At the Hart of matters
Family evolved into taking care of business for local pro teams as equipment managers
As Brett Hart floated between a row of skate- filled cubbies and the Blademaster that dominates the Penguins skate shop, he paused to remember the moment when reality felt unreal.
While Max Talbot notched two goals to lift the Penguins to their third Stanley Cup title in 2009, Hart was hidden deep within Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, performing the same game- day duties — sharpening skates, drying gloves, restocking water bottles — that he has since taking over his current do- everything role in 2007.
A few hours later, he was drinking out of the Stanley Cup.
“I was in the locker room after the game, drinking out of the Cup and just being a scummy, beer- battered mess with everybody else,” Hart said. “That’s stuff that you just don’t forget.”
Mid- sentence, he stopped to recount the thought that couldn’t escape his mind, then or now.
“Even now, I think about how weird is it that I ended there?” Hart said. “How did I even get here?”
Hart’s question is, of course, rhetorical. The answer, though, features a family lineage running from the 1970s to the present, on both sides of the state, 13 championship rings between them.
Hart’s first memories in a professional locker room aren’t from the day he became the Penguins shipping and receiving coordinator two years earlier, or even the day when he was hired to staff the organization’s mailroom in 2000.
They’re from the early 1970s, attached at his dad’s hip, exploring Terry Bradshaw’s and Jack Lambert’s lockers with the curiosity of a child.
“I remember just going and standing in front of people’s lockers and looking to see what they have,” Hart said. “The amount of shoes or the size of their
shoes. My dad was pretty good friends with Lambert, who in turn became my favorite.”
Brett’s dad, Jack, was the Steelers equipment manager at the time. While Brett’s biggest contribution to Pittsburgh sports takes place behind the scenes, Jack’s is a cultural institution — the Steelers famous asymmetrical helmets.
Accounts of the story differ, but as Brett knows it, the team wanted to honor the city’s steelworkers ahead of the 1962 Playoff Bowl — the NFL’s old third- place game — by pasting the tri- color Steelmark logo on its helmets. But as Jack ran out of logos, he realized he would only be able to paste them on one side.
Fifty- seven years later, the impromptu alteration remains.
While that story made it into family lore, Jack mostly kept his work and family life separate, allowing the Harts’ childhood to meet every cliché of the 1970s. Kevin, one of Brett’s five siblings and the Penguins’ current senior vice president of finance, recalls playing street hockey and pickup football with neighbors’ kids, watching the Steelers on TV every Sunday just like everybody else.
“I was young then, so you probably don’t have a great appreciation for what was really in front of you,” Kevin said. “But it became a little bit of second- nature, as well. Your dad’s a fireman and he saves somebody’s life today, that’s just secondary to you. It was a little bit of that.”
Brett, four years younger, remembers more of a curiosity, pressing his dad on why he couldn’t come down to the locker room during games or meet his favorite players.
Every time he asked, the answer was identical.
“If you weren’t a player or a coach or a trainer, you weren’t in that locker room,” Brett said. “It just didn’t happen.
“In fact, I’ve been told a few times that [ former Steelers owner] Dan Rooney ... he tried to bring a couple of friends into the locker room after a game. And him and my father got into an argument and my dad punched him and broke his nose — and kept his job. But that’s because his dad, Art, said, ‘ You knew the rules, nobody’s supposed to be in that locker room. It’s just not your place.’ ”
But every few months in the offseason, when no one was around, their dad would take them down to Three Rivers Stadium to give them a glimpse inside his life.
For Brett and Kevin, it helped foster a lifelong love of all sports, but football was “the 800- pound gorilla,” as Kevin puts it. Both played at Langley High School while Kevin went on to play defensive back at Thiel College.
With their athleticism more befitting an equipment manager than gridiron star, both knew football wasn’t in the cards beyond college and checked their sports dreams at the door of the professional world.
That’s where, in 1991 — five years after Kevin graduated from Thiel — sports drew them back in.
“I was walking down the hallway at the public accounting firm I was working at and a partner saw me walk by and said, ‘ Hey, what are you doing?’ ” Kevin said. “And I told him I was working on a project and he asked if I could come see him after lunch.”
When the partner stopped by after lunch to tell him to forget it, Kevin thought nothing of it, returning to the case that he was working on at the time. But the next day, back on his way to deliver edits to word processing, the same partner stopped him again.
This time, he dropped the the big one: They were working on the sale of the Penguins from Edward DeBartolo to Howard Baldwin’s group. “Purely happenstance,” Kevin says now.
