Newborn babies have been baptized inside it. Kentucky Derby winning horses have been fed from it. Grown men have showered, slept and even spooned with it. It’s covered over a million miles of terrain from Disneyworld to the nightmarish war zones of Afghanistan, and once even found itself at the bottom of a swimming pool. Rumor has it a stripper once incorporated it into her dance routine onstage.
Long considered the most famous trophy in the world, the Stanley Cup has partied harder than Keith Richards and turned up in more exotic locales than the Kardashians.
Originally commissioned as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup in 1892, the trophy is named after Lord Stanley of Preston, former governor of Canada.
“It’s one of the greatest trophies in all of sports, The Holy Grail, the ultimate in power and achievement and what separates The Stanley Cup from all the other trophies is the tradition that each player has his name inscribed on it and gets to spend a day with it. No one is taking home the Lombardi Trophy,” Bruce Beck, lead sports anchor for WNBC-TV, told The Post. Beck has covered six Stanley Cup Finals.
At the ripe old age of 124 years old, weighing in at 35 lb. and standing three feet tall, the Stanley Cup is the oldest trophy competed for in professional sports and the only one with 24-hour supervision, in the form of a chaperone/bodyguard who has come to be known by fans as the “Keeper of the Cup.”
Prior to 1989, that job didn’t exist. Then one day the Cup needed to travel north of Toronto for an appearance with the Calgary Flames’ Colin Patterson. Phil Pritchard, a 27-year-old who had just started working with the Hockey Hall of Fame that week, raised his hand and volunteered to make the trip.
“After that, I just kept on raising my hand and after a while fans would see me and say, ‘Hey, that’s the Keeper of the Cup,’” Pritchard, who is now 55 and travels up to 170 days a year with the Cup and shares their adventures together on Twitter @Keeperofthecup, told The Post.
The Cup itself is on the road 300 days a year. During hockey season, there are three Keepers. In the off-season, when the Cup must make its way around to all the players on the championship-winning team, two additional Keepers join the crew.
According to tradition, Keepers wear white gloves when handling the Cup. Pritchard, who is the vice president of the resource center and the curator of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto in addition to his Cup-shepherding duties, says he’s kept every pair he’s ever owned in plastic bags with dates written on them. “My sock and t-shirt drawers are filled with them. I guess it’s the curator side of me.”
“Every day is a new chapter in the life of the Stanley Cup. After 20 million years of doing this, you think you’ve seen everything but you haven’t,” he said. “The days seem so similar yet so different.” He (and the Cup) have joined LA Kings’ Anze Kopitar for a rowboat ride on 25 million-year-old Lake Baikal on the Russia-Serbia border, waterskied with the Detroit Red Wings’ Mike Babcock and enjoyed a quick sauna in Finland with the Anaheim Ducks’ Teemu Selanne (it had to be quick to prevent heat damage to the trophy, made of silver and nickel alloy).
“Having the opportunity to bear witness to a great moment for each and every guy is my favorite thing. Whether it’s going to a player’s hometown or an event with them is incredible,” Pritchard said. “For me, it’s like becoming part of their family for the day each time I turn up with the Cup.”
And it really has been a family affair, in many cases: Sylvain Lefebvre, after winning the Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 1994, planned his daughter Alexzandra’s baptism to coincide with his day with the trophy and utilized the prize in the rite; in 2008 the Red Wings’ Tomas Holmstrom did the same for his seven-week-old niece. Steve Yzerman got wet with it in a different way: immediately after his Red Wings won the championship in 1997, he stripped off his clothes and took a post-game suds with the trophy. Former Ranger Eddie Olczyk combined his love of hockey and horses in 1994, when he fed Kentucky Derby winner Go for Gin out of the Cup’s hollow at the Belmont Stakes.
The Anaheim Ducks’ left wing Brad May scored an unprecedented 48 hours with the Cup in August 2007 due to timing and logistics, and he didn’t waste a moment. Another Keeper, Mike Bolt, escorted the Cup to Canada, where May’s brother had planned a jam-packed schedule ranging from home and church visits to golf courses to a parade attended by 3,000 minor hockey children in Stouffville, the first town May ever lived in.
A friend even loaned May his private helicopter for the occasion, the player told The Post. “We flew the Stanley Cup around in the helicopter to different places and dropped down right in the front yard of Andrew Urban’s house, my trainer and one of my favorite people in the whole wide world,” he said. “We even took the Cup to the gym that I literally worked out in for 12 years to win the Stanley Cup.”
May cited his visit to Camp Oochigeas, a summer camp for children with cancer, as a major highlight of the day.
Then it was off to a party featuring both the Stanley Cup and the Calder Cup, the second-oldest professional ice hockey playoff trophy, which had just been won by the Montreal Canadiens’ farm team, the Hamilton Bulldogs. With the two oldest and most celebrated hockey trophies under one roof, Mays says there was “lots of funs and lots of drinking and baby pictures in the Stanley Cup and Crown Royal shots, and tequila and beer to go along with it.”
With the party still raging at 3 a.m., May said, he knew he only had a few hours left before giving the Cup back. So he went home, locked his bedroom door, and tucked himself into bed next to Stanley.
“Literally, I had my hand, my arm under it. The best part is it’s got like the perfect neck where your arm doesn’t fall asleep, and I literally spooned the Stanley Cup,” he said. “It was amazing. I don’t know if it was an hour or two or whatever I slept, it was just me and Stanley and it was the greatest moment ever.”
Whether sipping champagne from it, canoeing in a lake with it or enjoying a cuddle with it, Pritchard said that the Cup’s off-season adventures are part of its power.
“Some stories are exaggerated but it’s the stories that make up part of the mystique of the Stanley Cup,” he said. “Every emotion comes out in its presence.”
Rumors and speculation about the Cup’s adventures are as varied and wild as the superstitions athletes swear by. In 1991, the Cup sunk to the bottom of a pool when the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Phil Bourque grabbed it at a party and launched into a celebratory cannonball; in 1993 Montreal Canadien Patrick Roy pulled the same stunt.
In 2007, 19 former NHL players accompanied the Cup to a Canadian base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where troops were allowed to admire it and then challenge the pros to a few rounds of ball hockey. It was the trophy’s inaugural visit to a combat zone.
Of course, some tales of the Cup’s exploits are less tame: In 1987, after winning the Cup with the Edmonton Oilers, Mark Messier reportedly brought the Cup to strip club The Forum Inn for an appearance, a stunt he repeated in 1994 at Scores in New York City after he was part of the New York Rangers’ legendary trophy grab. Teammate Nick Kypreos later told Vice that he remembers the Cup being placed on the stage, where it became a “pretty good prop” for the dancers. As for how it was integrated in the routine, “You can use your imagination,” he said. “The girls certainly did.” Lore is mixed on whether the Rangers did, in fact, accidentally leave the Cup behind at the club for an hour before returning to collect it, but the NHL put its foot down on the trophy making return appearances at strip clubs after the wild 1994 tour.
“Everyone who has ever laced up skates or held a hockey stick wants to win the championship and the Stanley Cup, including me. It’s a huge honor to be Keeper of the Cup but I would trade it all in for the opportunity to actually win it,” Pritchard said.
He’s far from the only one to covet the Cup.
“It is so hard to win the Stanley Cup,” Beck said, “that when a player, coach or executive holds that trophy for the first time it may not be as good as holding your child or your grandchild for the first time, but it’s got to be next in line.”