Let’s go back to 2004. The heavily favored Boston Bruins entered game seven of the hockey playoff series with the arch-rival Montreal Canadiens on home ice. As game time neared, a friend said, “I think the Bruins will pull it out.” I replied, “There are sponges living under the sea that have only rudimentary nervous systems, and even they know the Bruins are going to lose this game.”
Needless to say, the sponges nailed it, but good times soon rolled for Boston sports fans. A few months later the Red Sox shocked the civilized world with their first World Series championship in eighty-six years. The once-laughingstock Patriots were already a full-on dynasty. The Celtics would rise from the crypt and raise their seventeenth banner in 2008. Only the Bruins continued to subject their fans to futility, mediocrity, and heart-stabbing failure.
The panicky trades (dealing league MVP Joe Thornton for three role players), the playoff collapses (blowing a three-zero series lead to the Philadelphia Flyers), the four decades of being just good enough to get beat. “For a few years the identity may have been lost,” says Cam Neely, who was promoted to Bruins president in 2010. “The Boston Bruins have a great tradition. I tried to make guys understand what it means to be a Boston Bruin. It’s an honor to be a Bruin. It’s an honor to put on that sweater. Let’s embrace that....Let’s understand what it means to be a Bruin.”
Holy cow, it worked. In the 2011 playoffs, the Bruins offed the damn Canadiens in seven, crushed the dang Flyers in four straight, and added another seven games against some just-add-frozen-water franchise called the Tampa Bay Lightning. And there we were, standing among the throng in Edgartown’s Wharf Pub for another game seven, cheering and hugging in gleeful disbelief as the Bs polished off the supposed best team in hockey, the superstar-studded Vancouver Canucks, and watching Zdeno Chára hoist the Stanley Cup. The big man handed it to Mark Recchi, who handed it to Patrice Bergeron, who handed it to goalie/hero Tim Thomas (whom the Bruins had tried to trade in the previous off-season).
And then, the Boston Bruins handed the Stanley Cup to Martha’s Vineyard. The parade in Boston, a quick trip to the NHL draft, and then – last June it arrived here on the Island, greeted at the airport with jets of water from fire trucks, cruising on a boat in Edgartown harbor, rolling up Main Street in an antique fire engine, soaking up the atmosphere in Sharky’s Cantina, visiting kids at the Edgartown School.
The Island is generally blasé about visiting celebrities, playing it cool and allowing them their rounds of golf and quiet dinners without pestering them. But Lord Stanley was subjected to an unrelenting onslaught of affection. It posed for thousands of photos, and was kissed and stroked publicly and shamelessly; President Obama, David Letterman, and Lady Gaga combined wouldn’t get this warm a reception (nor, one expects, would they want it).
“One of the great joys in having the Cup around is to see the reactions...the excitement, the passion,” says Cam Neely, a summer resident of Aquinnah. The emotions the Cup brings out are impressive; Cam talks about seeing grown men cry during the parade in Boston. “It’s what you play for....It’s the most special team sports trophy, and it’s hard to put into words.”
Kara Shemeth, a volunteer firefighter in Edgartown, experienced the “mob scene, chaos” in Edgartown. And when she touched the Cup, she says, “I know it sounds dorky and goofy, but my knees got weak.” Another fan describes it as “almost a religious experience.”
Cam Neely brought the Cup back to the Island again in August. That trip included a fundraiser at the Martha’s Vineyard Arena in Oak Bluffs, as well as trips to the police stations in Aquinnah and Chilmark. Cam’s mother worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, so he admits to an affinity for “people in that line of work. It’s the right thing to do to give back.”
As the Cup was resting on an NHL tablecloth at the Aquinnah Town Hall, Cam stood nearby, graciously chatting and posing for pictures. Children and adults examined the chalice with reverence. In person, the silver gleams even brighter than expected. The names of past winners are etched into the rings that comprise the base: Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr. People joke that simpletons are drawn to “shiny things,” but the Cup is more. For players it represents the accomplishment of the ultimate goal, and for players and fans alike, the fulfillment of a dream. After posing for a photo and shaking a Hall-of-Famer’s hand, my smile would not waver for hours.
Vineyarders have the allure of the Island to thank for our brush with sterling silver. In addition to Cam Neely, members of the Jacobs family, the team’s owners, spend their summers here. Cam began coming to the Vineyard in the late eighties, and “fell in love with it.” When he married, his wife also fell for it, as have his children. “I love everything the Vineyard is about. It’s relaxing, comfortable, a great place to get away. It’s easy, but there’s still lots to do, and great spots and new places hidden away to find.” Let’s hope the Stanley Cup enjoyed its time here – and revisits regularly.
The history behind the Cup
The Stanley Cup is special in that the National Hockey League doesn’t make a new one for every year’s champion, as in other sports. There is only one.
Well, there are actually three. The original Cup, a punch bowl purchased in 1892 from a London silversmith for ten guineas as a gift from the then–governor general of Canada, Lord Stanley of Preston, is on display in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. This original Cup is considered too fragile to be carted around by hockey players to drink from, baptize their children in, and feed dogs from, so in 1963 the NHL commissioned an authenticated replica known as the Presentation Cup; this is the one the Bruins hoisted overhead in June, and the one that was brought to the Island twice.
When the Presentation Cup is away from the Hall of Fame, the Replica Cup is on display. All three are almost identical, down to the inevitable dings and scuffs hockey players are infamous for doling out. Superstition holds that players don’t touch the Cup until they win it, but once they do each player gets a day with the trophy, accompanied by a minder from the Hockey Hall of Fame. The Cup has been abused in all manner of ways (peed in, thrown in pools), and most damage is repaired. The Cup holds fourteen cans of beer, by the way.
A Montreal silversmith named Louise St. Jacques is the Cup’s official engraver, carefully tapping the names of players, coaches, and management from each winning team onto the Cup with a hammer and a bit for each letter. As the five removable rings that comprise the Cup’s base fill with names, the oldest are removed and put on display in the Hockey Hall of Fame. The 2010–2011 Boston Bruins can expect to ride on the Cup for the next fifty-nine years.
