Chicago Blackhawks: Stories from the Chicago Blackhawks' Ice, Locker Room, and Press Box

by Mark Lazerus

  “That was the game when I knew we were going to win the Cup,” Blackhawks radio play-by-play man John Wiedeman says. “Buff put Pronger into the boards and just destroyed their intimidation. I still go on YouTube just to watch that hit.”

  Byfuglien scored his first goal of the series later in the period to make it 5–2 and added an empty-netter to seal the 7–4 victory and send the series back to Philadelphia, where the Stanley Cup would be in attendance, and where Pronger no longer held sway on the series. Chicago’s first championship in nearly five decades was within reach.

  “We had a happy bunch of cocky players on our team, and we were pretty mouthy,” Eager says. “But we played hard and we backed it up. Every time.”

  The Phantom Goal

  Taken out of context, the pictures from June 9, 2010, don’t make much sense. There’s Patrick Kane, mouthpiece dangling from his teeth, gloves off, arms flailing, prancing down the ice. There’s Patrick Sharp, eyes wide and roaring, chasing him down.

  But there’s Brent Seabrook, looking the other way, having hopped over the boards but for some reason just standing there. There’s Dave Bolland, craning his neck in the other direction of Kane, still on the bench. There’s Brian Campbell, sort of in the dog pile at Antti Niemi’s net, but sort of not—still watching the far end of the rink, gloves still on his hands.

  The Blackhawks had just won the Stanley Cup. Well, they were pretty sure they had just won the Stanley Cup. Okay, they were really hoping they had just won the Stanley Cup. Honestly, nobody knew what the hell was going on. Here are a few perspectives on the biggest goal in Blackhawks history.

  * * *

  Patrick Kane wasn’t trying to score. Not exactly, at least. There ­certainly are times when Kane is trying to pick a corner, or sneak a puck in the short side, or beat a goalie five-hole. This wasn’t one of those times. After taking the puck from Brian Campbell in overtime of Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final in Philadelphia, Kane gave Flyers defenseman Kimmo Timonen a couple of shoulder shimmies and just flung the puck on net from the bottom of the left circle, hoping to ­generate a rebound. But he saw the puck go straight underneath Flyers goaltender Michael Leighton and lodge underneath the pad in the back of the goal.

  Kane had just scored the goal that every hockey-playing kid in the world dreams of scoring. And nobody reacted. Not Leighton. Not his teammates. Not the referee. Not the crowd. Hell, Timonen was still skating alongside him as he swooped around the back of the net, inadvertently defending Kane’s celebration with an attempted smear along the boards.

  “I’ve had bad dreams where you’re celebrating like that, but the puck didn’t actually go in,” Kane says. “And nobody reacted. But I knew it went in, and I wanted everyone to know. I think that’s why I celebrated the way I did, where I just kind of went crazy and went down the ice.”

  Well, also because you scored a Stanley Cup–winning goal, Patrick.

  “Yeah, that’s true,” he says. “That too.”

  * * *

  Brian Campbell is something of a worrier. And the last thing he wanted to do was look like a schmuck. So even though he had the primary assist on the phantom goal, he waited. And waited. And waited.

  Moments after scoring the biggest goal in Blackhawks history, Patrick Kane raced down the ice toward goaltender Antti Niemi and the celebration was on. After a 49-year drought, the Hawks were Stanley Cup champions once again. (Newscom)

  “I gave him the puck, I saw him shoot it, and I looked in the netting for the puck and I never saw it,” Campbell says. “And I see this guy celebrating, and throwing his gloves in the air. And I wasn’t going to be the guy who threw my gloves in the air and had to pick them up like an idiot because it didn’t go in the net. A lot of guys knew. Well, some guys knew. But I wasn’t going to be the guy who had to pick his gloves back up. I wanted to make sure.”

  He wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  Duncan Keith was only about a minute removed from his last shift, so he was still on the bench trying to catch his breath. He had grabbed a water bottle just as Kane fired, and the next thing he knew, half of his teammates were leaping over the boards and freaking out.

  So Keith jumped out, too. But while everyone was headed in Niemi’s direction, Keith, surprisingly calm, skated over to the ­referees to find out what the hell happened.

