Coming Home

Jimmy Carson pulled his car to the curb at the corner of Grand River and McGraw and surveyed the desolation. Across the street the entire block was overgrown with grass and weeds and strewn with bricks and chunks of concrete. To the right of the car was an old parking lot, its blacktop crumbling and spattered with broken glass, its out-of-date business permits still posted on the light poles. To the rear stood a decrepit establishment called Al's Olympia Lounge.

"Imagine," Carson said, painting a picture with his voice, "if we could put ourselves back in the '20s or '30s or '40s. This used to be the heart of Detroit, one of the busiest intersections in the city. Right there [pointing to the weed-covered lot] was where Olympia Stadium used to be. Did you ever see the Olympia? It was like Chicago Stadium. The seats seemed to hang right over the ice. And loud? What an arena to see a hockey game.

"That place behind us, Al's Olympia Lounge? That was my grandpa's restaurant, the New Olympia Barbeque. He sold it in 1949. All the players went there for lunch. This corner here was my grandpa's car wash. My dad turned it into a parking lot. The Norris family, which owned the Wings, owned the parking lot next to it. And on the other side of the Norris lot was another lot of my dad's. And he owned a third one behind that. You couldn't have had a better location. I'd run across to the Olympia while he was taking care of business and wait in one of the stadium manager's offices and read the game program. The stadium manager was also Greek. A lot of Greeks worked at the Olympia. They all knew my grandpa and my dad, so they all knew me."

Carson's heritage is 100% Greek. His paternal grandfather, who was born in Greece, changed his name from Kyriazopoulos to Carson. His mother, whose maiden name was Maria Maragaki, grew up in Rhodes. Carson is fluent in Greek. He speaks it at his parents' house with his mother's mother, Kalliope, whom he calls Yia Yia. She is 85 years old, about 4'6" and boasts the distinction of having been Carson's first goaltender, when he was four years old. He even insisted that she wear pads.

Carson pulled his car away from the curb. "Now it looks like the Vietnam War just ended here," he said. "My dad won't drive by. He's never been back since they tore the Olympia down. He'd cry."

Carson was home again, and it was almost the way he had pictured it as a boy. Playing for the Red Wings. Living in affluent Grosse Pointe, three miles from the house he grew up in. True, the Olympia was gone now—the Wings have been playing in Joe Louis Arena since 1979—but things were pretty close.

Carson, a ripe old 22—the only teenager other than Wayne Gretzky to have scored 50 goals in a season, the man who was traded for the Great One in the most sensational deal in NHL history, the man who walked out on the Edmonton Oilers—was back in Detroit. He was playing for the team that had fed the fantasies of his youth, in a town where he seemed to know half the people on a first-name basis and to be related to the other half.

Greeks have been wandering off and returning to their cities and villages ever since Odysseus. Greeks must go home again, even if they have to tie themselves to the mast and sail past a chorus of Sirens to do it. That, in mythological terms, is just about what Carson had to do to get traded home from Edmonton.

But before we get into that part of the story, you should know more about Carson's boyhood, because if ever a kid was born to play for the Red Wings, Carson was that kid. He knew it by the time he was in the third grade. He wrote about becoming a Red Wing for one of those what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up assignments in school. He wanted to be a Red Wing and park in his father's lot and wear number 10, like Guy Lafleur, the Montreal Canadiens star who was his favorite player at the time. For some reason he has saved that composition all these years.

He has saved a lot of Red Wing stuff from his youth, too. Like the first stick he ever played with, the one Marcel Dionne gave him when he was five. The same Marcel Dionne whose wife, Carol, used to let Jimmy sit on her lap during Red Wing games. Later, Dionne would be his teammate on the Los Angeles Kings. Jimmy cried when the blade on that stick broke in the middle of a game. He retrieved the blade and taped it back to the shaft, but, of course, the stick was never the same. Still, he saved it, broken blade and all. It's in his basement along with pucks signed by Mickey Redmond and Danny Grant and Dan Maloney, Red Wing standouts of the not-so-great teams of the 1970s. So is the hockey goal he used to shoot on for hours while listening to Detroit games on the radio.