It was a brutally cold day in January 1993, even for Montreal. Weeks-old banks of greyish snow were piled high at every intersection where a fresh, slick layer of translucent ice had been pounded into shiny, flat sheets better suited to skating than to steering. Can you think of a more appropriate setting for the NHL’s All-Star Weekend? I led the league’s events department and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman had started his new job just four days before.
It was important to make a great impression on the new boss, but it was infinitely more important to make an impression on hockey fans because it was also the 100th year that the Stanley Cup was awarded. Some sports fans in North America may not know a thing about the “Great Frozen Game,” but they do recognize the iconic shape of the Stanley Cup. Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston, the governor-general of Canada, donated a magnificent bowl of sterling silver in 1893 to be awarded to the dominant amateur hockey club in the Dominion of Canada. This was 24 years before the founding of the National Hockey League (NHL) in 1917, which sometime after its advent had convinced the Cup’s trustees that awarding the trophy to the highest level of competition in professional hockey was the best way to promote the sport across North America.
There is only one real Stanley Cup. It’s the one you see on the ice when a team wins the NHL championship; it’s the one that the players kiss and hold above their heads as they skate around the arena at the end of the deciding game. There is a replica of the Stanley Cup that is exact in almost every detail, except for some deliberate features that enable the Hockey Hall of Fame to tell the two apart. If you see the Stanley Cup anywhere outside of the “temple” to the sport on Yonge and Front Streets in downtown Toronto, it is THE Stanley Cup. The replica never leaves the Hockey Hall of Fame and it is only displayed when the real Stanley Cup is on the road. Over the summer, each of the champion players take turns returning with the chalice to their hometowns around the world. When the NHL season gets started again in the fall, it is right back at the Hall of Fame, and you’ll have to earn it all over if you want to see it again.
For the Stanley Cup’s 100th birthday in Montreal, where ice hockey is a religion, we knew we had to do something really special. What better way to celebrate an All-Star Game during this auspicious anniversary year than to bring back three beloved Montreal Canadiens legends, with 23 Stanley Cup championships among them, and have them skate around the ice for one more time holding the trophy high above their heads?
It was a Saturday afternoon more frozen than the Montreal Forum ice as Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, Jean Béliveau, and Guy LaFleur donned skates and white Montreal Canadiens jerseys. The Forum atmosphere was electric, the air was abuzz with animated debates in French and English about the Canadiens’ chances of winning another Stanley Cup that season (which they did). Three gods from the pantheon of Canadiens hockey waited just off the ice, hidden underneath the stands where the Zamboni was dumping its load of shavings after grooming the ice into a sheet as smooth as a baby’s cheek. Our stage manager assigned to cue the entrance of the Cup went through his checklist when he arrived at the Zamboni gate.
“The Stanley Cup is not in the building,” he determined.
I knew where it was supposed to have been earlier that afternoon. The president of NHL Enterprises was hosting a pregame brunch for the League’s business partners at our headquarters hotel, and the Stanley Cup was the featured guest of honor. I honestly wasn’t comfortable with that and I had told him that I would rather have the Cup at the Forum early, well before we needed it. I was assured that the trophy would be there in plenty of time.
If everything went as planned, there were about 90 minutes between the end of the brunch and the beginning of the event. I hoped it would be enough time, and when I got the radio call, there were still 15 minutes to go. “They’re cutting it awfully close,” I muttered to Jack Budgell, the game producer. “We could be really screwed,” I said to myself.
The event was televised and subject to strict time constraints. We could not be late. We could either do it, or not do it. “Any sign of the Cup?” I asked the stage manager 10 minutes before we went to air. I asked myself, “How did I enjoy my first and only year at the NHL?”
We contacted the broadcast team in the production truck to let them know that we might have to dump the segment, and with less than five minutes to go, we put the call out that this highly anticipated moment was off. I had just finished sharing the disappointing news when a seemingly miraculous report came over the walkie-talkie: The Cup just entered the building. “Get it into Rocket’s hands and let’s go,” I responded. “We’re back on!”
It was one of those moments that we knew would start our event off with a bang. And, that’s exactly the sound that a priceless, sterling silver, 100-year-old national treasure makes when it’s dropped 8 feet to the ice. It slipped right out of Maurice Richard’s hands and I still recall that sound with utter clarity because 16,000 hockey fans became totally silent at the very moment the Stanley Cup proved that gravity was still a law. Jack and I watched from the press level as Richard recovered both his poise and the trophy. He lifted it again over his head as he, Béliveau, and LaFleur skated around the ice to fans roaring with appreciation. We could see, even from the press box, that the Cup would require a skilled silversmith when the game was over. It was seriously dented, and we were, too.
