Penguins aim to give Pittsburgh fans treat
1960 Pirates were last to clinch title in city
Henry Tucker can still hear the roar, echoing through time. He was walking home from St. Edmund’s Academy in 1960 when Bill Mazeroski hit a home run to lift the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series championship against the lordly New York Yankees during the dying days of the Eisenhower administration.
Tucker was in elementary school then. Now he’s a retired real estate agent, eating a late dinner at the end of the bar at the Squirrel Hill Café on Forbes Avenue, not far from where Forbes Field stood. Tucker, 65, wears a black-and-gold pullover with the word “PENGUINS” in large block letters across his chest.
The Pittsburgh Penguins are on the cusp of adding to the fullthroated roar of this city’s goldplated sports history. They’ll win the Stanley Cup on Thursday if they beat the San Jose Sharks at Consol Energy Center. And that would make them the first Pittsburgh team to win a major championship at home since Mazeroski’s ninth-inning blast over the 406-foot mark in left field Oct. 13, 1960.
“Everyone was honking their horns,” Tucker tells USA TODAY Sports. “I’ll never forget it.”
The self-anointed City of Champions boasts three rivers and multitudinous titles. The Pittsburgh Steelers won six Super Bowls at neutral sites. The Pirates won the 1971 and 1979 World Series in Baltimore. And the Penguins won Stanley Cups in Bloomington, Minn., in 1991, in Chicago in 1992 and in Detroit in
“Pittsburgh has won more than most towns, but people are dying to celebrate on home turf.” Joe Starkey, Pittsburgh radio personality
2009. That’s 11 major championships, and none at home, since Mazeroski put the home in home run.
“I’ve heard the stories about that home run my whole life,” Penguins fanatic Jackee Ging says. “Now I’m ready to see history for myself.”
Ging, 49, owns half of a Penguins season-ticket plan. She gets every other home game in the playoffs. Game 5 is hers. Friends tell her she should sell her seat to pay for next season’s plan. Game 5 tickets are going for well in excess of $1,000 on the secondary market. That kind of cash is tempting, but Ging’s mind is made up. “I need to be there,” she says.
When the Penguins won their first Stanley Cup, Ging and her mother and several friends drove to the airport to greet the team’s plane. They got caught in an epic traffic jam and stayed up all night, settling for high-fives from the windows of the team bus in the parking lot. And then mother and daughter went straight to 6 a.m. Mass at St. Bernard Church.
This time her mother watches games from a hospital bed. She’s 91 and broke a hip on Mother’s Day. Ging styles it a lower body injury, in the binary parlance of NHL coaches. She says these playoffs have been a blessing, helping reduce the stress of her mother’s extended hospital stay.
The Penguins have a 3-1 series lead. NHL teams are 31-1 in the Stanley Cup Final since 1939 when they hold that position. But Ging remains nervous. The Sharks had the league’s best road record this season.
“I think it’s hard not to get ahead of yourself,” Penguins defenseman Ian Cole says. “It’s easy to start thinking, ‘ Man, it will be great if we win.’ ”
Captain Sidney Crosby’s mission is to make sure the Penguins remember the Cup is not theirs until it is won.
“I feel like we’re in a good mental state right now,” he says. “No one is thinking too far ahead.” ‘A LONG TIME COMING’ Joe Starkey, sports talk radio host on 93.7 The Fan, thinks Thursday’s game is in the conversation for biggest played in Pittsburgh in the last 50 years, maybe even since the 1960 World Series.
“Pittsburgh has won more than most towns,” he says, “but people are dying to celebrate on home turf ” — or home ice.
Starkey says old-timers know precisely where they were when Mazeroski’s homer soared like a fairy tale. Another such championship moment “has been a long time coming,” he says. “This team has captured the city’s imagination with the way it plays, which is fast and furious.”
The Pens captured Bob Friend’s imagination. The former Pirates pitcher roots for them to join his 1960 teammates as champs to win titles within Pittsburgh city limits. “Our generation wasn’t brought up on hockey,” Friend says, “but then Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby came around, and you can’t help but be a fan.”
The Pittsburgh Pipers won the American Basketball Association championship in 1968, and the Pittsburgh Triangles the World Team Tennis title in 1975, both at Civic Arena. But Pittsburgh fans tend not to count those teams among the city’s major championships. Tattoo artist Garrick Dauberger, 30, had never heard of them.
A day after the Pens’ Game 4 victory, Rob Pavlik walked into South Side Tattoo and Body Piercing and asked for an indelible penguin. The artwork he chose combines the Pirates’ block P with the Steelers’ tri-diamond logo and the Pens’ pesky penguin. Dauberger spent 21⁄ hours inking the 2 holy trinity of Pittsburgh sports on the backside of Pavlik’s shoulder. Cost: $200.
“With everything going on, I thought now was a good time,” says Pavlik, who didn’t realize the Steel City is without a championship won at home since Mazeroski’s mighty swing. Forgive him: He’s 22 — and even his parents hadn’t been born in 1960.
Anita Kulig, 59, was alive for that World Series but too young to remember it. She sips from a 16ounce can of Iron City beer at Ca- sey’s Draft House and ponders what a Game 5 victory would mean. “Totally magnificent,” she says at last. “I’d just want to drink forever.”
Casey’s is on East Carson Street, where revelers will fill the bars Thursday night. When the Steelers last won a Super Bowl, in 2009, celebrants flipped cars and torched couches. Police are gearing up to make sure that doesn’t happen this time. The city will enforce a 90-minute window for street celebrations if the Pens win, less if things are out of control.
Carson is the calm before the storm: Local TV reporters air live shots from there, like Miami TV reporters on a tranquil beach with a potential hurricane on the way. EXCITEMENT IN THE AIR Clinchy is a ceramic penguin who lives at Excuses Bar and Grill. Patrons kiss Clinchy on the head after Pens’ wins. One time, when Clinchy’s nose broke, bartender Erin Mohan repaired it with a red pourer from a liquor bottle. Emergency nose job, she says.
Also at home behind the bar is a jar of Tang signed by Penguins defenseman Kris Letang. No one dares use it, even to make the drink named for him. Le Tang is a shot of vodka topped with Tang for $3.50. Other specials include the Five Hole (shot of Irish cream with hazelnut and raspberry liqueur and a side of nuts, $3.75) and the Hat Trick (shot of Canadian Club topped off with American honey, $3.50).
“We’re kind of a Penguin oldtime bar,” owner George Pantelas says. “And when the season is over, players like to stop in. We’ve had Sid in the back singing karaoke.”
Regulars are expected early for Thursday’s game. They’ll watch on a projection TV in the back room.
The projector mounted on the ceiling has a crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon can to hold it steady. They’ll listen to the radio broadcast of Penguins play-by-play voice Mike Lange, synced up to the TV. There’s a frozen mug on ice for Lange anytime he comes in, with a chip off the bottom of it, like a winger’s front tooth.
A framed photograph just to the right of the projection screen is serendipitously placed, given this chance at hometown history. The autographed black-and-white shot is of Mazeroski joyously running into history as fans run onto the field.
That remains the only walk-off homer in World Series Game 7 history. It’s immortalized in bronze outside PNC Park, where Mazeroski is captured midstride. The statue is rimmed by the actual section of wall over which the ball sailed, a holy relic in red brick.
Penguins fans, take note: Maz, in this forever moment, is heading for … home. As Dorothy Gale of yellow-brick fame could tell you, there’s no place like it.