The Movie ‘Slap Shot,’ But in Real Life

How my very proper mother survived New Haven Blades games

My mother, Betty Jane Hull, loved just two sports: tennis and figure skating. And her love of those sports revealed a lot about her: She was proper and a bit of a snob. I never heard her swear. Not once.

For people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s as I did, I think it’s safe to assume that most of their sports memories involved their fathers. It was their dads who took them to games or watched sports with them on TV. But my father was gone a lot for work, and he wasn’t really into sports. My mother filled the void. 

In 1965, as a 10-year-old, I was already a diehard Los Angeles Dodgers fan. (I am to this day—and I don’t know why. I grew up in Connecticut and have never lived in Southern California.)

Back then, World Series games were played during the day. Game 1 of the series between the Dodgers and Minnesota Twins started while I was in school. I remember running home from the bus stop to catch the end of the game. I burst through the back door and there was my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, watching the game, and writing down every play on a yellow legal pad so my brother, Josh, and I wouldn’t miss anything that happened.

During hockey season, my mother would take me to the old New Haven Arena to watch the New Haven Blades play. If there ever was a place my mother didn’t belong, it was the New Haven Arena. The 4,000-seat venue, which was demolished in 1974, was airless and dank. The bathrooms, even by the standards of an adolescent boy, were gross. Instead of plexiglass, wire mesh separated the players and the fans. At one game, an errant shot sailed over the mesh and hit a young girl in the face with a sickening thud. A few days later we read in the paper that she had lost an eye.

Smoking was allowed in the arena, and during the games a cloud hovered above the ice, like the marine layer over the California coast in late spring.

(The arena was also a popular concert venue. I saw my first concert there—Alice Cooper. I still marvel that he wrapped a boa constrictor around his neck during the show. The arena made headlines as the place where Jim Morrison of The Doors was arrested mid-concert in 1967 for screaming “eat it” at the cops present.)

The Blades and the arena were a perfect marriage. The team and the Eastern Hockey League in which they played were rough and tumble. Fights were a regular occurrence—I remember at least once when a brawl erupted during warmups. Blake Ball, a crowd favorite, averaged nearly five penalty minutes a game during his four seasons with the Blades. John Brophy, who was beloved during his three years with the Blades and reviled during the 15 seasons he played for other EHL teams, is sometimes referred to as the “Godfather of Goonery.” (Brophy, who became a coach when he hung up his skates, is believed to be the inspiration for Reggie Dunlop, the player/coach played by Paul Newman in “Slap Shot,” the classic hockey movie.) 

Keven Morrison, a former Blades player, told an interviewer in 2022 that the fans gave the team a huge home-ice advantage. Opposing players were reluctant to “fight for the puck along the boards because you’re getting spit on,” he told WTNH News 8. “[T]hey didn’t want to take penalties because they would go to the penalty box and get beat up by the fans.” (For the record, my mother and I never spit on any players or assailed them in the penalty box.)

The Blades’ final game as a franchise—a Game 7 playoff loss on the road to the Syracuse Blazers in 1972—was legendary. According to a 2022 story in the New Haven Register, Blades goalie Jim Armstrong knocked down a referee and sat on his chest after Armstrong witnessed the ref tripping a Blades player during a melee. 

The start of the game had been delayed because the Blades’ top scorer’s skates were missing from the locker room. According to the Register, “New Haven coach Don Perry called a nearby sports dealer to send over a new pair. They never arrived. Syracuse management refused to let the man into the rink.” Perry eventually sent someone to the store to pick them up.

There was more.

“In the press box, Ron Rohmer, radio voice of the Blades…, discovered his phone lines had been clipped. A repair crew soon restored service. But an unidentified man entered the press box and ripped the lines out of the wall. Rohmer resorted to an in-house phone line for his broadcast.”

As kids, my brother and I fashioned goalie pads out of polyurethane and used a magic marker to write “Blades” diagonally across the chest protector. One of us would don the pads and pretend we were Blades goalie Dave Hainsworth while the other would relentlessly fire pucks at him. We did this in our basement where the lighting was bad, the ceiling was low and many a puck eluded the padding. 

Nearly 60 years later, I can still recall the thrill of making a save, like Hainsworth would have.

When we went to games, my mother must have been aghast at the unchecked violence on the ice, the thirst for blood in the stands and the condition of the arena.  But she never said it or showed it. And she kept asking me if I wanted to go to games.

I always did.

We would love to hear about your memories of your parents and sports. Please share them in the comments.