker room at TD Garden, a calm-before-the-storm flight home from Boston, and a quick stop at Harry Caray’s near the airport.

  Then the Blackhawks got creative.

  The 2010 party at the Pony Inn the night the Blackhawks beat Philadelphia was the stuff of legend, and savvy fans planned ahead, packing the place before the puck was even dropped and refusing to leave into the wee hours.

  “We couldn’t get people out of there that night,” says one employee. “It wasn’t coming but everyone thought it was, because it came last time. I couldn’t get people out of there until like 3:30 am or something. It was insane. People wouldn’t leave the bar, and they wouldn’t move from outside the bar. We opened at 7:00 am the day after the second Cup because there were that many people ­thinking they were coming. We had a full entire bar for 10 fucking hours. We had the rerun of Game 6 on the TVs and it was like people were watching it live, ­cheering like crazy. It was absolute madness. People doing Jameson shots at 10:00 am. This is a Tuesday morning, what the fuck is going on here?”

  While the Pony Inn was the center of attention, the Blackhawks actually stealthily brought the Cup to the Scout—a downtown bar owned by the same guy who ran the Pony Inn—on Wabash, far south of the bedlam up on Belmont. Just like in 2010, the windows were papered over. Just like in 2010, the party started around 5:00 am and went well into the waking hours. Just like in 2010, it was only the beginning.

  “It might have been an even better celebration,” Dave Bolland says. “After 2010, everybody knew that we had to pace ourselves for this. We knew what to do. We don’t have to go out and blow our load the first night and have everything all done with.”

  Without some of the more colorful characters from the 2010 team, and with a better idea of the gauntlet of guzzling that lay ahead, the Scout party was slightly more tame than the Pony Inn one was.

  “It was still a full-blown party,” says one bartender who worked both parties. “But the Scout one was like PG-13 compared to how crazy it was at the Pony in 2010.”

  For some of the older Blackhawks, it was tough to keep up. Two days later, Marian Hossa joked to reporters that he hadn’t slept in two days. “Don’t tell this to my wife, please,” he said.

  Jamal Mayers actually went home after the Harry Caray’s ­gathering the night of the Game 6 victory, and woke up at 8:00 am to see the local news desperately trying to catch a glimpse inside the Scout, as word spread on Twitter that the Blackhawks were there. Later in the day, Mayers received a text from Jonathan Toews, ­saying a car—loaded up with Toews, Patrick Kane, Patrick Sharp, and Lord Stanley—was coming by to pick him up. Mayers quickly called up a handful of families in his Lincoln Park neighborhood, whose kids played with Mayers’ kids at a park on their block most evenings, and told them to go to Gaslight, a local bar, in a half hour. He didn’t say why.

  “They’re sitting there having dinner, and lo and behold, I walk in with the Stanley Cup,” Mayers says. “We were only there about 35 minutes, because by then, there were helicopters hovering over the place. People had tweeted and texted that the Stanley Cup was there, and the next thing you know, there was a news crew there. But we swept out of there before they figured it out.”

  That was the game. The crawl lasted about a week, ­interrupted only by a parade that somehow dwarfed the one in 2010. The streets were still lined with people as the buses drove by, but instead of a downtown rally, fans gathered on the softball fields in Grant Park—the same setting in which Barack Obama ­delivered his election-night victory speech in 2008. The Blackhawks ­outdrew Obama. An ­estimated 2 million people poured into Grant Park to hear a hoarse Jonathan Toews thank them for their support, to see a bleary-eyed Kane hand the team’s championship belt to Corey Crawford, and to hear Crawford drop a couple of F-bombs on live television.

  “Fuckin’ right, Chicago!” Crawford bellowed. “Biggest bunch of beauties in the league. Fuckin’ worked their nuts off for this trophy! Woo! No one will ever take this away from us, we’re the champs!”

  For Sharp, the second celebration was a chance to take it a little easier, and to sit back and watch the first-timers like Crawford go crazy. For Toews and Kane, it was a chance to reflect on the legacies they were leaving on their adopted hometown. For Mayers, it was a chance to go out on top.

  “It was pure craziness,” Mayers says. “Then m
y wife was like, ‘Okay, we have to go home. That’s enough.’ I was like, ‘Aw, come on, just one more night.’ Then I looked at her face and realized she was serious, and I decided she was right. So we drove back to St. Louis literally after the parade. She was a saint the whole time.”

