Travels with Stanley

Posted on 22. Jun, 2009 by Kerry Banks in Travel Blog

The Stanley Cup is about to hit the road again. This summer, all the players on the newly crowned NHL champion Pittsburgh Penguins will get to spend 24 hours with the trophy. If history is any indicator, the silverware will journey to some far-flung locales. In the last 15 years, Lord Stanley’s mug has toured the Czech Republic, Russia, Sweden, Nova Scotia, Finland, the Bahamas, Switzerland and Afghanistan. It has had strippers gyrate on it in a New York nightclub, visited an igloo in Nunavut, been a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, spent time with President Bill Clinton at the White House and hitched a ride on a dog sled in Alaska.

courtesy of A Boy Named Hugh (flickr.com)

Yes, the Stanley Cup really gets around. In fact, the trophy has logged more than 400,000 miles during the past five years. As well as making the rounds with the members of the championship team, it also travels 250 days per year to charity events and NHL promotional activities. When the chalice is travelling, a replica takes its place in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. How can you tell the difference? The real Cup has about a dozen misspelled names, such as the name of goalie Jacques Plante, and the word Boston in the 1972 engraving. All the errors are corrected on the replica.

The Cup’s wanderings have grown increasingly exotic since European-born players began sipping champagne from it. In 1997, the Detroit Red Wings’ Russian stars Igor Larionov, Slava Fetisov and Slava Kozlov took the trophy to Moscow’s Red Square and tried to take it into Lenin’s Tomb. Josef Vasicek of the 2006 champion Carolina Hurricanes transported the Cup to Havlickuv Brod, a town of 25,000 in the Czech Republic. There, the chalice was driven to the Vasicek family home, then to the outdoor arena where he played as a teenager. In 2007, Anaheim Ducks sharpshooter Teemu Selanne’s trip with the Cup to his native Finland included a stop at a Helsinki sauna and a cooling dip in the Baltic Sea.

courtesy of wstera2 (flickr.com)

The ritual of spending 24 hours with the Cup began in 1995, as did the rule that it always be accompanied by white-gloved custodians. Before that the celebrated silverware was not always treated with such reverence. After the Ottawa Senators won it in 1927, the Cup spent much of the summer in King Clancy’s living room, where it served as a receptacle for everything, including letters, bills, chewing gum and cigar butts. When the New York Rangers won the Cup in 1940, some of the club’s executives reportedly celebrated by urinating in it. Winger Clark Gillies of the 1980 New York Islanders allowed his dog to eat from it. In his defence, Gillies noted, “He’s a nice dog.” Fellow Islander Bryan Trottier took the Cup with him to bed. He said, “I wanted to wake up and find it right beside me. I didn’t want to think I’d just dreamed of this happening.” In 1991, the Cup was found at the bottom of Pittsburgh Penguin Mario Lemieux’s swimming pool. In 1994, New York Rangers captain Mark Messier took the Cup to Scores, a famous strip joint. According to Scores spokesman Lonnie Hanover, “It was the first time I’d seen our customers eager to touch something besides our dancers.” And in 1996, Sylvain Lefebvre of the Colorado Avalanche had his newborn daughter baptized in it.

During its 105-year history, the Stanley Cup has been dented, dismantled, left in a snowbank, kicked into a canal and used as a flowerpot. It has also been stolen a couple of times, and in another memorable incident–nearly stolen. During the 1962 playoffs, a Montreal fan, unhappy that Stanley was in a glass case in the lobby of Chicago Stadium, opened the case, snatched the Cup, and headed for the exit before police apprehended him. The thief claimed he was merely “taking the Cup back to Montreal, where it belonged.”

Yet, despite such abuses, it perseveres; the oldest and most famous trophy competed for by professional athletes. So, after defeating the defending champion Detroit Red Wings, where will this year’s winners, the Pittsburgh Penguins, take old Stanley? Judging by the varied birthplaces–Kiev, Magnitogorsk, Pizen, Chelyabinsk–on the team’s roster, there will be is some international stops on its summer itinerary.

In fact, this year’s tour has already started. On JUne 14, a group of Penguins players took the Cup on an impromptu visit to several Pittsburgh nightclubs, causing a traffic jam as delighted fans called friends and urged them to rush down to see it. During the Cup’s evening on the town, some players ate hot wings from it–wings, get it?–and held it aloft from a second-storey balcony. The next day, they showed it off at PNC Park prior to a Pittsburgh Pirates–Detroit Tigers baseball game. Coincidentally, the Pirates were paying tribute to the 100-year anniversary of their 1909 World Series victory over Detroit, also decided by Game 7 in Detroit.

For Stanley, it seems, the party never ends.