It has held champagne, breakfast cereal and even babies. It has been hoisted, hugged and almost kidnapped. It travels all over and has a team of chaperones to assure its safety.
It’s the Stanley Cup, the trophy awarded to the National Hockey League championship team each year.
This year, the Carolina Hurricanes, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, have won the coveted Cup, and the team is beginning a summer of passing the trophy from player to player. Unlike other national professional sports trophies, which are newly made and awarded to a new championship team to keep, there’s just one Stanley Cup. The champions in ice hockey only borrow the Stanley Cup for awhile, before it heads back to a vault in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.
The players revere their brief turns to hold the Stanley Cup — the oldest trophy awarded to North American pro athletes. After the Cup was donated to Canada in 1892 by Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley, a British earl serving in Canada whose children loved ice hockey, the National Hockey League acquired it in 1910 to establish it as the award for League champions.
A sterling tradition
Today, each winning player has his name stamped on one of the five rings that make up the barrel of the Cup. When there is no more room for players’ names, a ring is removed and sent to storage, and another one replaces it.
No matter what mishaps or age-related stresses befall the silver-and-nickel trophy year after year, “they don’t create a new one,” says Hockey Hall of Fame official Kevin Shea, author of 21 books about hockey, including Travels with Stanley.
“It’s got its dents and scratches. It’s a real living thing,” Shea says.
If you watched the final playoff game in the championship, just after the final buzzer sounds, you would have seen Hurricanes players skating jubilantly around the rink, some carrying the massive and heavy — it’s 35 pounds (16 kilograms)! — Stanley Cup over their heads.
Soon the real fun begins.
A decadeslong tradition, which became official in 1995, dictates that each player and team staff member will get one day to have the Cup all to himself, celebrating in whatever way is special to him (without damaging the iconic trophy, of course).
In earlier years, the winners have come up with some sterling ways to make the most of their day with the Cup.
The ‘Keeper of the Cup’
From one tradition grew another. Today, there is a “Keeper of the Cup” who, along with some deputies, keeps an eye on the trophy through all of this. They move with the trophy during a roughly 100-day period when players and staff members each have their day with it.
That all got started, according to the New York Rangers’ Neil Smith, when “one person took it, and the top came off. … And for some reason, somebody thought it would be wise to have an auto body guy weld it back on.”
“It wasn’t me,” Smith quips.
Since then, the keeper of the Cup — Phil Pritchard, vice president of the Hockey Hall of Fame — accompanies it wherever it goes.
Pritchard and his helpers clean and polish the Stanley Cup at the end of each day before awarding it to the next player.
Players get it from 6 a.m. to midnight, with veteran players getting first dibs on the schedule. It’s a special honor, notes Shea of the Hockey Hall of Fame, since ice hockey players, out of superstition, won’t touch the Cup unless and until they win the championship.
How the Cup will enter the daily lives of 47 Hurricanes players and staff is yet to be seen. But it will connect them to champions from teams decades ago. That is what makes the tradition so inspiring, Smith says.
“Ice hockey teaches you things you can’t get anywhere else. … Great values of sharing, of being in a group,” Smith says. And the Stanley Cup, every summer, joins the group.
Susan Milligan is a freelance
