TURNOVER of LEGENDS
Great players of bygone eras will soon have their names bumped from the Stanley Cup as the engraver runs out of room on the fabled trophy
Soon, Gordie Howe’s name will no longer adorn the Stanley Cup.
Nor Rocket Richard’s, nor Bobby Hull’s.
Similarly, 14 years from now you won’t be able to find the name Bobby Orr on hockey’s most-hallowed trophy. Nor Phil Esposito, Dave Keon, Jean Beliveau, Bobby Clarke or Bernie Parent. Nor, possibly, the name of any Toronto Maple Leafs player, even though the club won 11 NHL titles after changing its nickname from the St. Patricks in 1927.
The accomplishments of these legendary players and teams are indelibly etched into hockey history for all time, to be sure, but their names grace sportdom’s most cherished chalice only temporarily. For just over half a century, anywhere from 52 to 65 years.
“That’s too bad, but that’s the way it goes,” Esposito, a two-time Cup champion in the early 1970s with the Boston Bruins, told Postmedia’s Lance Hornby.
After the names of this season’s champions are engraved — probably in late September, once each victorious player and coach gets his prized turn at home with the Cup — the big-barrelled trophy for the third time will be filled up. Then, at some point over the following 12 months, the top and oldest of five sterling-silver bands on the barrel, containing champions from yesteryear, will be removed to make room for a new wave of successors.
Such band removal has been happening every 12 or 13 years since 1992. And it still comes as a shock to most hockey fans, says the foremost of the “Keepers of the Cup.”
“People just keep thinking the Stanley Cup gets bigger and bigger, until they look at it and then they see for themselves,” said
Phil Pritchard, a vice-president and curator at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto who annually dons the white gloves and rolls the Cup onto a red carpet at presentation time for the victors.
“Right now there’s only one spot left on the Cup, which will be this year’s champion. People who discover that then say, ‘Well, where’s next year’s team going to go?’ And then you start explaining it to them. At first they’re shocked. They’ll say, ‘Then why don’t you make it bigger?!’ ”
Only short-term concerns were on the mind of the Cup’s founder, Frederick Arthur Stanley — the 16th Earl of Derby and Canada’s sixth governor-general, who’s probably best remembered as Lord Stanley of Preston — when in 1892 he donated a silver punch bowl to be awarded to Canada’s annual amateur championship hockey team.
It wasn’t called the Stanley
Cup then. Rather, the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup.
“Part of the original agreement was the team that won it would be responsible for adding a ring to it, at their cost,” Pritchard said. “The winner would add a ring, then the next year another team would add a ring. Lord Stanley probably never thought they’d still be doing it in 2017. Obviously the team doesn’t add a ring anymore. That’s all changed and evolved over time.”
Indeed, various rings, bands and collars came to be added beneath the big bowl until 1927 — the year the NHL took over control and awarding of the beloved beaker, in concert with two perpetual trustees of the Cup, who to this day have final say on all things pertaining to the trophy.
It was then that a narrow “stovepipe” succession of rings of identical diameter began to be added.
By the end of the Second World War the trophy had grown so long and unwieldy it was derisively nicknamed the “Elephant Leg.”
That incarnation, though, began the beloved, uninterrupted tradition of honouring not only the name and year of each Cup-champion club, but also the names of those who either played during the playoffs, or helped the club off the ice to win.
The current size and shape of the Cup debuted in 1948, with a fatter barrel replacing the stovepipe in accommodating winners’ names from 1927-28 onward. (Previous winning teams are engraved on the bowl and on three tiered bands and a collar that descend between the Cup and barrel.)
A 1957 tweak introduced five equal-width silver bands that wrap the barrel, each of which can accommodate engravings for up to 13 champions. With more than two-and-a-half of the five bands empty in 1957, the next generation didn’t have to worry about what to do after the bands were filled.
That happened in 1992, when the next generation finally had to act, and fast.
The long unresolved dilemma accompanied Cup centennial celebrations, as it happened.
To expand or not to expand? That was the question.
The trophy was 100 years old. The original bowl and collar had become so brittle by the early 1960s as to necessitate permanent replacement; the originals are on display in Lord Stanley’s Vault in a great hall at the
Hockey Hall of Fame.
Was it time to retire the whole thing and create a new trophy entirely? That option was on the table at one point, says Pritchard, one of the Hall’s representatives at those 1992 meetings, which also included NHL executives and the Cup’s two trustees at the time, Brian O’Neill and Justice Willard Estay.
“There was talk of making it bigger,” Pritchard said. “And I don’t know if this was discussed at that time, but there has been talk since then of reducing the size of the engraving font. But we still would have filled up, eventually.”
Expanding the Cup would have continued the century-long tradition begat by Lord Stanley himself, of adding on, or enlarging, parts as necessary to honour new winning teams.
Eventually, 1992 decisionmakers deemed that option impractical.
The barrel would have doubled in height by the 2030s, to accommodate the 10 bands required by that time.
Probably such enlargement even would have proved unsafe. After all, the Cup, as is, weighs nearly 35 pounds. To this day that surprises members of victorious teams.
The 12 teams set to be removed in 2018 are the 1953-54 and 195455 Detroit Red Wings; the 195556, 1956-57, 1957-58, 1958-59 and 1959-60 Montreal Canadiens; the 1960-61 Chicago Blackhawks; the 1961-62, 1962-63 and 196364 Toronto Maple Leafs; and the 1964-65 Canadiens.
That’s when the Cup will bid adieu to Gordie, Rocket, The Golden Jet and their championship teammates.
“The same silversmith who does the engraving (Louise St. Jacques) actually removes the rings,” Pritchard said. “We have held a little celebration both times we’ve brought a band back to the Hall to put on display. We invited some of the players whose names came off. We probably will do that again when we get closer to it.”
In 2031, the bottom band will have filled for a fourth time, thus retiring the top band containing engravings for NHL champs from 1965-66 through 1977-78.
That’s when the names of a heck of a lot of Habs, plus Orr, Esposito, Clarke and all those long-haired superstars of the 1970s, will come off, too. As well as any mention on the Cup’s barrel of “Toronto Maple Leafs” — unless that titlestarved franchise should earn fresh engravings by then.
Does Pritchard ever get grief from any aggrieved or offended ex-players about the removal of old bands? “Never directly,” he said. “I know fans have commented on it.”