Hockey Ping!
Peter MacNabb was getting kicked by a fan, so MacNabb took the shoe off the fan and beat him with it!
Ice Hockey at its finest! And back then, I was a Vancouver Canuck fan: the greatest brawlingest bunch of thugs and miscreants that ever laced up skates and pretended to play Ice Hockey!
“I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.”
My favorite Terry O’Reilly moment was when he actually punched a referee. Too funny. It was a close, hard fought game (a play-off game, if I remember correctly) and the ref made a really questionable call on O’Reilly. O’Reilly, frustrated at the call, turned around and decked the ref. I believe the ref was Andy Von Hellemond. He had a habit of trying to determine the outcome of important games.
“The fans are standing up to them! The security guards are standing up to them! The peanut vendors are standing up to them! And by golly, if I could get down there, I’d be standing up to them!”
Haha, reminds me of the Hanson brothers from Slapshot.
I was at that game. Needless to say, we were shocked at the events that night. After the game a rather large gang of us waited outside the Garden to stone the Bruin bus. We anointed an (American) Indian as our leader...we called him the Chief. We were chanting “O’Reilly sucks”, “O’Reilly sucks”, “O’Reilly sucks”, “Iran Sucks”, “Iran Sucks” (this was just after they took our hostages), and finally “O’Reilly’s From Iran”. That last one really fired us up.
In the end, the police tricked us and the Bruin bus managed to sneak out of a different exit (from under the Garden).
It was quite a night, and thankfully it ended without anyone else getting hurt and major damage done...but we were in a frenzy.
Those really WERE the days. I remember going to a game at the old Garden and after just some short exhortation from the crown in the form of “Get Green..get Green..” chants, the Rangers jumped the evil Teddy Green and beat the crap out of him.
Those old arenas were great. You would walk into the old MSG from an outside corridor and be greeted by a haze of cigar and cigarette smoke, and the olfactory equivalent of a fraternity house the day after a big kegger party. Only a few of the goalies wore masks, and none of the players. To be high behind a goal and watch Gilbert, Ratelle, and Hadfield rushing toward you was magic for a young hockey fan. Today, you need to take a second mortgage on your house to afford tickets, and TV timeouts ruin the game live.