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To: Alberta's Child

OK, great. :-)


115 posted on 04/14/2006 7:11:58 PM PDT by Victoria Delsoul
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To: Victoria Delsoul; All
I once got to meet all the players on the New Jersey Devils back in the late 1980s. Their practices were open to the public, and maybe a dozen people showed up one day to watch them.

Someone called in a bomb scare at South Mountain Arena (the rink in suburban New Jersey where they held their practices), so they evacuated everyone. Most of the fans went out the main door, but I went out the back with a couple of people who were there with their young kids. Sure enough -- after a few minutes the players all came walking out in their socks (they left their skates in the locker room), and they hung around outside and goofed around with the young kids for about half an hour until the police dogs finished searching the building.

Some of them unlocked their cars and turned on their car stereos, and it was kind of neat hearing which kind of music each of them played. Three players -- Patrik Sundstrom, Bruce Driver, and John MacLean -- opened the rear hatch and all the windows in Sundstrom's Jeep Cherokee, and they all crammed into the back of the SUV (pads and all!) while the music blasted for everyone to hear.

One little kid was off to one side with a small hockey stick, hitting a ball against the back wall of the arena. He couldn't have been older than five or six.

"Hey, Sean!" he yelled out (to Sean Burke, the Devils' starting goaltender back then), "I know you live in Verona 'cause my mom and I see you at the Kings supermarket there all the time!"

Burke, who had just opened his white Corvette and was leaning against the side of it talking to defenseman Tommy Albelin while some heavy metal music echoed from inside the car, laughed and said to a group of us who had gathered around his Corvette:

"Wow, that's a pretty smart kid -- and he looks like he's gonna be a good hockey player, too!"

186 posted on 04/14/2006 8:39:20 PM PDT by Alberta's Child (Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)
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