The Adventures, Calamities, and Hijinks of the Stanley Cup

Of all the championship trophies in North American sport, none has the beauty and grandeur of the Stanley Cup. In the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball, their league trophies are made new each year and while they are surely wonderful to win, they all seem to suffer from a lack of soul.

I remember, in 2001, the Stanley Cup paid a visit to Safeco Field in Seattle on the afternoon before a game. The baseball players stood and gazed at the Cup for what seemed like hours. There were two things that they marveled at. Many of the ballplayers were mesmerized by all the names engraved on the Cup. Players, coaches, trainers, front office people, all there, season by season.

The other thing that surprised the baseballers was the weight of the hockey trophy. Many took turns trying to hoist the 35-pound Cup the way their hockey brethren do after winning it all. But, the bottom line was, they were all summarily impressed by the Stanley Cup. There were a couple who were quoted as saying things like “I wish we had a trophy like that.”

Indeed, Lord Stanley’s Mug does have a stately look to it. Its history is as storied as its appearance. We all know how the Cup came into its existence. Originally, the Governor-General of Canada, Frederick Arthur Stanley, the 16th Earl of Derby, also known as Lord Stanley of Preston, had commissioned a trophy to commemorate the champions of amateur hockey in Canada in 1892. Eventually, the trophy became open to competition by amateur and professional teams as well.

Hockey players, being the way they are, are prone to celebrating any championship with plenty of exuberance and varying degrees of alcohol. And the stories of Stanley Cup celebrations are peppered with just as many stories of misadventures when it comes to the way they handled the Cup.

Please Note – This article was originally posted at FiredUp Network, a sports website out of Toronto. It is republished on the Sports History Network with permission from FiredUP to provide you with added sports history. Check out FiredUP today.

The Evolution of the Stanley Cup

One must always remember that the way the trophy looks today is not the way the Cup has always looked. Originally, the trophy was merely the bowl that comprises the top of the large structure of the Cup. Over the years, parts were added to the base of the bowl, and as time passed, we began to see the championship trophy take on the appearance of the Stanley Cup that we see today.

There are, in fact, three versions of the Stanley Cup. There is the original bowl that was commissioned and donated by Lord Stanley. The Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup is made of silver and is 7 ¼ inches high and 11 ½ inches wide. It sits on permanent display in Lord Stanley’s Vault in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

There is the Presentation Cup that we see being given to the teams after they win the final playoff series. It was created in 1963 by silversmith Carl Petersen when then NHL President Clarence Campbell believed the original Cup had become too fragile to be handled on a regular basis. It was first actually awarded in 1970 and onlookers can tell the Presentation Cup by the Hockey Hall of Fame logo that is stamped on the bottom of the Cup’s base.

Thirdly, there is the Replica Cup. Whenever the Presentation Cup is not at the Hall of Fame, the Replica Cup sits in its place. It was created in 1993 by Montreal silversmith Louise St. Jacques. The NHL does not own the Cup, although they do have control of the trophy by way of a trusteeship. One thing that Lord Stanley did when he donated the Cup was to ensure that there were always two trustees to have the final say on the way the Cup was governed and awarded.

The league gained control of it in 1947 and even though the Cup was meant to be won by means of a challenge system, by 1926, there were no other professional leagues remaining to compete for it. The NHL became the only league left and so the Cup was basically theirs to play and fight for. The champions of the NHL were unofficially known as World Champions. In 1972, a new wrinkle appeared.

With the formation of the World Hockey Association in the early 1970s and their commencement of play in the fall of 1972, pressure began to be applied to the NHL to allow the winners of the fledgling league to compete by way of a challenge. There are reports that Clarence Campbell was in favour if the idea.

In fact, it seems that negotiations for the notion of a challenge between the NHL and WHA went to the point that Campbell conceived of having the North American club champion playing against the European winners for the Cup.

That idea never came to pass though. In 1976, the Canada Cup tournament was launched.

This was a competition that Campbell staunchly opposed. And then, as the 1970s were nearing an end, the NHL absorbed the four strongest WHA franchises and grew their league, thus ending any need for talk of any further rivalry between the two circuits.

As time has gone by, the Cup itself has been won by a lot of teams and carried by a lot of hands. Some of those hands have been more careful than others. And misadventure has befallen the beautiful silver trophy on more than one occasion. It has been forgotten, bumped, dunked, dropped, dropkicked, used as a decanter and a goblet. It’s been a baptismal font, a flower pot and a dancing pole.

Players Get the Cup

There are numerous stories of how the Cup has been treated. And how it has been mistreated as well.

