9806030209
DETROIT FREE PRESS
980603
Wednesday, June 03, 1998
METRO FINAL
1C
Photo Illustration RICK NEASE/Detroit Free Press
MITCH ALBOM
Copyright (c) 1998, Detroit Free Press
WHAT DO THE RED WINGS DO IN THEIR SPARE TIME? PLAY CHESS!
WHAT DO THE RED WINGS WANT TO DO TONIGHT IN DALLAS? DECLARE ... CHECKMATE!
WHEN IT COMES TO BOARD GAMES, WINGS WORK HARD TO FIND A WINNING STRATEGY
Look, I'm not trying to make excuses for these guys. But hockey is rough
business. The Red Wings need a release. They need to blow off steam. So, OK,
maybe it isn't "normal" behavior. But they're big, powerful men. They have to
do it. They gotta have it.
They need their chess.
Chess?
"We're into it," admits Darren McCarty.
Chess?
"Oh, yeah, every chance we get," says Brendan Shanahan.
Chess? Chess. On the team plane. In the hotels. In the locker room. Chess. It
may be Bobby Orr on the ice, but it's Bobby Fischer everywhere else.
"Last year it was card games, poker, helicopter, stuff like that" McCarty
says. "And for a while this year, it was Balderdash, and Scattergories."
"And then what?" I say. "Suddenly chess became popular?"
He shrugs. "Brendan brought in a board."
Brendan brought in a board? That's it? And now the defending Stanley Cup
champions spend their spare time deciding whether the knight should take the
rook?
"Sometimes we play two on a side," McCarty says. "It's like a war. Other guys
line up behind you, trying to figure out the best move."
I don't know if we should brag about this, or hush it up. Chess? The Stanley
Cup champions? Larry Murphy, Bob Rouse, Slava Fetisov, McCarty, Shanahan --
all guys who rely on a certain toughness out on the ice -- all are deeply into
the little board and the plastic pieces. You ask them about a particularly
hard check in last night's game, and they're liable to say, "It wasn't that
hard. I just shifted my king and took his bishop. Checkmate."
Let's face it. Only hockey gives you this. A bunch of guys with scars and
missing teeth gathered around a chess board is either the greatest endorsement
ever for the NHL, or a sure sign the players have taken too many blows to the
head.
"Who's the best player on the team?" I ask Shanahan.
"Iggy," he says.
"Who's the best player on the team?" I ask McCarty.
"Iggy."
Let's go to Iggy.
The Russian grandmaster
"Iggy" is Igor Larionov, the Red Wings center, who always has been more
cerebral than your average hockey player. He grew up in Russia, a nation quite
fond of chess, and began playing the game when he was 6 years old.
"They say you're the chess king," I tell Larionov.
"Well," he says, coyly, "I am not going to say this."
"Have you ever lost?" I say.
"One time," he says.
"Impressive," I say.
He winces. We look around at his teammates, pulling on jockstraps and throwing
towels.
"Consider the competition?" I say.
"Exactly," he sighs.
So, OK. It may not be Moscow. It may not be IBM's Big Blue. Maybe some of the
Wings still think Boris Spassky is the sidekick to Natasha in "Rocky &
Bullwinkle." But you gotta admit, playing chess is a much preferred pastime to
smoking dope, chasing women, fathering children out of wedlock, or making the
police blotter -- all of which seem to be fairly popular in other sports.
Besides, considering the competitiveness of the Red Wings, you know they throw
themselves headfirst into their chess. You just hope no fights break out over
who plays black and who plays white.
"Mathieu Dandenault's surprisingly good," McCarty says. "Sometimes he teams
with Martin Lapointe."
"Yeah," adds Joey Kocur, "but then they start speaking French and nobody knows
if they're cheating. That's not fair."
"Yeah," McCarty says, "that's not fair."
Chess?
The answer is Bowman
Now we should point out that playing games has a long tradition on this
Detroit team. For a while, it was a movie quiz thing, where one player named
three actors in a movie, and the others had to guess the movie. This was big,
until they ran out of movies.
Then the board games were hot. Balderdash. Pictionary. Scattergories. They all
faded, too.
"Somebody throws a game out there and suddenly, we're all into it," McCarty
says, "but we do it so much, we get sick of it, and then we never want to see
it again."
"You guys were into Monopoly for a while," someone says.
"Yeah," McCarty answers, "but that was just because we forgot the Trivial
Pursuit box."
Trivial Pursuit? I still can't get past the mental picture of Kirk Maltby
telling Tomas Holmstrom, "My queen takes your knight." I still can't imagine
Nick Lidstrom nudging Steve Yzerman on the bench and whispering, "Hey. Up
there in the stands. Isn't that Garry Kasparov? Geez, you think we could meet
him?"
I can't imagine it. But then again, why not? As we said, there are worse
pastimes. Chess uses your brain. It passes the time. And as one Wing admitted,
"It's really hard to lose money on it."
Then again, chess is only passing through. Already, McCarty says, Trivial
Pursuit is beginning to grow in popularity. It could be the Next Official
Pastime of the Best Team in the NHL.
"We were playing the other day, and the winning question was, 'What hockey
coach led Montreal, Pittsburgh and Detroit to the Stanley Cup?' " McCarty
says.
"That's convenient," I say.
"Yeah, but Shanahan said he was going to tell Scotty that I didn't know the
answer."
Boys will be boys.
Which is the whole point. Boys will be boys. So I am not going to bury this
story about chess. I am printing it here, for the whole world to see, because
we in Detroit are not embarrassed that our team has both brains and brawn. We
are not ashamed that they like little plastic kings and queens. We are proud.
We are glad.
Besides, the Dallas Stars play bingo.
Well, that's what I heard . . .
To leave a message for Mitch Albom, call 1-313-223-4581.
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COLUMN;HOCKEY;RED WINGS;CHESS