In New York, Hockey's House Is Not A Home

It must be obvious by now to anyone interested in the game that New York just plain doesn't want to have a good hockey team. Why it doesn't will perhaps forever remain a mystery, but the evidence is incontrovertible. Except for the (comparatively) small band of faithful fans who cram into Madison Square Garden each week to moan over its team's losses, New Yorkers seem utterly indifferent to hockey and hockey players. The men who own and run the New York Rangers seem even more so. Twice in the last two years the Ranger management has given away its best players in trades that could be equaled only if the New York Yankees gave away Mickey Mantle one year and Roger Maris the next and got a handful of rookies and also-rans in return. Last year's end-of-season Ranger trade sent Andy Bathgate, the team's alltime scoring leader and one of the few genuine superstars of the game, off to Toronto just in time to help that team win its 12th Stanley Cup. If the fans were a bit downhearted, Andy himself was not. "What a difference," he said with the happy smile of a man paroled, "between New York and Toronto. Back there the only time people recognize you as a hockey player is when you are going in or coming out of Madison Square Garden."

With Andy gone, the bright star of the Rangers was little Camille Henry, the second-highest scorer in the team's history. So this year, just four weeks ago in fact, the Rangers traded off Camille—perhaps, though it was not so stated, because he was shooting more goals than anyone else on the team.

No single trade, not even Andy's, has upset Ranger fans as much. Not only was Henry the second Ranger captain and high scorer to be traded away in two seasons, he was the league's most accurate shooter as well. Cammy hit on nearly 25% of his scoring opportunities, and scoring opportunities with a team like the Rangers are not easily come by. Up to the time of his trade, Henry had scored 21 goals for the Rangers in the current season, and 19 of them were "important" goals, i.e., first, winning, tying or insurance goals.

Except for warning them not to throw rotten eggs and hot pennies on the ice, the Ranger management, an amorphous group of capitalists who own the Knicks basketball team and Madison Square Garden as well, does not waste much time on hockey fans. The official excuse it gave for dealing off Bathgate and Henry amounted to little more than a kind of hot-potato-in-the-mouth muttering about "building for the future." But for a Ranger fan such as I, the future still seems a long way off.

The trouble with being a Ranger fan—or a Ranger player, for the matter of that—is not just the drab hopelessness which comes with constant defeat. It is not just the knowledge that the Rangers have not won a Stanley Cup in a quarter of a century or a league championship in 23 years. It is not just knowing that no Ranger in recent memory has been named the league's top goalie, the league's top scorer or even its rookie of the year in 10 seasons. The trouble with being a Ranger fan is the feeling of frustration which comes from knowing that none of this is the fault of the team or its players.

The last time I saw the Rangers play, people were throwing little colored rubber balls down on the Madison Square Garden ice from the box seats, the mezzanine and the balcony. Green balls, red balls, orange balls. Not one of these balls was being thrown at a Ranger player or even at an opposing Black Hawk. Instead, like a man who has finally cracked up and sits thrumming his fingers over wet lips, the Ranger fans were reacting mindlessly but desperately to the rocks that the Ranger management has been throwing at them for years.

Since November 1959 that management (the Madison Square Garden Corporation, Irving Mitchell Felt, president) has had five different coaches running its team. Meanwhile, to make the job of each one virtually impossible, it has traded away the makings of an all-star team, including Goalies Johnny Bower and Gump Worsley; Defensemen Allan Stanley, Lou Fontinato, Bill Gadsby, and Al Langlois; scorers Ron Murphy, Andy Bathgate, Dean Prentice, Don McKenney, Dave Balon, Floyd Smith, Andy Hebenton and Camille Henry.

There is a mathematical constant in big league hockey almost as reliable as Einstein's E = MC[sup 2]. It is that the teams in positions one through five in the standings will play better than .500 hockey at home. With only eight wins in 28 home games the Rangers are currently batting worse than .300.

Three weeks ago a Ranger fan from Brooklyn named Richard Goldhaber began to circulate a petition aimed to stir the Ranger management into doing something. "We live without a tradition of victory," says this document, "and without a team of which we may be justly proud.... For the past decade, the management has continually promised that things would be looking up. Yet the only things that go up are ticket and concession prices."

Mr. Goldhaber has a valid point. In recent years programs for Ranger games have doubled in price from 25� to 50� while the editorial content has remained virtually the same. Since 1961, ticket prices have risen as much as $1. Yet the hockey has not improved. Management can thus count on half a million more dollars in profits but its player payroll remains the lowest in the league—so low in fact that recently NHL President Clarence Campbell stepped in to arbitrate on behalf of the Ranger players to get more money for them from the Ranger management.