New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘Like losing a family member’
Twenty five years later, Hartford Whalers remembered
A hockey team’s booster club is planning to gather at Buffalo Wild Wings in Wethersfield Wednesday night to mark the 25th anniversary of the last time they saw that team play.
It has somehow been a quarter century since the Hartford Whalers’ fans said goodbye to the state’s NHL franchise, which played its last game at what was then the Hartford Civic Center on April 13, 1997.
Joanne Cortesa was there. She and her parents had season tickets for years, first in Section 101, then 123, back, she said, to the “91 Club” of fans who traveled to Springfield for home games after the roof of the Civic Center collapsed in 1978.
“The last game was hard,” said Cortesa, president of the Hartford Whalers Booster Club, still 65 members strong. “A lot of people say ‘ehhh.’ You don’t realize it: Losing a team is like losing a family member.”
The franchise has now been the Carolina Hurricanes for as long as it played in the northeast, beginning life in Boston as the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association in 1972, moving to Hartford in 1975 and becoming the Hartford Whalers when it joined the NHL in 1979.
“It’s hard to believe it’s 25 years,” said Mark Anderson, membership chairman of the club’s board of directors. “There are times it feels like 25 days, you know what I mean? And times it feels like 200 years, not 25.”
The team’s connection, though, to a community that threw a parade when it won its only NHL playoff series is indelible.
What amazes Pat Pickens is that, even as the loss is still felt by those who were here then, the Whalers may have never been more popular to everyone else.
When he worked for Hearst Connecticut Media last decade, he saw high school hockey players and fans wearing Whalers gear who could’ve barely been talking, let alone attending games, when the team played in Hartford.
It sparked the idea for a book, “The Whalers: The
Rise, Fall, and Enduring Mystique of New England’s (Second) Greatest NHL Franchise,” which came out in October.
“I think the thing is, it’s still a team that’s alive, which is remarkable,” Pickens said.
It’s not that teams like the Quebec Nordiques, Minnesota North Stars, Atlanta Thrashers are gone and forgotten, Pickens said, but the Whalers’ “name recognition, their cultural relevance: They’ve arguably never been more relevant, 25 years after they’re gone.”
Whalers merchandise sells better than many current teams’. “Brass Bonanza,” Jacques Ysaye’s unmistakable instrumental that served as the Whalers’ goal song and played them onto the ice, is still heard around the state and beyond.
The Hurricanes co-opted Hartford’s uniform as a throwback when they were at their lowest in 2018, with an on-ice product only just about to emerge from nine seasons without a playoff appearance.
“They needed an event to capture the attention of the league,” Pickens said, “and they put that jersey on.”
Most of the nostalgia, Pickens noted, is for the original green, blue and white logo. When they left, the Whalers’ color scheme included a darker blue that had replaced green as the base of their dark sweaters, with silver trim.
“If you look at that game 25 years ago, there are so many fingerprints of why they failed. Kevin Dineen had (been traded and) come back. They rebranded. Players had come and gone,” Pickens said.
Anderson didn’t see it: He locked himself in his bedroom on April 13, 1997, and watched on television, not wanting to put any more money in owner Peter Karmanos’ pocket before the team left town.
(Anderson has stuck with the Hurricanes as his team, though, in part because Whalers legend Ron Francis returned to the franchise in Raleigh and in part because Karmanos is no longer involved.)
The state’s hockey landscape has shifted since the Whalers’ departure, though a quarter-century later, the state of the XL Center and finding the money to renovate or replace it remains an issue.
Though it’s “our dump,” Anderson said, full of memories of not only Whalers games, he deeply wants to see the state commit to gutting the building and creating an entirely new arena, like Seattle did turning Key Arena into Climate Pledge Arena. He fears that if that doesn’t happen, it’ll be a death knell for downtown businesses that rely on the arena bringing people in.
The XL Center has been the home of the New York Rangers’ AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack, since the Whalers left.
The Hurricanes affiliated that summer with an AHL team in New Haven, which had gone four years without pro hockey since the AHL’s Senators, formerly Nighthawks, moved out. The Beast lasted just two seasons, but that minorleague franchise came out of dormancy in 2001 in a then-new arena in Bridgeport and has been there since.
The Wolf Pack played a couple of seasons early last decade, with former Whalers owner Howard Baldwin in charge, as the “Connecticut Whale” before returning to the Wolf Pack name. The National Women’s Hockey League, now the Premier Hockey Federation, put one of its charter franchises in Connecticut in 2015, and it took on the Connecticut Whale name and the blue-and-green color scheme
Three other state colleges joined Yale in Division I (four, really, but Fairfield soon dropped its program). Quinnipiac built an oncampus rink and has become a factor on the national stage. Sacred Heart and UConn have new buildings on campus due to open next season; the Huskies play conference games at the XL Center. Facilities at Yale’s Ingalls Rink got a major upgrade, and the Bulldogs won an NCAA title in 2013 against Quinnipiac.
Three of those schools’ women’s programs were nationally ranked this season, and two made the NCAA tournament.
The booster club still meets monthly, with members from all over who now get to virtually attend over Zoom. It gets together to mark the anniversary, but Cortesa said she wasn’t positive that will continue past this year.
The pandemic kept them from going on road trips, but they’ve been to New Jersey, Long Island and Philadelphia, among other places; Boston has become too expensive. They march in Hartford’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and play “Brass Bonanza.” They give out a $1,000 annual scholarship.
Some former Whalers are expected back in town in mid-July for the Hartford Yard Goats’ Whalers Alumni Weekend.
Cortesa said the club will be around as long as she can help it. But she says she doesn’t go to Wolf Pack games; they aren’t the same.
“Remembering the Whalers, I’ll never forget them, put it that way,” Cortesa said. “When you associate yourself with a player and the player never forgets you — it’s not like today. Players back then cared about the fans, spoke to them. It’s different.”