The cabbie snickered at us as he pulled his taxi in front of our suburban hotel. Its yellow and black exterior should have served as a clue. We were in the only city with team colors, Pittsburgh. Home to the black-and-gold Steelers, black-and-gold Pirates, and the Eastern Conference Champion Penguins, who--suprisingly--wear black and gold.
Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals, my first-ever NHL playoff road game with the Red Wings, was a jersey game. I brought two sweaters with me for the ride assuming something divine would point me one way or the other over the course of our four-and-a-half-hour journey. Would it be the Nick Lidstrom 1998 Stanley Cup jersey, with the "Believe!" patch on its left shoulder and the long since forgotten alternate "A" on the chest? Or Igor Larionov's Cup jersey from 2002, the year he broke by a single day the record for the oldest player to score a goal in the Stanley Cup Finals (his goal in the third overtime coming after midnight, technically a day after his second-period goal in the same game set the original record)? Though #5 was the current team captain and #8 was retired, pimping his own bottled wine and waiting for a call from the Hall of Fame, I had to go with Igor tonight. It helped that my buddy Mike was sporting fellow Russian Vladmir Konstantinov's #16. Why just be loathed as mere Detroit fans when you can work in the dual-hatred of the Soviet Union?
So after tossing a few race bombs into the back seat of his cab--hey, they're white dudes from the D, they must be bigots too--the taxi driver pulled up to the curb in front of the Igloo (now referred to as Mellon Arena) and spilled us out. We turned to face the arena and noticed one thing. There wasn't a red jersey to be found. Nothing that even bore the color, with the exception of the cycling traffic light at the corner. So... let the insults begin!
We had a third companion with us, our friend Doug, who chose to do other things with his money (which, tickets being what they were, could have included booking a Virgin Islands vacation). He preferred to mill about the crowd outside the rink and just be. I had yet to put my jersey on. I was meeting a Pens fan outside the arena, a guy I had already sent roughly $1,000 to, and I didn't want to cause him any reason to just keep walking. I had already bought tickets to this game four times... twice I bailed out on the deal after google searches of their names revealed everything from securities fraud to web sites on scrotum reduction. (You read it right; I can't make up this kind of stuff.)
"What, you too scared to wear your jersey?"
The first taunt came from a cute 20-something female. Frankly, I couldn't wait to walk into the Pittsburgh Penguins' arena sporting the winged wheel. Bring it on. I like this city actually, being a long-standing Steeler fan. And despite our being outnumbered and verbally abused, I didn't feel the least bit threatened. Trust me, I've been physically threatened in Columbus, I've had drinks thrown at me in East Lansing and I've had fans chant "You suck!" at me--and my son. This atmosphere, even at its worst, was nothing like that. But it was no walk along the Monongahela River either.
In fact, the only friendly face we found was the large, paper mache head of a black and gold penguin (see photo). Even he yelled out a muffled epithet as we walked off, but as you can see, we took what we could get.
We waded through the crowd like Moses waded through the Red Sea. There's a scene in the movie Juno where the camera follows a visibly pregnant Ellen Page down her high-school hallway and her classmates back away if they could get knocked up on contact. Yeah, it was like that. But it was exciting. Rarely is one put in a position where they are hated by so many people in the same place at the same time. The situation was right for performance art.
I had seen an exhibit a few years back in Los Angeles from a photographer who would incite groups of people and capture them in full-blown rage as they chased him down the street. This gallery filled my mind as our pathway approached a crowd of thousands camped before a large-screen TV outside the Igloo. I had a similar chance to capture the instantaneous anger of hundreds of hard-core hockey fans, directed at me. I couldn't resist.
So I stopped before them in my red and white jersey (I couldn't have garnered as much attention naked), flapped my arms and yelled, "Can I get a little Red Wings love here?" This was the response.
"The police should take you guys away in handcuffs!"
It wasn't merely that the comment came from a five-year-old boy. It was that he was just getting warmed up. His laughing father held him back as we passed, while the kid struggled to free himself as if to say, "And another thing..." By the time we approached the doors of the arena, we were novelty to the point of celebrity. Strangers approached us asking if we'd take pictures with them (see below). Others would hurl F-bombs at us, then turn around and say "But Igor's cool though" or "Nice Vladdy jersey".
Inside the door, we received our "Mellon Arena White Out" shirts and Cup Crazy rally towels, and local Stanley Cup Finals programs, full-color small-format magazines they gave away for free. Nice touch... hear that, Mr. I? We then worked our way past the jeers and promises of bodily injury to level E, and found our seats... in the very last row, deep below the overhang of section F. An old rickety air conditioner rattled ceasingly throughout the game, and while we had a complete view of the arena, we could see nothing else beyond that. If I bent down till my chin touched my knees, I could see the Jumbotron (which I did for this shot of the opening face-off):
When we arrived at our seats, the fan next to us immediately grabbed his cell phone. "You sold your seats to f---ing Red Wings fans? You are a f---ing a--hole!" he screamed and slapped the phone shut. He wouldn't even look at us at first, but his friend was more understanding. (By the start of the third period, we were laughing it up... they even vowed to take us to the city's famous Strip District after the game for a steak and egg sandwich at Primanti's delicatessen.)