  For Bolland, one of the original and most colorful members of the Blackhawks’ renaissance, it was bittersweet. The off-season purge of 2013 wasn’t going to be nearly as bad as the one of 2010, but Bolland had an inkling that he’d be one of the ones to go. He was right, as he was shipped off to Toronto during the draft two days later. He never wanted to leave Chicago, but there are worse ways to go out than with a Stanley Cup–winning goal in the greatest ending to a Final in hockey history.

  Goaltender Corey Crawford, holding the team’s replica championship belt, let the profanities fly during the Stanley Cup celebration and rally in 2013.

  “It was tough,” Bolland says. “I was hoping to play my hockey career out in Chicago and end it as a Chicago Blackhawk. I was just so invested in Chicago. I lived there all year. I’d go back home for about two weeks and live in Chicago all year round. I just became a Chicagoan. I had a house in Lakeview and loved it, and my goal was hoping to finish my career as a Blackhawk. When that day came and Stan [Bowman] called me, it was a sad day. But it made that celebration so much better. We got to do it again, we got to experience it for a second time, and share it with Chicago again. The city embraced us so well, and I still miss it to this day, living in Chicago.”

  The Less Glamorous Side of 17 Seconds

  Time to let you in on hockey writers’ dirty little secret: precious few of us ever see the end of a game live. We’re watching on television, just like you. Press boxes are too far from press rooms, which are too far from dressing rooms. Modern-day writers don’t get to sit back and watch a game, ruminate on it, casually meander around the room chatting up several players, ruminate some more, then start writing their stories. The second the final horn sounds, we have a story posted online. Instantly. There simply isn’t time to get a story uploaded and wait for an elevator and trek to the press room and head to the locker room in time. You need a head start.

  So I usually head downstairs to the press room during the ­second intermission and begin writing. And if it’s a late start—and it’s almost always a late start—I’ll have a few versions of the story ready to go. Hawks win. Hawks lose. Hawks go into octuple overtime and the game ended too late for this edition. But I never write a word until the second intermission, so at least I have a feel for how the game has gone. Sure, it’s tempting—particularly in a big game with a championship potentially on the line—to pre-write the meat of the story, to tweak it and perfect it hours or days in advance. But I find the best writing comes from the adrenaline of being on ­deadline. If that proverbial gun to the head doesn’t get the creative juices flowing, nothing will.

  But then something like “17 Seconds” happens.

  Everyone knows the story that happened on the ice. The Hawks led the Stanley Cup Final 3–2, but trailed the Boston Bruins in the game 2–1. With 76 seconds left in the third period at TD Garden, with a winner-take-all Game 7 at the United Center looming, with Corey Crawford pulled for an extra attacker, Jonathan Toews slipped a centering pass to Bryan Bickell on the doorstep, and suddenly the game was tied.

  This, of course, was one of those Command-A, Delete moments, when a thousand keystrokes get wiped out by one stick stroke. In the sprawling makeshift press room on the event level of TD Garden, a couple hundred writers let out a collective expletive, took a deep breath, and started frantically writing new ledes. But, hey, at least we had an overtime intermission to compose ourselves and make everything coherent. After all, this is hockey. In hockey, deficits become ties, or ties become wins. Deficits don’t instantly become wins.

  Well, on June 24, 2013, a deficit instantly became a win. In the biggest game I’d ever covered. Gulp.

  I was one of the few writers that night who even saw Dave Bolland’s winner 17 seconds after Bickell’s equalizer. We all had our heads buried in our laptops, trying to salvage a first-edition story, when I looked up for a split second, saw Johnny Oduya’s shot from the point tick off Michael Frolik’s stick and off the post, only for Dave Bolland to knock it into the net. I reflexively yelped, “Holy shit, they scored again!” and a hundred heads popped up all around me. So much for that overtime intermission. Now I had 58.3 seconds of game action to reconfigure the biggest game story of my life.

  I pulled it off. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but dammit, it lived up to the moment. Back in 2013, I couldn’t post stories directly to our website. I had to send it in to our web editor, who was waiting for it back in Chicago. But just as I was about to hit “Send” on the most-read story I’d ever send, the WiFi at TD Garden crapped out on me.

