Real Stories of the Minor Leagues
This
page is all about the wacky world of minor league hockey.
Several hockey players (and a few coaches) were asked the
question,
"What's the strangest incident you've seen in minor league
hockey?"
and here are their answers. No names have been changed to protect
the
innocent because there aren't any!
Craig Conley - Ft.
Worth Fire (CHL) - 11/28/98
(Click here to download in .wav format)
"The strangest or funniest memory I have in minor league hockey was last year, playing for the Ft. Worth Fire, we had to travel to Tulsa with one goalie and our bus driver, Tom, had to be the backup goalie, and he had never put skates on before and he had to skate across the ice in Tulsa, and the whole Tulsa crowd was chantin', "BUS DRIVER! BUS DRIVER!", and let's put it this way, he looked quite funny and he took it all well and he dressed the part and he helped us out a lot."
Roland Monilaws -
Ft. Worth Fire (CHL) - 11/28/98
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"I had one in Juniors, playing in the Alberta Junior Hockey League for the Ft. McMurray Oil Barons. We were down in Bow Valley, and it was after the first intermission; they have a mascot, an eagle, and he was mocking us as we were coming off and he actually hit me as I was going by, with his stick, so I "accidentally" cuffed him right between the legs in the crown jewels and he went down like a ton of bricks and they had to get a stretcher and an ambulance but since we were walking off in a line nobody knew who did it so nobody saw me do it. Hopefully nobody remembers that."
Doug Lawrence -
Shreveport Mudbugs (WPHL) - 12/10/98
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"We were playing in Memphis one night and a guy on our team, Chad Seibel is his name, after the game got traded to Memphis and we ended up playing Memphis the next night back in Tulsa, this is in the Central Hockey League, and he rode the bus back with us to Tulsa and played for the opposing team the next night and two days later he packed all his stuff and we were back in Memphis on Tuesday and he rode back on the bus with us with all his equipment and luggage and we dropped him off at the hotel and he played and ended up staying in Memphis for the rest of the year."
Ken Sheppard- San
Antonio Iguanas (CHL) - 12/12/98
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"The strangest thing that I've ever seen in hockey was I was playing with a gentleman by the name of Jim McGeough who plays in Wichita now and the night before one of our games, Jimmy had went out all night and the coach found out he had went out all night. So the next day we had the game and Jimmy's sittin' on the bench and the first 2 periods go by and Jimmy hasn't got a shift yet so he keeps lookin' up at the coach wondering why he hasn't got on the ice 'cause he doesn't know the that the coach had found out about him being out all night. So, the third period rolls around and he still hasn't played and there's about 3 minutes left in the third period and Jimmy decides he's going to undo his skates on the bench. Well, with about a minute left, the coach taps Jimmy on the shoulder and Jimmy goes to jump over the boards and both of his skates fall off onto the bench. So Jimmy hopped on the ice in his sock feet and he had to get back off just as fast as he went on."
Paul Jackson - San
Antonio Iguanas (CHL) - 12/12/98
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"When I played for the Wichita Thunder, we were playing in OK city one night and we didn't have enough players. They kicked everybody out and there was only 6 players to play in the game and the only thing we could do to get any rest was to get a penalty and I got a penalty. Their team scored a hat trick and somebody threw a bunch of hats in the bin and I put on a sombrero and took my helmet off and when the penalty was over I went and played in the game, skated around, picked up the puck and I was skatin' with a sombrero on my head."
Taylor Hall (Coach)
- Corpus Christi Ice Rays (WPHL) - 12/188/98
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"Way back in the Western Hockey League, probably 15 or 18 years ago, there was a transaction made where there was a player traded, I believe from the Victoria Cougers to, I think, to the Seattle Breakers, which was another team in the Western Hockey League, for a bus, which I thought was a pretty neat story and they had the transactions in the newspaper. I think it was Tom Martin, believe it or not, who was traded for a bus."
Craig Hayden - Ft.
Worth Brahmas (WPHL) - 12/18/98
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"It was probably the 96-97 season with the Amarillo Rattlers, it was probably mid-January, it was not a very good night. It was kind of Winter, whatever you guys call Winter down here, the roads were icy. We traveled from Amarillo to New Mexico which is probably about 3 and a half hours...seen a bunch of wrecks, couple of mishaps and fatalities and we got there the day before just to skate and the next day in pre-morning, we found out before we got there that there was a monster truck competition and they had no ice in so we drove all that way for nothing."
Jamie Hearn -
Central Texas Stampede (WPHL) - 1/7/99
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"When I was playing for Wichita, Wichita and Oklahoma City had a line brawl and everyone got tossed out. We had four players on each bench for spares. The coaches dressed the backup goalies in the equipment that the guys got kicked out in. Our goalie got an assist and a roughing penalty and their goalie, I think, might have score a goal. It was like 13 to 7 or something was the final score. And in another one, when I was playing in Memphis, our goalie, Roydon Gunn, proposed to his fiancee' before the game. She sang the National Anthem. She skated out, he skated out and proposed to her after singing the anthem. Then the first four shots went in on him so it wasn't a good night for him."
Brian Shantz - San
Antonio Iguanas (CHL) - 1/8/99
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"It was in the playoffs, we had 9,500 people in Freeman Coliseum and we went out to play the game and 'Disney on Ice' has just been there the previous 2 days. They used white paint to cover up all the logos on the ice and when we went to play the game the paint rose to the top of the ice so every time you skated over that patch of ice you came to a stop and the puck wouldn't slide over it so we delayed the game for about 2 hours with 9,500 people drinkin' beer and then they decided to cancel the game and there was a lot of unhappy people in the stands."
David Oliver -
Central Texas Stampede (WPHL) - 1/16/99
(Click here to download in .wav format)
Editors note:
This happened on the night that he was interviewed.
"First period, I was put out there on a power play basically
to stand there in front of the net and our defenseman, Brian
Loney, one timed his shot and I was screening.....I didn't quite
get out of the way in time and it actually caught me in the
private areas, but it ended up in the back of the net so I got
credit for the goal so I guess it was well worth it."
Bryan Wells (Coach)
- Wichita Thunder (CHL) - 1/30/99
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"We were playing in Roanoke, Virginia one night, we were taking it to them pretty good down there, and one of the rednecks from that area decided he'd pull out his gun and chase our whole team to our dressing room, which was kind of a different situation, but I've never seen some of those players move so fast as they did that night."