  “They didn’t know either,” Keith says.

  Keith took their silence as a “yes,” and raced down the ice to join his teammates in celebration.

  “Obviously, it was a weird way to win,” he says. “I could just see a nightmare coming. I just didn’t want it to be one of those situations where you feel good that you won the Cup, and then you didn’t.”

  Ah, yes. One of those situations. Of course.

  * * *

  Leave it to Captain Serious to turn five or six seconds of confusion into a mental dissertation on the pros and cons of premature jubilation.

  “My true sentiment was that it felt too good to be true, and I didn’t want to give into that feeling of relief and letting go, and then have it called back and have to try to get a grip and get back in the moment to try and go score another goal,” Jonathan Toews says. “I wasn’t ready to let go until I knew for sure.”

  Toews wandered over into the Flyers’ end while most of his teammates piled on Niemi 150 feet away. He kept looking at the Flyers net, then looking back at the celebration, then back at the net, and back at the celebration. Finally, he saw Leighton standing next to referees Stephen Walkom and Kelly Sutherland as they took the net off its moorings. The puck was sitting there. Leighton’s shoulders slumped. So did those of everyone else in orange.

  “I could see it in their body language, they knew,” Toews says. “That’s when it started to sink in. It could have been seconds, it could have been minutes. I can’t really remember.”

  It was actually about 40 seconds between the puck crossing the goal line and the public-address announcer making it official.

  And the best part? Barely a minute after celebrating a Stanley Cup–clinching goal, they got to do it again, this time along the boards. Bolland joined the hug next. Soon after, Kane was drowned in a sea of white sweaters and scraggly beards.

  The Blackhawks waited 49 years to celebrate winning the Stanley Cup. Then they got to do it twice in two minutes.

  “It was kind of like two different celebrations, right?” Kane says. “Sometimes we’ll still look at the pictures and videos, and look at guys’ faces, how confused they are. Pretty funny the way it worked out.”

  The Scratches

  Patrick Kane lived every hockey-loving kid’s dream when he scored the winning goal in overtime of Game 6 of the 2010 Final. But being part of a team that wins it, and taking that victory lap around the rink while holding the most famous trophy in sports above your head, is the next best thing. And nobody wants to be wearing a suit for that moment. Or even an ill-fitting jersey draped over unpadded shoulders. You want to look like you played, with tears and sweat mingling together in a patchy beard. Preferably a little blood, too, for effect.

  Colin Fraser, Bryan Bickell, Adam Burish, and Jordan Hendry didn’t play in Game 6. But they were still Blackhawks, still ­members of the team, still on the verge of becoming Stanley Cup ­champions. And so with the Blackhawks clinging to a one-goal lead in the third period of Game 6, as the final 10 minutes or so of the 49-year wait melted off the clock, the Blackhawks’ healthy scratches took off their suits and started getting into their gear. The socks and skates, the hockey pants and elbow pads, the shoulder pads and jersey—the full deal. After all, these are the images that will live on forever, the ­pictures that will grace their homes and their Twitter profiles, the glory shots for posterity.

  Then Philadelphia’s Scott Hartnell scored to tie the game at 3–3 with 3:59 to go in the third period.

  The four men, in various states of und
ress, looked at each other for a moment, and all had the same thought.

  “We’re like, ‘Fuck me,’” Fraser says.

  Usually, the last four minutes of a tied Stanley Cup Final game feel like they last forever. For Fraser, Bickell, Burish, and Hendry, it all went too fast. First, they were pissed that the Flyers had tied it up. Then, they were in an absolute panic because they didn’t want to look like fools, all geared up in pristine uniforms, when their battle-weary teammates trudged back in for the third intermission.

  “We’re like, ‘We’ve gotta hide somewhere!’” Bickell says.

  So the four men shoved whatever was loose—suit jackets and ties, pads and skates—into their bags and ducked into Pawel Prylinski’s massage room. And “room” is being generous. It was more of a broom closet, with Prylinski’s massage table wedged in at an angle because it didn’t really fit. The room looked like the interior of a clown car, only with very large, heavily padded clowns. Grown men, hiding from their friends.

  When the horn sounded and the Blackhawks stomped back into the dressing room, cursing and muttering under their breath, the four healthy scratches tried to stay perfectly still so nobody would know they were there.

