RANGER FANS TRUE BLUE
Loyal base gets Final say
IN THE END, as the Stanley Cup Final begins across the country on Wednesday night, this hockey story in New York is about the Rangers and their fans. That means the ones who have never had the numbers around here but who just kept coming, even as 1994 began to feel as distant as 1940 once did at Madison Square Garden.
This includes the Rangers fans, the ones old enough, anyway, who remember what it was like in 1979 after the Rangers beat the Islanders and John Davidson looked as big in goal, at least for a while, as Henrik Lundqvist does now. The Rangers were up a game on the Canadiens in the final that time, only then a goalie named Bunny Larocque took one off the chin in warmups and the great Ken Dryden got back into the game, and the Rangers never got another game off Montreal that year.
These are the Rangers fans I saw in the Chicago airport in their Messier jerseys and Leetch jerseys and Richter jerseys, on their way to Vancouver to see Game 6 on that Saturday 20 years ago, because if this was the night when their team finally won the Cup, they couldn’t take a chance on missing it.
“Hockey fans are through and through hockey. Of course they like other sports, too, but hockey is usually their sport. They’re knee deep in it all the time. So I think regardless of how the team is doing, they’re going to be there,” the great Brian Leetch told me the other day. “They’ve been there passing it along to their kids. Their grandparents are the ones that started it. It’s through and through for the hockey fan, there is no question. As a player we’re lucky to have the passionate group because we’re really a gate-driven sport and TV gets a little bigger each year, but it’s the people who come through the turnstile all the time.”
Then Leetch said, “Rangers fans, they’re there every year.”
Sports is something so often passed on between parents and children. You know how it is with Giants fans, they’re the ones whose tickets have moved from the Polo Grounds to Yankee Stadium to the Yale Bowl and finally to Jersey. Rangers fans never had to leave the Garden. They just kept coming, they were part of the 19,000 there, the ones of a certain age thought 1972 was going to be the year and thought 1979 was going to be the year, until 1994 finally did become the year.
Even then, it almost wasn’t, because the Devils were up three games to two in the Eastern Conference final. And even in Game 7, a close-out game at home the Rangers were supposed to win the way they won, 1-0, against the Canadiens last Thursday night, Rangers fans remember what happened long before “Matteau!..... Matteau!..... Matteau,” when Valeri Zelepukin of the Devils scored with eight seconds left in regulation to tie that game, and get Rangers fans, the ones who had mostly lived with hockey disappointment in the spring, thinking that maybe ’94 wasn’t going to be their year after all.
My friend Henk — it’s short for Hendrick, close enough to Henrik in this hockey spring in New York — was in business school in Boston in ’94, had watched Messier’s Game 6 hat trick in Jersey. His dad, who had season tickets and had passed on the Rangers to him, who took him to his first game when he was 6 years old, told him he had to come home for Game 7. Because this might be the year. Everything was good, and crazy loud, in the last minute until Zelepukin scored that goal for Jersey to send the game into overtime. The first overtime that night.
“Fans were in the corridors punching
the wall when the Devils tied the game game,” ” Henk says. “I saw people crying as they cleaned the ice for the first OT. Then Matteau.”
Later when he took his own son to his first game, the boy also 6 years old, the Rangers lost a regular-season game in overtime because of a dumb penalty in overtime, and a penalty shot that won the game. As they were walking out of the Garden, the boy said to his dad, “We really blew it today.”
A Rangers fan behind them said, “Get used to it, kid.”
These are the people who have been united in blue and became a catch phrase and a marketing slogan, who were united in blue before there was a Chase Bridge, and “blue seats” wasn’t just a high-up part of the place, it was a state of mind in New York sports, and a badge of honor. This run the Rangers are on right now, the one that really began when they were down three games to one against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second round, it is about the people from there, from all the seasons when the Rangers fell short, and sometimes broke their hearts, the way sports can, for the ones who care the most.
Nothing will ever be quite like ’94 again in hockey in New York, nothing will ever be the night when NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told Mark Messier to come get the Cup, and before long the hockey block party had begun on Seventh Ave.
“But it’s been 20 years,” Brian Leetch says. “It’s time to make new history.”
The Rangers try now, against the Kings, first two games Out There, then the Stanley Cup final returning to the Garden, this Garden that is so new inside, next week for Games 3 and 4. Hockey will be big again in New York, big and loud, and a Rangers ticket will be the hottest and most expensive in town, and that will be part of the story, of course.
But the real story is the real fans of the New York Rangers, the ones connected to their team by Sam Rosen’s voice, or Kenny Albert’s, all year long. The real story is the 19,000.