Wish my pals were around last Saturday, to take in a supreme indulgence into boyhood sportstime nostalgia.
Anybody who is a fan of another, actual hockey team may not understand it. But if you lived in Hartford in the 80s, there is an emotional tie to the Whalers that was jolted but never really severed when its greedy owner packed up and moved South somewhere (they became the Hurricanes).
The last professional men’s team vacated the state left a gaping hole. Once we were a place where other teams came to play and we would occasionally beat Boston or New York or Montreal, though mostly we were more in league with the Nordiques.
The Whalers may never have been great, but they were our team. You could look up at a SportsCenter in Hawaii, as I did once, and see the name of the town and the score of the game its hockey team lost.
But in the mid-80s, when I first came to town and the possibilities were, well, maybe not endless but at least better than the last mid-sized insurance town I had come from, the Whalers were on the rise, possibly playing .500 and aiming toward a second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
This may not sound like much, but it had apparently never happened before and it was enough to cause WhalerMania. Tickets were apparently cheap enough back then that we could go to many of the playoff games and have enough money to pay for beer to accompany the sport, both during and after the game at fine, long gone establishments like the Russian Lady, the Civic Pub and, if worse came to worse, Boppers.
At such places, spontaneous calls of “Let’s Go Whalers” would erupt. More musical souls would begin to spout “Brass Bonanza,” the so cheesy it’s good theme song that would inexplicably play every time the Whale made a goal (because of the caliber of the team, at least it didn’t happen as often as it could have). Amateur sports analysts would declare Kevin Dineen the world’s greatest athlete without irony, and Ron Francis close behind.
I missed the AHL days of the New England Whalers, but the NHL Whalers had one of the great alltime logos of hockey, with a whale tale on the top, a W on the bottom forming the H in the middle.
Then it was all gone. A replacement minor league was not even worth considering as substitute. And the hockey tradition of Hartford disappeared.
But put your ear to the wind, what is that sound you’re hearing but the faint strains of “Brass Bonanza”? Especially at the first Fan Appreciation day, held at Rentschler Stadium last week. Lines were around the place waiting to get in. Not that they needed a stadium to hold the people. But hey, about 4,000 people showed up to pick up T-shirts, hats, stickers, posters and get signatures from, yes! The Whalers themselves. The idea, according to onetime Whalers owner Howard Baldwin, was to show the NHL there was still support for a team in this market.
And there they were, the World’s Greatest Athlete, Francis and the rest, in a long line of tables signing stuff. Then over at his own table and warranting his own line was the Hockey god himself, Gordie Howe, who came over to the Whalers at an advanced age as more of a gimmick than anything else. But hey, he was king then and he’s king now.
Like many of the Whaler faithful, I dragged along my daughter to the event, promising we’d only be there an hour. She had seen a game or two as a toddler in a luxury box but was too young to remember. Maybe this would jog her memory. It did not.
She was sort of interested in the goings on; all these old guys fawning over equally old former hockey players. She didn’t mind getting a T-shirt and getting a green Whaler vuvuzela. We used to have one years ago back when they were called cheap plastic horns. You can’t play “Brass Bonanza” on it but like Howard Baldwin, you can try.
Bring back the Whalers. You can get a coffee cup that says so.