At the time, he was married to the accounting world, but he jumped at the opportunity to help with the sale, thinking his involvement would be over by the end of the week — he started Aug. 30, the deal was supposed to close the next day.
Kevin still remembers the date it actually closed: Nov. 12. Even then, after three months of spending every work day at Civic Arena, the thought of a full- time job never crossed his mind until it actually came, with an offer to be the Penguins head accountant.
“I was ice in the veins,” Kevin said. “‘ Well, let me think about it, I have to talk to my wife.’ But jumping for joy inside.”
For Kevin, it was the dream job. While his professional aspirations had shifted away from sports, his passion for hockey bubbled, surrounded by hockeycrazed colleagues as the Penguins rolled to the 1991 Stanley Cup.
Five months after taking the job full time, he had a ring of his own. Twentyseven years later, he’s second only to Mario Lemieux in the organization with four — the latter two in his current role, the closest thing the Penguins have to a CFO.
Within his own family, it’s only good for a tie for first. Brett matches the three Penguins rings that adorn his bedside table with his dad’s 1975 ring that his uncle sent him when he got married in 2002.
His sister Kelly, too, has the three most recent Penguins rings after becoming a receptionist for the team in 1997. When Brett followed three years later, he was taking classes at Pitt and a local community college — “walking through life,” in his words — before Kevin called, needing help in the mailroom.
“I don’t think either of them was out and about, saying I’m going to go work for the Penguins in the mailroom or I’m going to go work for the Penguins as the receptionist,” Kevin says, thinking back over a bowl of gumbo across the street from PPG Paints Arena, where all three siblings now work.
On this afternoon in late July, the three were engrossed in their own lives — Brett and Kelly preparing for a busy three- concert week at the arena while Kevin readied briefs for the annual auditors’ visit.
Now in their 20th year working together, the proximity of their jobs has become second nature. Family lunches are sporadic, and when they get together with their three other siblings over the holidays, hockey doesn’t dominate conversation any more than baseball or football do.
“We were [ fans growing up], but all three teams,” Kelly said. “That’s just how people grow up in Pittsburgh, whether your father worked for them or not.”
Throughout their career turns, sports have always been a critical part of the family fabric. While Kevin says Brett wasn’t thinking of a mailroom job that day when he reached out in 2000, the pull of sports never quite subsided.
“I did think it might be kind of cooler to do something in sports,” Brett said. “And obviously I thought [ about] following in some sort of steps of my father.”
Nineteen years later, a near- identical quote reverberates from Nick Hart with only a few minor details distinguishing it from his uncle’s.
“I think more than anything, my dad and the other members of my family working for the team got me around the game more,” said Nick, Kevin’s son. “Even all the locker room stuff and all the fantastic opportunities I was afforded in that regard, just being able to watch all those games and go to all those games at a young age before I can even remember, I think that’s really where my passion grew.”
Today, the 26- year- old spends his work days rotating between the announcer’s booth and press box in Wilkes- Barre/ Scranton, where he’s the media relations manager and broadcaster for the Penguins American Hockey League affiliate.
His story of how he got here follows a much more straightforward path. One of his earliest memories is from an emptied Civic Arena, inconsolable after the Penguins tied the Winnipeg Jets in an otherwise anonymous midseason game.
The rest of his childhood is filled with late nights at the arena that all blur together, culminating in that unforgettable day in 2009. Minutes before Brett’s turn to drink out of the Stanley Cup, Nick — then working as a locker room attendant — found his way onto the ice. The moment is forever immortalized by his place in the Penguins’ scrum photo, something that would have been unimaginable to Kevin or Brett a generation earlier.
Today, it’s the expectation. Brett keeps a friendly relationship with players, just as his dad did with Lambert, but now it extends to family. Before a game last year, he walked into the locker room to find his 12year- old son, Connor, talking about Fortnite with Kris Letang.
This season, Brett expects Connor to join him in the same locker room attendant role that Nick had 10 years ago, if his higher- ups let him. His older son, 13- year- old Sean, doesn’t match Connor’s fervor, but he, too, spends much of his winter tracing Brett around the clubhouse.
“It’s a nice environment to work in,” Brett said, walking past the glass- encased room where the Penguins’ brass prepared for the upcoming NHL draft, before stopping to stare into the team’s expansive office space. As he talked about Nick, Connor and Sean, a contagious smile seeped onto his face.
“I’m sure we’ll be around for a while.”