The first person who is reported to have picked up the Cup and skated around with it after winning the final series was Ted Lindsay of the Detroit Red Wings in 1950. Clark Gillies of the New York Islanders has used it as a dog bowl. Ed Olczyk of the New York Rangers took the Cup to Belmont Park after their 1994 win and filled it with oats to feed Kentucky Derby winner Go For Gin. In 2017, Phil Kessel of the Pittsburgh Penguins used the Cup as, you may have guessed it, a hot dog holder.

The Stanley Cup has appeared in television shows as well. In 2006, it made a cameo on the daytime soap opera The Guiding Light. Then, in 2007, Denny Crane (William Shatner) and Alan Shore (James Spader) take turns drinking out of the Cup in an episode of Boston Legal before they perch it on the railing of the balcony in order to get a picture with it. The Cup then falls over the balcony and makes a sick thud far below. I’m hoping they used a “stunt Cup”. It has been on 30 Rock and Heroes also.

In 1905, after the Ottawa Senators had won the Cup and celebrated at their team banquet, one player apparently tried to drop kick the trophy (it was still just a bowl at that time) across the Rideau Canal. His attempt failed. Luckily the Canal was frozen at the time and they were able to retrieve it.

When the Montreal Wanderers won it in 1906, they got a team picture taken with the Cup but forgot it at the photographer’s place. Weeks later, someone went to retrieve it and found that the photographer’s mother had been using the silver bowl to plant her geraniums.

In 1964, Red Kelly used the Cup as a prop to hold his infant son while he got what he figured would be a great picture. All went well until Kelly removed his little boy from the Cup only to discover that Junior had left a little moist souvenir behind.

Kelly cleaned the mess from the Cup but then snickered knowingly to himself after that for years whenever he saw anyone drinking from the trophy. The same thing happened in 1998 when Kris Draper’s little baby daughter used the Cup as her potty. Undaunted, Draper cleaned up the bowl of the trophy and later drank out it himself.

In 1924, the Montreal Canadiens were out celebrating with the Cup and while in transit from one party spot to the next, experienced a flat tire. Everyone got out of the car and helped replace the flat. While they were doing so, they had placed the Cup on the side of the road. After the tire repair, everyone got back into the car. But they forgot the Cup on the shoulder of the road. When they went back to look for it later, they found it, still sitting in the place they had left it.

In 2010, after winning the Cup with the Chicago Blackhawks, Tomas Kopecky took it back to Slovakia and did what he had always wanted to do with the sacred silver mug. He used it as a massive bowl to feast on his mother’s traditional Slovakian soup! Phil Pritchard, the Keeper Of The Cup, said that the name of the soup, when translated into English, is “The Inside Of The Stomach Of A Cow Soup”.

At least Kopecky was able to do that without any injury or personal damage. Maurice Richard was not so lucky. When his Montreal Canadiens won the Cup in 1957, while trying to drink out of the trophy afterward, Richard chipped his two front teeth.

Some players are naturally curious about certain aspects of physics when it comes to the Cup. Or at least they seem to be, if their actions are to be believed.

The 1990-91 Pittsburgh Penguins

Bryan Trottier told a story recently on the Spittin’ Chiclets podcast about how the Pittsburgh Penguins partied with the Cup after they had won it in 1991. The team had convened at Point Park for their Cup celebration. Trottier said that there were about 100,000 people in a space that held about 10,000.

The players had been celebrating for what Trottier had estimated was “about three days” and ended up at Mario Lemieux’s house.

“There’s Phil Bourque at the top of Mario’s waterfall, it’s about a 20-foot fall, and he’s going ‘I’m gonna jump into the pool with Lord Stanley’ and we talk him off there (because) he’s gonna die, basically. He comes down and then it’s ‘Everyone into the pool!’ and we all jump into the pool….clothes, whatever we have on. Everyone’s in the pool and then we all pull ourselves out of the pool after the picture, whatever. We were in there for quite a while, and……..no Cup!”

“It’s in the bottom of Mario’s pool. We had to go dive in. Troy Loney and I dive in and get the Cup out of the pool. We get it up. It was very tarnished the next day. It had a little bit of chlorine tarnish on it. But if that thing could talk, some of the stories……but that’s one of them. From the top of the waterfall to the bottom of Mario’s pool, that thing had a wonderful night of celebration.”

One thing that Trottier doesn’t mention on the podcast is that, apparently, while the Cup was being tossed around, a piece of it broke off and had to be duct taped back on. Also, there are reports that while Bourque had the Cup, he noticed a rattling sound coming from inside the Cup. So he opened it up and saw that some earlier person had inscribed their name INSIDE the Cup. Bourque then did the same scratching “Enjoy it, Phil Bubba Bourque, ’91 Penguins”.