  “Nobody could see us,” Fraser says. “I mean, the guys aren’t dumb, they probably figure we’re in there somewhere. But we don’t want to be a distraction.”

  For 18 minutes, they hid. Joel Quenneville gave his terse intermission report. Brent Seabrook and Jonathan Toews and others made their quick little pep talks. Tape was ripped and clichés were spouted and the clock ticked away and they went back out there to go win the Stanley Cup.

  The four scratches emerged from their closet and began watching on TV. The sudden-death aspect raised new concerns.

  “What if we don’t win this?” Fraser said to nobody in particular. “We’ve got to take all our gear off. How the hell are we going to get out of here?”

  Before they even had time to formulate a contingency plan should things go awry, Kane juked his way past Kimmo Timonen and slipped the puck past Michael Leighton from a sharp angle, at 4:06 of overtime.

  Kane saw it go in. Patrick Sharp knew it had, too. Nick Boynton saw Kane celebrate and half-celebrated himself. Nobody else seemed to know what had happened. Least of all the four guys in the dressing room. By the time Kane had reached the other end of the ice and deliriously jumped into Antti Niemi’s arms, Fraser, Bickell, Burish, and Hendry had darted down the tunnel toward the ice.

  “We stopped there, because we didn’t know if it was a goal or not,” Fraser says. “It’s the same thing. We don’t want to be these embarrassing idiots, these healthy scratches, running out there and then they say it’s no goal and we’ve got to skate off the ice. I was ­following Burish’s lead. He said, ‘Screw it, we’re going.’”

  Not that Burish was sure, either.

  “Everybody goes crazy and we run out there,” Burish says. “And me and Andrew Ladd are skating down the ice together, and I remember us looking at each other and thinking, Should we get back? Do we need to get back? Are we going to get a penalty? I don’t want to be the one that screws this up and gets the too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty. Because I was flying out there. Nobody was sure what to do, everybody was looking around and looking for the refs.”

  “It was wild,” Bickell says. “We didn’t know if it went in or not. When they finally called it a goal, we went crazy.”

  And they each got their turn with the Cup, looking every bit the part.

  “Yep, I lifted it,” Bickell says. “I touched it. Kissed it.”

  The Cup Crawl to End All Cup Crawls

  Every time Andrew Ladd steps into the visitors dressing room at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, he can still see it all. He can see Joel Quenneville dancing under a spray of champagne and beer, the Stanley Cup high above his head. He can see radio play-by-play man John Wiedeman drinking Bud Light out of the Cup—the man’s first drink in 21 years—bellowing, “Thank you, boys! Thank you!” as Patrick Sharp looks on from his perch atop a locker stall, giddily ­losing his mind. He can see Quenneville running around, handing out cigars. He can see Patrick Kane and his buddies in the corner, one of them holding the Cup and not even paying attention to it as he looks at his phone. He can see his teammates—his brothers—and their families and closest friends lost in delirium, the tears in their eyes a mix of the joy of victory and the sting of alcohol.

  “Every time I walk into that room, I still see the whole party,” Ladd says.

  For all the players on that 2010 team, those are the clearest ­memories. The most visceral memories. The lasting memories.

  That’s partly because they were the most immediate after the ­sudden, shocking victory—the kind of joy that only comes from ­ending a once-proud franchise’s 49-year championship drought. But it’s mostly because everything that happened afterward is a bit fuzzy, thanks to a fortnight-long celebration that spilled into seemingly every bar, dive, rat-hole, and restaurant in the Cup-starved city of Chicago.

  “We’re all still trying to piece it all together,” Ladd says.

  * * *

  Before the Bacchanalia, there was the two-hour plane ride home from Philadelphia, which took off about 90 minutes late thanks to the impromptu locker-room party. It was the calm before the storm, as players had a chance to sit back and reflect on what the hell had just happened. They sat around and tried to determine who actually knew that Patrick Kane had beaten Michael Leighton with that sharp-angle shot (Kane and Patrick Sharp knew for sure, everyone else basically figured it out from the way Kane danced down the ice afterward). They shared war stories of an unforgettable season. A handful grabbed a precious hour of sleep to rest up for the chaos that lay ahead. Most of the guys had beers in their hands.