The Stanley Cup had made it to the Montreal Forum just in time, but it might have been better if it hadn’t. The ice storm had traffic gridlocked. The trophy had left the brunch as it ended, and was being escorted by Phil Pritchard, the Hockey Hall of Fame’s “Cup Keeper.” Both were sitting in the back of a taxi pointed toward the arena, but the taxi was getting nowhere fast. The Cup was nestled comfortably inside a foam-filled road box, which was visually unremarkable except for the “fragile” and “heavy” stickers wallpapering the outside. The Cup was heavy alright, and about to prove how fragile it really was.
Have you ever been stuck in traffic and wondered whether it would be faster to walk than to sit there? Phil Pritchard KNEW he could. So, he tugged Lord Stanley’s box out of the cab, while he was still blocks from the Forum, and pushed the box across the ice coating Boulevard René Lévesque in the -24 °C (-11 °F) temperature. He couldn’t tell us any of this because, alas, we did not possess the brick-sized phones available in 1993. When he arrived at the truck entrance to the Forum, Phil’s face and extremities were red from the cold, but his hardy Canadian core was successfully warmed by the exertion, victorious over hypothermia. Lord Stanley, in his metallic glory, was not so lucky. All three dozen pounds of his gleaming, finely polished silver skin had cooled to the below-zero temperatures outside, so when it was quickly thrust into The Rocket’s hands, it was simply too cold to handle. It fell from his grasp, pealed like a church bell, and lay sad and dented on the Forum ice.
No matter what would happen over the course of the day, it would be hard to get past having damaged the Stanley Cup. That’s because the TV monitor, tuned to the live French-Canadian broadcast, treated viewers to repeated slow-motion replays of the moment of infamy from multiple camera angles, with close-ups on the looks of anguish by the players. Happy birthday, Lord Stanley!
I fully acknowledge my slight tendency toward obsessive-compulsive behavior. Left to my own devices, I would have never planned to have the Stanley Cup show up a half-hour, or even an hour before we needed it. I’d have wanted to have it there at least two hours, maybe even three hours, before the event began. My boss needed it at his sponsor brunch, and I hoped all would go exactly as planned, and if it did, it would be there in time. Well, we all know how often everything goes exactly as planned.
It’s hard to argue with bosses, especially in your first year on the job. But I have found that at least some of them are reasonable and willing to negotiate with you if you spell out the things that could go wrong and that could wind up embarrassing them along with yourself. It was incumbent on me to lay out the consequences of something going wrong and negotiating Lord Stanley’s release before the end of the brunch. We could have even created a ceremony for its exit from the ballroom. I didn’t do that, and I owned the problem as a result. The outcome was my fault, not his.
Truly, hope is not a strategy. I should have abandoned hope and instead articulated the ramifications of the Cup arriving late for myself and my boss. He may well have agreed that the risk was too great not to allow us to move the trophy to the arena before the brunch was over and the entire episode might have been avoided. It is equally possible that despite my diplomatic best, my boss would have chosen to not agree to cooperate. It would still be my fault, not his. I should have had contingency plans for that possibility, as well, long before we were faced with the necessity for last-minute, and ultimately flawed, decision-making.
In hindsight, I realize that a contingency plan was required, including the need to closely monitor the weather’s effect on traffic and making another pitch to the boss when conditions favorable to gridlock were developing. Further, we should have had a plan on what to do if the trophy simply did not arrive at the arena by a certain time. We could have, for instance, had a plan that would have moved the presentation to an intermission, or during a break in the middle of the game.
We didn’t have a contingency plan in place, so I made the decision to cancel the original plan and move on, and then hastily I un-canceled it after Phil’s desperate dash to the arena. We were so relieved that the Cup had so miraculously appeared at the last moment that no one had considered its “too-cold-to-handle” condition. At the potential cost of ignoring the centennial, and with no other plan ready to activate, we urgently put the Cup into the Rocket’s hands. Our entire plan fell apart because its underpinning was based purely on the hope that the Cup would be there. That wasn’t the boss’s responsibility. It was mine.
