The Red Wings fan bites his fingernails. The Red Wings fan taps his feet. The Red Wings fan approaches a stranger in a Tampa Bay Lightning cap.
“How scared should we be?” he says.
“Well, if you’re asking me,” the Tampa Bay fan says, leaning back on his rocking chair, sliding a weed between his teeth, “pretty darn scared.”
Until Monday, Comerica Park was a big building with a home plate. Now the Tigers have something to put behind it.
His name is Ivan (Pudge) Rodriguez, he’s a catcher, a leader, a newly minted world champion — and he just became the face of Detroit baseball. With his stocky build, shiny black hair and big-toothed smile, he does not look anything like Steve Yzerman, the Red Wings’ charismatic captain.
But he does to one man: Mike Ilitch, the guy who signs the checks.
He just signed his baseball Yzerman.
He’s betting $40 million on it.
DENVER — Hollywood is interested. They want a hockey movie. They dispatch a young producer to the Western Conference finals to assemble a cast. He wears sunglasses, a diamond earring, a leather coat and four cell phones.
He asks me to help.
“I hear this Detroit team is loaded with stars,” the producer says.
It is, I say.
“Good. Get me the guy without a spleen.”
I beg your pardon?
“The guy without a spleen. Sign him up. The Spleenless Swede. I love it!”
You mean Fredrik Olausson, I say?
If you live in Detroit, there are certain things you never want to hear on the first night of the hockey playoffs:
1) Your car is in the last row on the Cobo roof.
2) The guy next to you is hiding something slimy in his jacket.
3) Steve Yzerman has an injury.
Well. The good news is, your car is safe. The bad news is, Yzerman, the heart, soul and captain of the Red Wings, was on the ice for the first period Wednesday night and was gone by the second.
In the broadcast booth, the announcers said, “Count the players. Someone’s missing.”
TO: Baby Girl Yzerman
RE: Your birthday message
Dear Newborn,
By the time you are old enough to read this, many things will have changed. We’ll be in another century. We’ll have a new president. We might even have stopped going to see “Titanic.”
Also, by the time you’re old enough to read this, your father might not be playing hockey anymore. He might be retired, living a quiet life with you and your mother and your older sister, polishing his Stanley Cup ring (or rings), getting on with a new career.
Look, I’m not trying to make excuses for these guys. But hockey is rough business. The Red Wings need a release. They need to blow off steam. So, OK, maybe it isn’t “normal” behavior. But they’re big, powerful men. They have to do it. They gotta have it.
They need their chess.
Chess?
“We’re into it,” admits Darren McCarty.
Chess?
“Oh, yeah, every chance we get,” says Brendan Shanahan.
Chess? Chess. On the team plane. In the hotels. In the locker room. Chess. It may be Bobby Orr on the ice, but it’s Bobby Fischer everywhere else.
ISHOULD SAY, from the start of this particular column, that it is not for outsiders. If you aren’t from Michigan, you probably won’t get it.
And if you’re not a hockey fan, you probably won’t get it.
And if you’re a journalistic wise guy, one who thinks the only good use of newspaper space is critical and negative use of newspaper space, then you, too, will probably not get it.
But most of you will. Because most of you saw what I saw these past few years, a hockey team that lifted the level of expectations in this city and then, remarkably, exceeded them.
DENVER — The ugly thud could be heard in the rafters. It was Brendan Shanahan’s head smashing into glass. The bone cut the skin. The blood surged down his face. It ran in map-like lines, down his cheeks, chin and neck, trickling into a thin red river that dripped into the neckline of his jersey.
The fans jeered. The players cursed. The refs blew the whistle and dived into the scrum.
Game on.
In the end, you could no more stop them than you could stop the moon. They rose to the occasion, they rose to the challenge, and finally — when the last seconds ticked away and Chris Osgood threw his hands into the air and leaped into a hug from Larry Murphy as a lonesome octopus came flying onto the ice — finally, they raised the roof. They were back to the big stage, the Stanley Cup finals, and they burst through the curtain with a certain swagger, as if they knew it would happen, as if they’ve been here before.
After all these years, they finally got to play outdoors.
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