  I lost my mind. I started banging on the table. I started yelling at the computer. I started cursing at the ceiling. And I was getting louder by the second. I made Niklas Hjalmarsson’s outburst in Game 7 of the Detroit series look like a child’s tantrum. Just wildly unprofessional stuff. The WiFi seemed to be working fine for everybody else, but not for me. Then came the F-bombs. So many F-bombs. A totally justified amount of F-bombs given the situation, but in hindsight, a mortifying amount of F-bombs in front of so many new colleagues whose respect I craved (this was my first year on the beat, after all).

  After about the 12th or 13th F-bomb, Bruce Arthur, then of the National Post, came over, laptop in one hand, iPhone in the other. Bruce didn’t know me from a hole in the ground back then, but he gave me his iPhone and his hotspot password. He basically saved my life. Or my career. Or at least my sanity.

  To this day, I shudder at the thought of TD Garden and its WiFi betrayal. Tuukka Rask and the Boston Bruins might be scarred from “17 Seconds” for life. But they’re not the only ones.

  5. 2013–15: The Endless Slog

  The South Bend Massacre

  There are countless adjectives that can be used to accurately describe Duncan Keith. He’s supremely gifted. He’s fast. He’s savvy. He’s creative. He’s crafty. He’s indefatigable. He’s phenomenal.

  He’s also…intense.

  Keith has a famously short temper, as evidenced by his retaliatory stick-swinging incidents against Minnesota’s Charlie Coyle and Los Angeles’ Jeff Carter, and his retaliatory elbow to the head of Daniel Sedin. On the ice, he rarely smiles. Off the ice, he broods and stews after losses, his answers curt and clipped. Even when he’s in a good mood, his deadpan style of humor can come across as aggressive to novice reporters who don’t know him well.

  Oh, and he likes watching horror flicks, too. The Saw series of horror movies are among his favorites.

  So when you first meet Keith, he can be a little intimidating. Off-putting. Unsettling. In fact, it wasn’t until the aftermath of his ­infamous and ill-conceived back-and-forth with a female radio reporter in Vancouver in late April of 2013—three full months into my time on the beat—that I began to understand him and feel ­completely comfortable around him. The reporter goaded Keith into saying something stupid by repeatedly asking about a blown call that clearly infuriated Keith, and Keith indeed said something stupid by asking if she should become a referee.

  “Yeah, maybe. Can’t skate, though,” she said.

  “First female referee,” Keith continued in a bit of crosstalk. “Can’t probably play, either, right? But you’re thinking the game like you know it? See ya.”

  It was a dumb thing to say, as Keith freely admitted afterward. But it was immediately pounced on by the national press and the blogosphere, turning it into a Big Deal. I was one of only a few people in that postgame scrum in the visitors dressing room at Rogers Arena, so I had the audio of the exchange and posted it online in its entirety, with a full transcript. I certainly wasn’t excusing what Keith said, but I wanted to at least provide the proper context—the snarky line of questioning
that preceded the snarky response.

  The next day in Edmonton, Keith came up to me and thanked me for doing that, and we chatted about the incident, his poor choice of words and sentiment, and his very professional working ­relationship with women in the press. He was apologetic. He was grateful. He was calm. He was normal. The brooding angst and fiery temper? That’s just hockey related.

  That said…

  Five months later, at training camp at Notre Dame, we got a good look at Keith’s temper on the ice and his Sphinx-like ­personality off it. In front a packed house at the Compton Family Ice Arena, at the tail end of the second ho-hum team scrimmage of the day, Keith was battling for position with Ben Smith in front of Corey Crawford’s net.

  Then Keith snapped. He pummeled poor Smith—one of the strongest, sturdiest, most fit guys on the team—into oblivion with a flurry of lefts and rights, pounding him into the ice. It was a stunning display of fury from a guy not known for his fists. And it seemed to come out of nowhere.

  In the locker room afterward, Smith shrugged it off, joking that he wanted to get on the scoresheet one way or another.

  “It happens,” he said. “We’re competitors.”

  Then came Keith’s scrum. Reporters crowded around him, nobody really sure what to say. Tim Sassone, the venerable dean of the beat, 25 years with the Daily Herald, stepped up for one of the most uncomfortable—yet oddly hilarious—exchanges you’ll ever witness.

  “Dunc, were you angry?” asked Sassone.

  “No, I wasn’t angry. I was happy. Felt good out there.”