  Wiedeman was sitting in his seat near the front of the plane—the coaches and front-office types sit in front, the internal media and staff behind them, with the players toward the back—and thinking back on all the little moments that comprised what may have been the biggest moment in franchise history. One seemingly innocuous thing stood out. It was Game 4 against Nashville, way back in the first round, when Brent Sopel did one of the most difficult things to do in all of sports—try to block a Shea Weber slap shot. Sopel took it right off the shoulder.

  Sopel kept saying he was fine, of course. Hockey players and all. Wiedeman never believed him. So Wiedeman got up and walked back to the players’ area of the plane. He found Sopel way back in the last row of the plane. His shirt was off. He had the Stanley Cup perched on his knee, leaning against his shoulder—he was using hockey’s Holy Grail to hold an ice pack in place. There was a Bud Light in his left hand.

  “How you feeling, Sopes?” Wiedeman asked.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Sopel replied.

  * * *

  A year earlier, after the Blackhawks had lost to the Detroit Red Wings in the Western Conference final, much of the team lingered in the city for a few weeks. Patrick Sharp, Brent Seabrook, Adam Burish, Brian Campbell, Troy Brouwer, and a handful of other guys stopped by Wrigley Field to catch a Cubs game and have a few beers together.

  They were mobbed.

  “It was like we had just won the Stanley Cup,” Sharp says. “People were high-fiving us, taking pictures, celebrating the season that we had. I just remember thinking, Wow, the city of Chicago is an ­unbelievable sports town. They were thanking us for a great season and we hadn’t even won anything. I knew if we ever won, it would be absolutely crazy.”

  It was. When the Blackhawks landed at O’Hare at 3:56 am, fans, reporters, and airport workers were waiting. Firefighters saluted them by firing a water cannon over the plane as it pulled in. Jonathan Toews stepped out of the plane with the Stanley Cup and lifted it over his head. The party was on.

  It started with a private gathering at Harry Caray’s in Rosemont, near the airport. That went until about 5:00 am
or so. Then the scene shifted to the Pony Inn, a little bar on Belmont Avenue that had become the Blackhawks’ go-to establishment because of its proximity to the homes of so many players. Duncan Keith, Dustin Byfuglien, Dave Bolland, Sharp, and several other players all lived within a block or two. The Blackhawks held Halloween parties there, watched hockey games there, all but lived there. Byfuglien once drove a motorcycle into the bar—not to the bar, into the bar—on a weeknight, because, well, he could.

  So the staff was on call the night of Game 6 in case the Blackhawks won—after all, they had shown up after sweeping the Sharks in the conference final—and all hands were on deck. Shortly before 5:00 am it was a quiet scene, with staffers and a few friends and family members lounging around and trying to stay awake.

  All of a sudden, Patrick Kane and Burish walked in wearing booze-soaked suits.

  “We all looked at each other like, ‘Oh shit, this is about to go down,’” says one Pony Inn staffer.

  Within minutes, the entire team was in the bar, with their wives and girlfriends and close friends and family. The curtains were closed, newspapers covered the windows, and the door was locked. Downstairs, people were passing the Stanley Cup around and drinking out of it. A DJ blared music. People were dancing on tables. Upstairs was a more exclusive area, with players hanging out with their female friends.

  “I don’t know what the hell was going on up there,” another Pony Inn staffer says. “It was just a rowdy, rowdy event.”

  Chicago bars, of course, are supposed to close by 4:00 am. So when a couple of police officers muscled their way into the Pony Inn, a few staffers got nervous. No need. The cops wound up ­taking ­pictures with Toews and taking a drink from the Stanley Cup ­themselves. The city belonged to the Blackhawks.

  Nobody could get in to the Pony Inn, but word quickly spread that the Blackhawks were celebrating there. By the time they started trickling out on Thursday morning, around 9:00 or 10:00 in the ­morning, television camera crews and hundreds of fans were huddled on the sidewalk, waiting for a glimpse of the staggering Blackhawks. The back alley was just as jammed. Bleary-eyed players stumbled out and scratched out a few autographs as they tried to find their way into a cab or a car.