Why Blazers’ 1996 title meant more to OKC
The morning of the biggest game of his life, Doug Sauter found flowers outside his office.
Workers sometimes used the space beyond his door as a holding area for whatever needed to be moved out of the arena in order to put down the ice and ready the rink. But that April morning in 1996, they had left not only flower arrangements but also items that had been on the stage — “I call it an altar,” Sauter said — for the one-year anniversary of the bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
Sauter stood looking at things the entire world had seen during the remembrance ceremony just a day earlier.
“It was quite a feeling,” Sauter remembered the other day. “Here was history, all sitting here, all quiet where the before, that altar … was on national TV.
“It gave you goosebumps without a doubt.”
During a week Oklahomans paused again to remember that tragic day, there is another anniversary worth remembering. A year and a day after the bombing, Sauter and his Oklahoma City Blazer hockey team won a championship. It wasn’t the city’s first pro title, and many hope it won’t be the last. But none may ever be more important to the
city than the Blazers’ Central Hockey League title in 1996.
It came at a time the city needed a reprieve.
The Blazers provided.
From the time the CHL was revived in 1992 — Oklahoma City won a couple titles in the old CHL during the 1960s — the Blazers were among the league’s top teams. Mind you, this wasn’t the NHL. The players weren’t as skilled. The games weren’t as crisp.
But Oklahoma City loved its Blazers. Playing in what was then the Myriad Convention Center, the Blazers played to raucous crowds nightly. Sellouts were common. So was leading the league in attendance.
“It was an event,” said George Dupont, a fiery forward for the Blazers in those days. “There wasn’t really much like it in Oklahoma City at the time.”
But as big as the resurrected Blazers were in their first three seasons back in OKC, they went super sized in 1995-96. They hired Sauter, who took over a roster that had talent the likes of Dupont, Joe Burton, Carl Boudreau and Steve Simoni but had not been able to get over the hump in the postseason.
Brad Lund, then the general manager of the Blazers, remembers how Sauter came in and set strict rules about everything from game-day dress codes to locker-room decorum. The coach could be intimidating, but the players responded.
“Talk about changing the culture,” Lund said. “Not just the culture of the dressing room but the fan base.”
Fans loved Sauter. He had the bushy mustache and the quick jokes, but he was serious about winning, too.
“I think the biggest thing I brought to the team,” Sauter said, “was accountability.”
The results quickly became clear. The Blazers started stacking up wins, winning 12 in a row at one point during Sauter’s first season. They were winning games they might’ve lost in previous seasons, and they started to think about what might be.
And yet, the entire season, they were constantly reminded of what had been.
The Myriad was a staging ground in the months after the bombing. Rescue workers and first responders from near and far gathered there. They would walk the six blocks on Robinson Avenue from the bombing site to the arena, and in its cavernous spaces, they ate and rested and slept.
When the first anniversary of the bombing came, thousands of people walked that same route from the spot where the Murrah building had been to the Myriad for a memorial.
The next night, the Blazers played Game 7 of the championship series.
They’d been dominant throughout the regular season — those Blazers set more than two dozen CHL records, including the most wins at 47 — and they’d been dominant through much of the playoffs, too. OKC got out to a 3-1 lead on San Antonio in the championship best-of-seven series. But two straight losses, including an overtime heartbreaker in Game 6, set up the winner-take-all seventh game. Stressful?
“We still felt like, ‘Hey, we are in control, we are the better team,’” Dupont said.
Lund said, “I knew we would win. We had to.”
The connection between the team and the city was well established, but that night, it was solidified. The game had sold out in three hours — those were pre-internet, buy-tickets-on-thephone-or-in-person days — and while some fans complained about the .50 ticket surcharges, no one raised a stink about standing in a ticket line that wrapped around the Myriad. People wanted to be there.
And when the lights went down and the synthesizer music for player introductions came up, the roar of the fans was as deafening as anything heard before or since in downtown Oklahoma City.
Only a minute into the game with the Blazers still on their first line shift, Kevin Lune scored a goal and the Iguanas were cooked.
“If that first goal doesn’t go in and they hold on, weather the storm for the first 5 or 10 minutes, might be a totally different game,” Dupont said. “But I think there was a sense of urgency for us.”
They wanted the title — for themselves and for the city.
“So glad we could do this for this city,” defenseman Todd Harris said amid the celebration after the Blazers’ 4-2 victory. “It’s been through so much in the last year.”
No one left that night. Fans stayed through the trophy presentations and the speeches. They wanted to soak in every moment.
And six days later when the Blazers held a parade through the streets of downtown Oklahoma City, fans came back.
One woman held a bright green homemade sign.
“Thanks, Blazers,” it read. “We needed that.”
The Blazers provided a respite for a grieving city.
“I know what we did was a very, very small thing compared to what happened here a year ago,” Sauter said that day of the parade. “But there were an awful lot of smiling faces out there today. It is something I will not forget for a long time.”
Sauter remembers still.
Like Dupont and Lund and so many others, Sauter still calls Oklahoma City home. He lives on a ranch west of the city, and Monday morning, he stopped feeding horses to go inside, have some coffee and watch the broadcast of the remembrance service at the Oklahoma City Memorial.
He thought about the victory parade, too. The Blazers made sure it went north past the arena on Robinson, a celebration on a street that had carried weary workers and sad survivors south to the Myriad.
“When we had that parade and went against everything — up the street — it kind of just made me smile,” Sauter said. “It was a tough, tough time.”
Made a little easier by Sauter and his Blazers.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at 405-475-4125 or jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.