Blue White Illustrated

Ice hockey's arrival at PSU brings back memories N o one was happier to see Penn State play Division I intercollegiate hockey in the new Pegula Ice Arena than Joe Battista. But this writer was not far behind him. Battista left Penn State in early November after 35 years of association with the university he loved, starting as a brash young freshman who grew up playing hockey in the Pittsburgh suburbs. He once dreamed of playing in the NHL and he hoped playing for Penn State's club team would help him reach that goal. However, when he realized that would never happen, he went to work for the Pittsburgh Penguins after graduating but continued thinking of how he could help his alma mater resurrect hockey as a Division I varsity sport. After returning to Penn State in 1987, it took Battista years of struggle through the often labyrinthine rules of the NCAA and the Penn State bureaucracy in his quest for varsity status. It also took more money than he had ever envisioned – $82 million to be precise. Thanks to this magnanimous beneficent of another Penn State alum and hockey zealot named Terry Pegula, who became a billionaire through the gas exploration business, Battista finally achieved his alternative dream. The aptly named Pegula Ice Arena makes some NHL facilities look like relics from another era. Although the limited seating capacity is not up to NHL standards (by design) and the private suites are nowhere near as luxurious as many major league amphitheaters, the arena is now the envy of many Division I hockey teams. And although Penn State's hockey team is only in its second year of Division I competition, the action and style of play on the ice are reminiscent of the NHL hockey I once saw in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Washington. The only things missing are the incessant fights and occasional brutality that still mark what is, to me, the most exciting day-in, day-out sport in existence. Unlike Battista and his schoolboy chum Tim King, who is now the Nittany Lions' radio analyst, I did not play hockey as a kid. But while Battista and King were skating around the dumpy amateur rinks of western Pennsylvania, I was covering the original Penguins for a Pittsburgh television station and Hockey News, the bible of the National Hockey League since 1947. With 30 teams now making up a league that stretches coast-to-coast in the United States and Canada, many of today's hockey fans cannot remember when there were only the "original six" NHL teams concentrated in the Midwest and East: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York and Toronto. From 1942 until 1967, that was the NHL. Naturally, the old NHL was highly popular in Canada, where hockey is the national sport and Foster Hewitt's famous nationwide radio and television broadcasts had entire families following their favorite team. But in the United States, except in cities that had NHL teams, the league could not compete with the popularity of baseball, football, horse racing, boxing and even professional wrestling – especially as television took those sports into more and more American homes from the late 1940s into the early 1960s. In the mid-1960s, fearing the threat of a rival league being formed with mostly U.S. teams and with a desperate need for a U.S. network television contract, the NHL decided to double its franchises exclusively with U.S. markets, including some on the West Coast. That's when the Penguins, Philadelphia Flyers, Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues, Minnesota North Stars and California Seals [San Francisco-Oakland] came into being. (In the late 1970s, the California franchise moved to Cleveland, and then merged with the North Stars out of Minneapolis before moving to Dallas in 1993.) Although the city zoo is the only place you'll find penguins in Pittsburgh, the new owners of the franchise had decided to name their team the Penguins because the home ice would be the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, where the minor league Pittsburgh Hornets had played since the arena's construction in 1961. The facility had a rarely used retractable roof that earned it the nickname "the Big Igloo." Since penguins were somewhat synonymous with igloos, the owners thought that was the perfect name for the team and chose blue, white and black as the team colors. In 1980, another group of owners switched the uniform colors to the city's traditional black and gold to capitalize on the popularity of Pittsburgh's other major sports teams, the Pirates and Steelers, the World Series and Super Bowl champions, respectively, in 1979. To fill the roster of the new expansion teams, the NHL held a two-day expansion draft in Montreal in June, 1967. The Penguins' owners decided to fly a contingent of Pittsburgh media by charter to Montreal in an effort to drum up publicity for the team. Although I was primarily on the news side at WIIC-TV, our sports director, Red Donley, chose me for the assignment. Frankly, at the time, I really did not know a blue line from a red line and had seen only two hockey games in my life, both in Detroit. I will never forget my first game on Nov. 29, 1952. I was in 10th

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