Something similar happened just two years later, after the Montreal Canadiens became the last Canadian team to win a Cup in 1993. The Cup ended up at the bottom of Patrick Roy’s pool and that left Guy Carbonneau to muse that the Stanley Cup “does not float”. In 2002, when Dominik Hasek tried to go swimming with the Cup, he had the trophy taken away and his day with it was cut short. The ‘Keepers of the Cup’ may have had enough of the Cup swimming after the following story.

The 1998-99 Dallas Stars

The grand-daddy of Cup pool stories has to be the one from after the 1999 Cup Final Series. The Dallas Stars had defeated the Buffalo Sabres after the controversial Brett Hull ‘foot in the crease’ goal. But the story started years before, shortly after the Stars had moved south to Texas from their previous home in Minnesota.

In 1993, Stars’ defenseman Craig Ludwig was out with his teammate Richard Matvichuk. The two had been riding their motorcycles for the afternoon. They stopped at a roadside bar and as Ludwig went to use the restroom, he heard a voice say “Hey! You’re Craig Ludwig!” Ludwig was surprised that anyone would recognize him anywhere in Dallas. He turned and it was Vinnie Paul, the drummer for the metal group Pantera.

Paul knew who Ludwig was and he also knew that he had played with the Montreal Canadiens. The two became fast friends. Paul and his band-mate brother Darrell (aka, Dimebag Darrell) became massive fans of the Stars and eventually wrote the team’s goal song “Puck Off”. As the team grew more successful the relationship between the musical brothers and the team intensified.

As the 1999 Stanley Cup Final Series headed down to the final game, Ludwig placed a call to his friend Vinnie who remembered it this way, “Craig Ludwig called me from Buffalo and he says, ‘If we win this thing tonight, you better have your house ready to party.’ I loaded up four or five cases of Crown Royal and everything and of course everyone knows the famous Brett Hull goal…and they came to two places; they came to a place called The Big Apple, which is a bar we all hung out in Arlington (Texas), and then they came to my house.”

“They brought the Stanley Cup, and we brought every strip dancer we could find in town and it was the best party you’ve ever seen. At about five o’clock in the morning, we’re all out in the pool, the hot tub – it’s just party, party, party, and here comes Guy Carbonneau and he’s got the Cup and ‘Hey Luddy – catch the Cup!’ and he throws it off the balcony and it gets right about to there (meaning the pool deck) and goes ‘doink’ off the side of the pool and into the water and we jumped on it and sank it to the bottom.”

“The Cup keeper, the guy you see on the commercial, he says, ‘You cannot do that – that’s the Stanley Cup!’ and we’re like, ‘We just f***ing did it, dude!’ It was pretty awesome, man.”

The Cup suffered a massive dent and some severe chlorine tarnish. The team would later say that the trophy had been dented by Ed Belfour as he was leaving the plane, but Mike Modano later explained how it happened as many of the team members were late getting to the official celebration because of their participation in the party at Vinnie’s residence. (That pool, by the way, is reportedly shaped like a bottle of Crown Royal.)

The 1993-94 New York Rangers

But, when the New York Rangers won the Cup in 1994, they showed the city what winning the NHL’s championship really meant!

Over the course of that summer, Rangers’ fans, who had not seen their team win a Cup since 1940, reveled in the glory of the win…..AND the Cup itself! It was a star everywhere it went.

Of course, the ticker-tape parade down the Canyon Of Heroes was the logical adulation point. But it also was the guest of honour at a party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It even went to a Yankees’ game and was given a credential under the name ‘Stanley Cup’.

It was seated in owner George Steinbrenner’s box! It also HAD to do the rounds on the talk shows. It was on Letterman, Charlie Rose and MTV’s This Week In Rock. (Host Kurt Loder complained that the Cup reeked of beer!)

According to the New York Post about a dozen players brought the Cup to the nightclub Tatou, where it was dropped and dented. At some point, as well, it was reported that it fell out of the trunk of a car. It spent time at the MTV summer beach house in The Hamptons where it was filled with raw clams and oysters.

Nick Kypreos played on that Rangers’ team and he told Vice.com how he remembered it all. “It was a zoo! It was everything you can imagine after 54 years.” He said that the beach house was wild and funny. “It would be a show-stopper,” Kypreos said. “Like, there’d be models at the MTV House that didn’t follow hockey, and they wanted the Cup out, because it was grabbing too much attention.”

Being around the Cup had its benefits as well.

“I was still single at the time, and that was the biggest chick magnet you could find,” he added.

The real story started the night of their victory though. The Cup was brought into the Rangers’ dressing room. Players and their families took turns drinking champagne out of it. Then an official team party took place at the Play-By-Play restaurant inside the Garden.

After that, it was really party-time.