Ice-cold beers in our mitts, we watched the player intros amid the deafening roar of the Penguin faithful. In a scene reminiscent of Le Colisee in Quebec during a Nordiques playoff game, or the Jets' last game in Winnepeg in 1996 when the Red Wings closed them out in game 6 of the Western Conference semis, the entire arena went white... from the ice to the stands. Take a peek again at the face-off photo above. I counted people wearing red from our vantage point and came up with 47. 47 out of the roughly 10,000 fans in my eyesight (the arena seats 17,000). Indimidating only scratches the surface. Place was LOUD.
Anyway the chrome dome nearly blew from the ground when Pittsburgh's Marian Hossa scored the game's opening goal five minutes in. Both teams had performed extremely well when scoring the game's first goal... and extremely poorly when giving up said goal. The Mellon nearly split like a cantaloupe from the exposion, and it stayed crazy as the game continued. Minutes later, while on the power play, Lidstrom blasted a shot from outside the left circle that passed Pens' goalie Marc-Andre Fleury and into the net to tie the score. We yelled out "Yesss!" and high-fived, as the profanity rained down on us like so much Iron City beer.
The tight-checking 1-1 game worked its way into the third period, with Wings goalie Chris Osgood standing on his head once again with save after mystifying save, one knocking him clear into the crease--all but his trapper, that is. Then, just a few minutes into the third, Detroit's Brad Stuart settled the puck in the neutral zone and worked it in deep to Darren Helm, whose cross-ice pass hit a streaking Jiri Hudler. Alone on Fleury, the lightning-quick Czech fired a backhand shot off the right post and the goalie's leg to put Detroit ahead to stay.
But the game was anything but won at that point. Detroit had fought off a disproportionate number of short-handed situations all game long, and with ten minutes left, faced a 1:26-long 5-on-3 advantage.
"Now we're back in this game!" the once-silent Penguin fan beside me proclaimed. "But if you don't score, it's over," I shot back. And the Red Wings denied Pittsburgh any more than a single shot during their entire power play. The highlight and what will surely become the snapshot moment of the game if not the series, was Henrik Zetterberg's clamp-down on Sydney Crosby as the 20-year-old phenom awaited a centering pass at the mouth of the net. Ozzie was beaten on the play and the talented Swede was all that was in the way of a 2-2 tie game. But Crosby could barely touch the puck, much less get the puck on net, and the one remaining opportunity was snuffed out by yet another spectacular save by the once-maligned Osgood. The fuzzy-faced netminder--even in his mid-30s--who has allowed a grand total of one goal in three Red Wings victories, now sits a win away from his third Stanley Cup, second as a starter. And with his career statistics climbing up the list of the very best goaltenders of all time, that win may be enough for him to reach the Hall of Fame.
After the game, I couldn't help but get a picture holding my lucky little repliCup (see photo below). As I worked my way down to arena level, one last drunken idiot threw a vile string of profane name-calling. I turned to him, smiled and pointed at the scoreboard, which sent him into hysterics. I looked back at him as his five friends looked away in embarrasment. As I told a Pittsburgh fan earlier that evening, this team will win one, maybe two Cups in the next five years, so chill out.
We met up with our wandering friend and the three of us headed to the Marriott, where ESPN had taken up shop. The hotel bar was crawling with Red Wings faithful--FINALLY!--and we celebrated this magnificent victory with our own for a change. I even met a couple fans from Alberta, who all but invited us up some weekend next winter to catch back-to-back Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers games. Yet the afterglow still wasn't without incident. A slurry, drooling punk actually threatened a gang attack on me--twice--yet each time I asked him to repeat what he just said, he wouldn't. I've been described many ways, but imposing has never been one of the adjectives. It was one final case of idle threat by drunken fan. And from Pittsburgh of all places, a city I respected for its toughness. I'd never witnessed sore loser to this degree before... and I have season tickets for Michigan football!
We ended the night at a sports bar by our hotel, gloating before sunken-spirited Penguins one last time before we retired for the night. Sunday morning was the long trip back home. Well okay, the four-and-a-half-hour ride home. But we had two items left on our Steel-town agenda. First, a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum. No way do we miss that experience, even if for just two hours. The silver clouds room alone (where you walked along a swirling hallway filled with massive rectangular mylar pillows) was worth it. And second, of course, Primanti's. And not just any Primanti's, the Strip District Primanti's (or "the dirty one" as our adjacent Penguin friends referred to it the previous evening). Though the Red Wings win killed their "free lunch" offer, the thought of having the city's signature steak and egg sandwich was too good to pass up. (FYI, they serve them with cole slaw and fries inside the sandwich, a recipe designed to enable steel workers to enjoy an entire meal packed conveniently within two slices of bread).
It's a weekend I won't soon forget. At least until Detroit and Pittsburgh line up for a Stanley Cup rematch next May. Or the one after that. Without a doubt, these two franchises will meet again. The Penguins are too talented not to make it back and the Red Wings are just too smart.
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