The Buffalo Sabres will receive the #1 overall pick in the 2018 NHL draft. Their only other #1 picks became NHL legends - Gilbert Perreault (1970) and Pierre Turgeon (1987). This year, they are expected to select Sweden’s Rasmus Dahlin. It’s doubtful, however, that this occasion will be any more memorable or bizarre than their [...]
Cooperalls were a brand of ice hockey equipment manufactured by Cooper Canada. The name has since become a generic term for all hockey pants featuring a waist-to-ankle outer shell. Cooperalls were marketed from 1972 to 1975. Promoted as "a complete hockey uniform system", it consisted of an elasticated girdle extending from the middle of the [...]
The growth and success of the USA in gymnastics, soccer and other sports, including hockey in the early days, has been helped along and fueled by the talents of coaches from other nations. So it is that China recently came calling to one of Rhode Island’s favorite daughters, Margaret Digidio Murphy, to build its fledgling [...]
In February of 1978, Charles Bard, CEO of the Decathlon Club of Bloomington, MN, attended a convention at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. There, he learned of the development plans for the Wooden Award, created to honor the outstanding collegiate basketball player of the year. He learned about its beginning, how the trophy was designed, [...]
Paul Newman’s movie, “Slap Shot”, opened 40 years ago to fairly negative reviews but over time has become a consensus pick as one of the top sports flicks of all-time. The trio that stole the show was the Hanson Brothers. And at the center of that mayhem was David Hanson, aka Jack Hanson, (far left [...]
If you were entertaining a visitor from Mars and brought your visitor to a hockey game, how would you explain all those hats thrown onto the ice by fans in the crowd after a player scores three goals in the game? Admit it, the hockey hat trick is an action that requires some explanation for [...]
In mid-century and despite having no major home sports team, sports columnist John Hanlon’s insightful articles and whit combined with Frank Lanning’s legendary cartoon style to help rank the Providence Journal sports pages among the best in all of America. Hanlon was a commanding yet gentlemanly press box presence at all RI Reds home games [...]
The Olympics of 1940 and 1944 were both cancelled because of WWII, but even before the '48 Games at St. Moritz got underway there was another war erupting - a hockey war - that threatened the inclusion of hockey and the appearance of RI’s first Olympic hockey players. The conflict involved two American hockey bodies, [...]
In the Fall of 1964, Brown University’s men's hockey coach, Jim Fullerton, cleverly arranged for Nancy Schieffelin '67, an experienced hockey player enrolled at Pembroke, the coordinate women’s college for Brown, to join a team practice disguised in full uniform. The exercise was to show the men's team how well a woman could play. An [...]
In the early days of international hockey, Canada was all but invincible. It won the first four Olympic tournaments (1920, ‘24, ‘28, ‘32) and the first two International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) World Championships (1930 and ‘31) without losing a single game. When looking closely at the scores, one could see that Canada was occasionally [...]