A number of players took the Cup to a bar on the Upper East Side called The Auction House, a place where numerous A-listers like to play.

Sports radio host Dan Patrick, who was still with ESPN then, was there that night and he wrote about it in his book The Big Show. It came to be his turn to drink from the Cup. He asked Messier what it was that he would be drinking.

Messier came back with “If you have to ask, you’re not a Ranger fan.” Patrick drank and instantly, Messier let out a huge laugh. Patrick asked him “Did you do something to what’s in the Cup?” Messier snapped back with the same answer as before. “If you have to ask, you’re not a Ranger fan.”

A few nights later, Messier and the Rangers showed up with the Cup in tow at Scores, an East Side strip club. Michael Blutrich, who at that time was the owner of Scores, was absolutely beside himself. He spoke to Vice.com about that night. “I was as shocked as I’ve ever been! Who would expect that the Stanley Cup would walk in?”

But, really, why wouldn’t Messier bring it there? His legendary foray with the Cup to the Forum Inn, the Edmonton strip club, in 1987 has been fairly well documented. And, just as in his time with the Oilers, the New York girls used the Cup as a prop as well.

And according to a man who was a Scores employee at the time, Messier was an occasional patron there. Stephen Sergio called Messier a “nice guy, a gentleman.”

According to Blutrich, the Cup spent much of the night in the champagne lounge, but after a while, it was brought out to the main bar area so fans could get up close to it and drink out of the silver bowl.

Lonnie Hanover, another Scores employee at the time said “The moment they walked in, people turned away from the strippers and said, you know, ‘Holy sh**, there’s the Cup!’”

There were a few times through the night that the Cup went up on stage with the dancers. According to Blutrich, “I’m not sure they really understood what it meant the way a Ranger fan would, but they were playing along, because they were feeding off the frenzy of the crowd.”

In 2015, Blutrich was on 60 Minutes and in an interview with Anderson Cooper, while talking about his life as an FBI informant, talked about that night that the Rangers brought the Cup into his establishment.

Blutrich: The New York Rangers came to Scores on the night they won the Stanley Cup, filled the Stanley Cup with champagne and shared it with everybody, and then left the Cup.

Anderson Cooper: They left the Stanley Cup there?

Blutrich: They got drunk, they left the Cup.

The Stanley Cup went all over New York that summer. And in the process, it got very banged up. It also traveled unaccompanied from city to city, causing players who were to have some time with it to have to go to their local airport and pick it up.

The Keepers of the Cup didn’t shepherd the trophy everywhere the way they do today. In fact, because of the way it was handled in 1994, the following spring of 1995, strict guidelines were imposed on where the Cup could go and what could be done with it.

Kypreos acknowledged that he and his teammates were a bit rough with the Cup.

“It’s safe to say we ruined it for every other team moving forward,” Kypreos said. “They weren’t too pleased with us by the end of the summer.

It (the Cup) wasn’t in great shape, put it that way.” He figured that the reason it got so banged up was that a lot of people had been handling it and not enough care was taken with it. “I think there were some issues with a lot of people carrying it by the neck, and it kind of got loose.”

When it was Joey Kocur’s turn with the Cup, he went to the local airport in Michigan to pick it up. When he uncrated it, the bowl had been separated from the body.

He didn’t know what to do. He was supposed to bring the Cup to a party that day that was going to be attended by a bunch of family and friends. He wanted to fix it but he didn’t know how.

He didn’t want to call the Hall of Fame.

He didn’t call the Rangers either.

He took it to someone he knew who could look after it himself. “Someone with more skill than I have” was able to solder the bowl back on to the body of the trophy.

There were reports that summer that said the Cup went back to Montreal for repairs on at least two occasions during the time the Rangers had it. When asked specifically what needed to be reapired, silversmith Louise St. Jacques told Sports Illustrated in 1994, “There was a little bit of everything.” SI reported that the bowl was cracked, the base was loose and the body of the trophy was dented. “I can’t say the Rangers did a terrible thing to the Cup.

It just needs to be pampered, that’s all.”

What a life!

Author - Howie Mooney

When he lived in Ottawa, Canada, Howie was a fixture in sports media. He covered the CFL’s Ottawa Rough Riders, the NHL’s Ottawa Senators, and the OHL’s Ottawa 67s for local television. He also did color commentary for Ottawa Lynx games. The Lynx were the Triple-A affiliates of the Montreal Expos and Baltimore Orioles.

He also spent time as co-host on the morning show for Ottawa Sports Radio. He was co-author of Third & Long – A Proud History of Football in Ottawa and is currently the co-host of The Sports Lunatics Show, a sports history podcast.

He is also a feature writer for the FiredUp Network, a sports website out of Toronto.