When we don’t, or can’t, win an argument with our boss, it’s up to us to develop the contingency plans required to deal with the problem should we end up being right and things go wrong as a result. Being right, but not prepared, will be no consolation.
Coaches, athletes, event organizers, and normal humans frequently invest in a form of hope when they embrace superstitions, activities they believe will avoid or lead to certain outcomes. Some athletes refuse to shave or alter their pregame meal during the playoffs. Michael Jordan was thought to have worn his lucky University of North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform, inspiring the trend of players wearing longer shorts in the NBA. Baseball fans often join their home team’s players, sporting their “rally caps” backwards and inside-out to encourage a come-from-behind shot at taking the lead. Do they work? Maybe a little bit in the locker room. As Yogi Berra is quoted as having said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” If athletic performance is dependent on mental and emotional preparedness in addition to the physical, then superstitious routines may help reinforce confidence to some degree. Any small competitive edge can make the difference between winning and losing.
I’m not sure the same holds true off the field. If performing a ritual superstition is a way to make yourself feel better, I suppose there’s no harm in it. But if it’s a way to “protect” yourself and your project, it’s doing you no good at all. Perhaps quite the opposite.
I learned the event business at Radio City Music Hall from a mentor, genius, and certified crazy person, who oversaw all the shows the company produced outside the theater. He was as creative as they come. He was a perfectionist who demanded that every detail was addressed. While producing an event at the Waikiki Shell in Honolulu, Barnett Lipton noticed local stagehands carefully hiding Hawaiian Ti leaves around the site. Local tradition suggests that in the right hands, the Ti plant possesses properties that repel evil and bring good luck. One of the elements of luck that Barnett had most hoped for in this humid tropical environment was an evening under the stars without rain, and he was indeed blessed with just such an evening.
We find it easy to believe superstitions when they seem to “work” much of the time. For as long as I worked with Barnett, he insisted we find a local florist, in every city every time we staged an event, to procure a supply of Hawaiian Ti leaves. At first, I thought he was kidding, but he was deadly serious.
Back when the summer and winter Olympics were held the same year, the U.S. Olympic Committee staged an enormous multisport event just for American athletes during the three intervening years, called the U.S. Olympic Festival. Barnett produced the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1989 U.S. Olympic Festival in Norman, Oklahoma, and I was the associate producer in charge of talent. Part of my job was to manage the enormous number of rehearsals during the month leading up to the event. Some of the rehearsals were held at Memorial Stadium; others were held on football fields dotted throughout the area. One evening, we were rehearsing a segment that involved a few hundred local dancers when the skies to our south darkened ominously to a deep purple-black, punctuated by forks and brilliant flashes of lightning and deep rumbles of thunder. An open football field surrounded by metal grandstands is one of the last places you want to be in a thunderstorm, so we stopped the rehearsal and moved everyone to shelter. As powerful as nature’s sound-and-light show was, the storm skittered off somewhere beyond the end zone and we never saw a drop of rain in the stadium. Rehearsals resumed after about 20 minutes. Afterwards, the two-mile drive back to the hotel was sobering. The state road running outside the University of Oklahoma was flooded with deep, nearly impassable ponds of rainwater and covered with thick, heavy tree branches.
Barnett was in the lobby waiting for me and looked relieved when I drove up. A severe microburst had ripped through the area dropping hail and torrential rain. At the stadium, however, we had already hidden Ti leaves at every entrance to the field, under the stage deck, and behind the speaker stacks. Even Barnett was impressed, and you can bet your lucky socks I made sure, without being asked, that there were Hawaiian Ti leaves ready for every event from then on.
I brought that hope with me when I went to work for the NHL, and there were Ti leaves hidden all over the Montreal Forum on the day when the Stanley Cup made its rapid descent to the ice. That was the day that I learned that although plants can do amazing things, like making their own food out of sunlight, at least in my hands they can’t keep bad things from happening. I gave up investing any hope in superstitions, even ones that seemed to work sometimes. More importantly, I realized that the very notion of investing in hope itself is a counterproductive endeavor. I wouldn’t say that giving up hope as a strategy helped me to sleep better. Quite the contrary, it kept me up nights more often. I recognized that hoping a reality into existence isn’t the same as helping it into existence. We can’t really affect the outcome with hope, or truly apply it to being totally prepared for everything that can go wrong—like a winter storm in Montreal or a torrential cloudburst in Oklahoma.