Stumbling by Mahov

On our walk this morning, hubs and I found ourselves strolling up on Mahov’s house. The man, the myth, and the legend was out front shoveling, wearing a nondescript pair of navy nylon ski pants and a black wooly winter hat that covered most of his face.

To the average onlooker, Mahov’s just a big bear of a guy chipping away at ice on the driveway but to me, seeing one of the town idols from my childhood is still a rather monumental treat. He glanced sideways at us with that same smooth yet slightly squinty glance that as a ten-year-old I’d behold through the smudged Plexiglas; a glance where he surreptitiously scouted where to pass the puck and a glance that in a fraction of a second said to his opponent, go ahead, check me and I’ll make you forget what day it is.

I’ve never known what to say or do when I see pedestal-worthy athletes around town. I immediately feel tongue-tied. I look at my toes like they’re suddenly novelty items. My fingers curl and uncurl repeatedly within my mittens. I get what hubs calls the itchy-buggitchees where I start speaking too fast and I do weird things with my neck and shoulders. On this day, I peeked to see if Mahov still had the big red C for Captain sewed on his chest, and as I did so, stumbled clumsily on a deep rut in the road. Meanwhile, hubs, completely nonplussed, struck up a bit of conversation asking Pete if he was the proud owner of this new stretch of ‘waterfront property’ growing larger and larger due to all the melting ice.

They laughed together. Mahov said yes, in fact, he was buying a boat.

I’m grateful for hubs’s grace and ease for I am neither graceful nor easy around Mr. Peter Mahovlich.

You see, Mahov is a hockey God. Nostalgically, he represents, for me, a uniquely specific capsule of time…the time when my hometown built an arena and we banded together as a community to support all things hockey. When I see his face I see, in almost a sped up cinematic display, some of the best years of my life.

Ned Harkness, former NHL coach and hero to the town of Glens Falls, jockeyed hard so our little piece of hometown heaven could procure the Adirondack Red Wings, which in 1979 was the AHL affiliate of the NHL parent club Detroit Red Wings, and served as my personal initiation into the world of professional sports, a love of all things Canadian, and my ongoing acquisition of hockey related vocabulary. Just like movie lovers who rattle off lines from the very quotable “Slapshot”, hockey slang is a language all its own shared by casual fans, riotous revelers, and radio and television commentators; as well as pond and pro players alike.

Before we had hockey, famous folks were just people in magazines and on TV to a ten-year-old kid like me, but after the Civic Center was built, and the Red Wings started leasing apartments and houses in Glens Falls, my friends and I began seeing celebrities upon the streets of our city. We’d come to school with stories of who we’d seen and where, breathlessly told at the coat cubbies while shedding our parkas and collectively rattling names off with that faraway star struck glint in our eyes. I have to tell you, the AHL guys were pretty easy to spot. The married ones and their fox fur-coated wives worked out in the early mornings at the Nautilus. The single players danced at the local bars but they also came and talked to us at our schools with their accents, sometimes Canadian, sometimes Eastern European, sometimes Massachusetts or Minnesota; tossing back their feathered hair dos, scuffing the heels of their wooden clogs, and flashing their snowy white dental plates. Near the end of season one, which led to the playoffs, we saw that many sported superstitiously driven facial hair and even the townspeople refused to shave, catching on to the belief that a fresh face might bring bad luck.

As time went by, the team and their training staff mixed and mingled very freely within our habitat and every unattached female this side of the Hudson between the ages of 18 and 25 would head to “Heritage Hall”, a social gathering place within the arena, open both before and after the games. Those on the hunt for a hockey husband would stand around trying not to appear overly excited while holding small plastic cups of chardonnay. They wore tall, wine-colored stack-heeled boots with tightly tucked in dark washed and white stitched designer jeans, applying and reapplying their strawberry flavored Kissing Potion in the arena’s cold cement-walled bathrooms while we preteen girls looked on, wondering which of them we’d see sitting in the wives’ section (lower section JJ) next season, bundled together like a group of silken lemurs, chatting animatedly amongst themselves and trying not to catch the eye of us regular folk seated on the outside of their immediate vicinity.

Pete Mahovlich, Dennis Polonich, Claude LeGris, Al Jensen, Mal Davis, Greg Joly, Teddy Nolan, Jody Gage, Brad Smith, Dave Hanson, Rich Shinske, JP LeBlanc, John Ogrodnick, Danny Bolduc, these are the names I typed in without referencing anything but my own gray matter. I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast but I can tell you with about 90 percent certainty this was much of our regular roster in the inaugural season of 1979/80.

Their posters were on my wall, torn from the center of the programs we bought and brought home every weekend. Those particular black and white faces, some smiling, most serious and stoic, were what I looked at each night instead of counting sheep. I find it interesting as I reflect on the amount of money we spent on glossy programs; money that could have been used on milk or bread or a fix for our old garage that listed so badly to the left we couldn’t risk parking a car in it…but no, we bought thick, stat-heavy and photo-filled programs without thinking about it. It’s just what we all did. I imagine that being in the stranglehold of inflation, not that far removed from odd/even gasoline, the hard-working types who paid to go to Red Wing games felt like these tickets, these programs, these bags of popcorn, these sno-cones and these waxy paper cups of soda poured over gobs of ice… these were investments in our future.

We did it FERDA game. We did it FERDA fun. We did it FERDA players and if you are playing along with the hockey slang, you, like Mahov, might have said, we did it FERDA town.