Audio By Carbonatix
Peter Forsberg’s in Sweden. Joe Sakic’s in limbo. The most inept commissioner in professional sports, Gary Bettman, is in dutch — with everyone from the wheat farmers in Bemidji to the guys who sell hot dogs at the Pepsi Center. In other words, the stars have been perfectly aligned this year for college hockey to take center ice, and Colorado’s two major hockey schools are giving the state’s NHL-deprived puckheads plenty to cheer about in the winter of their discontent.
As of Monday, Colorado College (20-4-2) was number two in the nation in both college hockey polls — down from number one last week — and the University of Denver (16-6-1), last year’s surprise NCAA champion, stood fifth on both lists. As far as anyone can tell, this is the highest cumulative ranking for the Tigers and the Pioneers since pollsters started crunching numbers. Local hockey fans have started to notice.
“Oh, yes,” says DU head coach George Gwozdecky. “There has been renewed interest in our game — not so much from people who are [already] DU fans, but from Avalanche fans. When we won the national title back in the spring, we got a huge spike in ticket sales. Then it leveled off. With the NHL lockout, we got another big spike. I think we’ve played in front of sellouts every game this year.” The sparkling new Magness Arena on the DU campus seats just over 6,000.
In Colorado Springs, capacity (7,343) crowds for CC hockey games at the seven-year-old World Arena began to show up just after Christmas, and Tigers head coach Scott Owens reckons that 10 percent of those patrons are unhappy NHL fans who love the sport and who may be embracing college hockey with new or renewed fervor. It doesn’t hurt that they are getting to watch the best nineteen- and twenty-year-olds in the country mix it up. “We’re getting more media coverage, too,” Owens adds. Only game on ice.
Apart from the unexpected bonus that both programs got this season from the bitter NHL lockout, they are fueled by something more enduring: their deeply felt antagonism for each other. In classic, we-take-it-one-game-at-a-time style, players and coaches at both schools insisted last week that they had nothing more on their minds right now than their upcoming weekend series — DU at St. Cloud State, CC hosting Minnesota-Duluth. But as any hard-core Pioneers fan who ever screamed “Cee Cee Sucks!” from the raucous, student-jammed balcony at the drafty old DU Arena or any growling Tiger who ever tried to pelt a Denver goalie with a frozen chicken can tell you, the rivalry of the two teams simmers and seethes all season long, erupting in the four games they play against each other. It’s one of the great ass-kicking contests in all of sports — and at the end, one of the schools gets to take home not the Stanley Cup, but a somewhat more modest trophy called the Gold Pan. The players get to strut and boast and signify — at least until the playoffs start and battle is rejoined.
“Well, it’s great,” Gwozdecky says, slowly and carefully. “There’s a great deal of respect, but you can’t have a rivalry without a little bit of edge to it, a bit of nastiness.” You want nastiness, these guys will give it to you: In one recent contest, the two teams racked up 32 penalties. When they met in November (they split, one win apiece), one DU student dressed as a Pioneer hockey player was spotted leading a friend in a tiger getup through the crowd on a rope. Well, not just a rope. A noose. Lakewood businessman Bob Parker, who’s been going to DU games on and off for 35 years, recalls a boozy punchup in the arena parking lot in the 1970s in which half a dozen Pi and Tiger fans went at each other with beer bottles and snow scrapers — two hours before the puck even dropped. The Avalanche-Red Wings rivalry? That started yesterday. Broncos versus Raiders? Last month. Denver and Colorado College have been duking it out for 56 years, a combat that has taken on the weight of history and the encrustations of myth. The NHL’s brand of hockey may be bloodier in fang and claw — Avs fans who pay $200 per ticket want a little Roman Coliseum with their beer — but for sheer passion, it’s hard to top CC-Denver with the score tied late in the third period.
Tigers coach Owens has heard the din and tasted the thrill from a couple of angles. As a Colorado College goaltender in the late ’70s, he recalls, he would hide in the goal nets below the infamous DU student balcony, venturing out only to stop the occasional angled shot. “Otherwise,” he laughs, “you might get hit with something from 300 feet away.” Chickens were the item most frequently thrown onto the ice at both DU and the now-demolished Broadmoor Arena, but they weren’t the only thing. “I remember one time it was live swans,” Owens says. “A bird with clipped wings flying around the place at a height of about ten feet. And mice. One night at the Broadmoor, somebody set a hundred live mice loose on the ice. They were bitterly intense games. The fans were crazy, and as for opposing players, you just didn’t interact with them — not even in the off-season.”
Now in his sixth year as CC’s coach, Owens knows his second-ranked club has a huge bull’s-eye on its back, and he’s not above a little local gamesmanship to relieve the pressure. “Denver’s as good as we are, if not better,” he says. “They’ve got a lot of offense, and trust me, they’re lurking. They’re every bit as good as us, if not better.” The coach’s tone of voice suggests Donald Rumsfeld acknowledging that the French put out a pretty good plate of chow.
“I was miserable the whole summer,” Owens allowed after his Tigers beat Denver 3-1 in their first matchup of the year on November 12. Miserable because his tremendously talented but injury- and illness-plagued 2003-04 team was knocked out of the playoffs and failed to make the sixteen-team NCAA Tournament field. Miserable because he had to sit and watch as long shot Denver upset top-seeded North Dakota to earn its first Frozen Four berth in eighteen years. Miserable because the Pioneers went on to win their first national championship since 1969 by withstanding a dramatic last-minute six-on-three barrage by the University of Maine to hold on 1-0.
“My reactions are mixed,” Owens says. “Denver is our top rival, and what they accomplished eats away at you a little bit. But, quite honestly, I was actually pulling for them in the end. They are from Colorado, and like us, they are in the WCHA. But still. They were our nemesis, and what made matters worse is that we had just beaten them in the playoffs.”
CC’s star winger, Brett Sterling, also watched that Denver-Maine final on TV, and he, too, thought about what might have been. CC, after all, won the second of its two national titles way back in 1957. “I was watching a great hockey game,” he says, “and, of course, I was hoping Maine would score. It would have been a major comeback story — a great game taken into overtime. As it is, coming into this year, we still had a bad taste in our mouth for not making the regional and seeing our arch-rival win the national title. We’ve got a lot of motivation this season.” Teammate Marty Sertich agrees. “It was a long, long summer for a lot of the guys, but once the puck dropped in October, we put last year behind us.”
For other reasons, that’s also what Denver has tried to do. This season, Gwozdecky and his assistant coaches haven’t even mentioned the 2004 national championship — Denver’s sixth one overall — and the team has tried to reinvent itself in a new image after losing seven players to graduation, including one of the best goaltenders in DU history, Adam Berkhoel. “We don’t pay much attention to the [title] banner,” team captain Matt Laatsch says, “and you don’t see guys with their championship rings. This is a new time, a new team, and we have to stay focused on that.”
On March 3 and 4, Colorado College and Denver will square off in the last two games of the regular season — the 252nd and 253rd games of a tooth-and-nail series that began in 1949. Nobody in either camp wants to talk about that just now, but don’t be surprised if they’re already stocking the freezer with chickens. To hell with Joe Sakic. As always, this will be epic.
