Strange Tales of the Stanley Cup
You’ve won the Stanley Cup, the most coveted prize in professional hockey. You and your teammates have the silver chalice in your possession and you feel like you’ll never let it out of your sight, right? Not necessarily. Professional hockey’s venerated trophy has more than once been found in unusual environs:
- On at least three occasions, it went for a swim—In 1991, after the Pittsburgh Penguins won the championship, a player set the cup in Mario Lemieux’s pool to see if it would float…it didn’t. A couple years later, the cup ended up at the bottom of Montreal Canadiens goaltender Patrick Roy’s pool. The cup took its last dip in 2002, when Detroit Red Wings goalie Dominik Hasek took it for a swim. The cup’s official custodian immediately demanded that Hasek dry off the cup and return it, effectively ending his one day with the cup and setting a precedent.
- Okay…maybe it went swimming four times—In the early days of the cup, when the Ottawa Senators, then known simply as the “Ottawa Hockey Club,” took home the chalice, a number of the players engaged in a little too much celebrating and brought the cup to the edge of the Rideau Canal, where they proceeded to test their accuracy. One of the players booted the cup into the canal and it stayed there until the next day, when divers fished it out.
- Where did we put that cup?—On at least two occasions, players completely abandoned the cup in the midst of their revelry. In 1907, the Montreal Wanderers forgot the cup when they left the team photographer’s house. His mother, appreciative of the gift, promptly planted flowers in it. A few years later, in 1924, as the Montreal Canadiens headed to the team banquet, the car ferrying the cup got a flat tire. When players took the cup out of the trunk to get to the spare, they set it on the side of the road. In their haste to get to the banquet, they took off and left the cup, nestled in a snow bank.
- You brought the cup where?—Hockey legend Mark Messier won the cup with both the Edmonton Oilers and the New York Rangers. After winning the championship with the Oilers in 1896 and the Rangers in 1994, he escorted the cup to strip clubs in Edmonton and New York. Legend has it that some of the dancers added the cup to their routine.
