Another Rangers move that was hard to believe; but I saw it live and in noisy, living color..
Mind you, it had nothing to do with winning and losing unless you're referring to losing your hearing and that's another story which The Maven will tell right now. And, yeah, I am partially deaf. (Do you hear me?)
Since you'll never guess what incredibly dumb thing the Old Madison Square Garden folks did to your Rangers, hear this:
The Blueshirts had a practice rink installed on the top floor of the old Garden, between West 49th and West 50th Streets, facing Eighth Avenue. It was called Iceland; and to the extent that it had ice, that was a legitimate name.
The 185 by 85 foot rink on which the regular Rangers games were played, made Iceland's hockey dimensions (about 140 feet long by 75 feet wide) absurd. Plus one end was cut off at an angle so it wasn't a real "corner" – more like a cul de sac.
Instead of installing normal wooden boards, the MSG purchasing department must have been sold a bill of goods by a metal company and – SHAZAM! – the "wooden" boards became aluminum,
Which is fine when nobody was inside Iceland. But when the Rangers skated out and the boys started firing pucks past the net and off the aluminum end boards, you'd have thought you were listening to The Big Noise From Winnetka -- inside a boiler factory.
It was – and this is not an understatement – deafening. (Do you hear me? DEAFENING!) As reporters entered Iceland in to check a practice, players such as Andy Bathgate would fire the rubber off the aluminum which, at the very least, almost scared their pants off scribes like me.
Other comedic players such as Rangers boisterous forward Eddie Shack had another use for the aluminum. My author buddy ("We Did Everything But Win" George Grimm relays these tales in his wonderful, story-filled book about the Emile Francis' years.
A few samples follow:
"Shack would fire shots at the aluminum whenever he saw Coach Phil Watson, whom he was not fond of, trying to speak to the team or give one-on-one instructions to an individual player," Grimm wrote. "Watson had to yell at him to cut it out."
Here are a few other comments about Iceland from Rangers of yesteryear collected by Sir Grimm of the Maven's Roundtable:
DON MARSHALL: “It was different playing in that little rink upstairs (laughs). It wasn’t the best for the team but that’s what you had and that’s what you had to do. But it was small and it wasn’t good for the hockey team.”
DICK DUFF: “I can still hear the shots coming off of those aluminum boards! And it was about half the size of the rink at the Garden. It was like a figure skating rink.
"Ratelle, Gilbert, Hadfield – the Rangers had some damn good players there over the years. I think if they had the same kind of set up we had in Toronto and Montreal they would have won more often.
"But they couldn’t always practice in their own rink. In Toronto and Montreal we played in the same rink as Juniors as we did as pros. So it was a built-in advantage.”
EMILE FRANCIS: "One end (of Iceland) was all glass, the sun would come in there, they didn’t even have blinds. Well if you were the goalkeeper at the other end of the ice you’d never see the puck coming.
"The most important things when you’re putting a hockey team together are your power play, penalty-killing and your forechecking and backchecking. But we couldn’t practice any of them because the rink had 'tin' boards.
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It must have been the decaf coffee, else how could I have forgotten "Ask The Maven" yesterday?.
"You couldn’t have body contact because if a player touched his skate on the boards the equipment guy had to take the guy's skate, go down five floors, run over to the dressing room and sharpen the skate. It took forty minutes for the guy to come back up.
"So we couldn’t practice properly. I said to myself, 'I don’t know how the hell they got by with this?' To think that they had done this since 1926, and won three Stanley Cups, that’s the rink that they practiced in.
"I don’t know why whoever was running that club would have put up with that or why they never went out and built a rink on their own. "
"Teams used to come in to play us, like Detroit or Toronto and they’d look at it and couldn’t believe it and would say, 'That’s where you practice?'"
Yeah but some guy in the aluminum business must have moved to the Riviera after selling those "tin" boards. – under an assumed name like Joe Trolleycar!