A reporter's job is to take readers to place where they cannot go, to provide information they could not otherwise obtain.
Imagine if, after each game at PPG Paints Arena, rather than a dozen or so media members, Sidney Crosby had the 18,000-plus fans who'd attended the game crowd around his locker-room stall, asking for his perspective on what had just transpired.
Not everything a reporter sees makes it into print, though, for any number of reasons. Perhaps it's because of space limitations. Maybe a perceived lack of significance, relative to other information. Or it might simply be for reasons of propriety, because not everything that's said or done away from the playing surface is suitable for public consumption.
I have been covering the Penguins since the summer of 1983, albeit on a limited basis during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons, so the memory bank has gotten pretty full over the years.
Some of the most vivid came during my first decade or so on the beat, and most -- coach Bob Berry's blistering, but oh-so-funny, "circus performers" critique of his players after a loss in Toronto during the 1986-87 season is a good example -- were chronicled in detail when they happened.
Others, though, played out behind the scenes, and didn't necessarily seem pertinent at the time. A few of those were touched on publicly when they happened, but seem more meaningful -- or, at least, entertaining -- now than they did more than a quarter-century ago.
Here's a look at a few of those:
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The Cambria County War Memorial Arena in Johnstown was a dark, dank place in the early 1980s, which made it an ideal training-camp venue for the Penguins in late summer, 1983, as the franchise was plunging toward what would become a 38-point season.
Much of what transpired during that camp is best forgotten (even if that requires years of intense psychotherapy), but one afternoon stands out, when I, about a month into my first year on the beat, was sitting in the seats, chatting with a group of scouts during a break in the on-ice workouts. As the conversation progressed, I asked Albert Mandanici, the scout who covered the Quebec Major Junior 'Hockey League for the Penguins in those days, how the prospects pool there for the 1984 draft was shaping up.
What, if anything, he said about highly regarded young players such as J.J. Daigneault, Stephane Richer and Sylvain Cote was forgotten long ago, but the way Mandanici raved about one teenager made an enduring impression. He could not have been more effusive about the young player's potential, although his glowing assessment seemed to conflict with Mandanici's suggestion that he had pretty much discovered the guy after he'd been overlooked by everyone else who attended QMJHL games.
It turned out, though, that Mandanici actually might have been understating the player's possible impact, because Mario Lemieux proved to be pretty good.
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The Penguins' winless streak at the Spectrum in Philadelphia had swollen to 0-39-3 (the "3" represented ties, not overtime/shootout losses) when they ventured there on Feb. 2, 1989. And while an ever-improving roster gave the Penguins at least a modicum of hope that they could actually win a game in that arena, someone at WDVE-FM decided that additional help was called for.
And so the station's popular morning team, Scott Paulsen and Jim Krenn, was dispatched across the state and, in the guise of witch doctors, attempted to exorcise whatever it was in the building that had tormented the Penguins for 15 years. (That the Flyers consistently put up a superior lineup apparently wasn't taken into consideration.)
As part of their pregame performance, the duo asked the two Pittsburgh beat writers who were covering the game to stop by the station's spot in the cramped arena press box to discuss the streak and the game that night. As the discussion was winding down, one of the radio guys presented what could have passed for a brontosaurus fibula and asked the writers to "rub my bone."
Tom McMillan, the Post-Gazette reporter who would become a Penguins executive later in his career, obliged.
Was his compliance with that double-entendre the difference-maker?
Well, who really can say? But what's clear is that the Penguins won that night and have fared quite well on the far side of the Commonwealth for much of the time since then.
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Gene Ubriaco probably is remembered more for crawling through a cramped tunnel beneath the Civic Arena seats to reach the Penguins' bench rather than subject himself to the jeers of fans while walking across the ice from the locker room than for anything he did during his season-plus as coach.
He did, however, deliver one of the most memorable quotes in franchise history not long after he was fired, when Ubriaco told a Baltimore reporter that coaching Lemieux and Paul Coffey was "like trying to teach a shark table manners."
It took a while, in those pre-internet days, for the word of that putdown to reach the Penguins, but it finally got to them -- after being republished in a Harrisburg paper -- on a game day in Minnesota. Lemieux and Coffey declined to comment on Ubriaco's insult at the morning skate, but after the game that night at the Met Center, Coffey invited McMillan and me into the trainer's room -- usually off-limits to everyone except team personnel -- at which time he and Lemieux offered their responses, along with their critiques of Ubriaco's qualifications and performance as coach.
While their exact words have drifted into the mists of hockey history -- although if memory serves, Lemieux made some reference to Ubriaco's extended time in the minor leagues, suggesting that he was suited to work at that level -- it's safe to say that those were less charitable than anything disgruntled fans might have yelled at Ubriaco on his way to the bench.
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Eddie Johnston, a fixture in and around the organization for most of the past four decades, liked to joke that he spoke four languages: "French, English, broken French and broken English."
Well, he probably was joking, although Johnston and the spoken word weren't always on, well, speaking terms. No one knew that as well as some of the players with whom he worked as coach and/or GM, including Tim (Hrendachuk) Hrynewich, Kevin (McClellahand) McClelland and Rod (Butkus) Buskas, to say nothing of the Sandstroms (Ulf and Kjell Samuelsson).
Johnston could deliver words at a rate that would humble a Gatling gun, which occasionally compounded the challenge of keeping up with the points he was making, but perhaps his most memorable malaprop came in a most somber tone. It came in the wake of the Jan. 12, 1993 press conference during which Lemieux stunned the region -- and the hockey world -- by announcing that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Or, as Johnston labeled it to a small group he was speaking with afterward, Hopkin's Disease.
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It was quite a coup when the Penguins hired Pierre Creamer to replace Berry as coach in the summer of 1987. Creamer, after all, had been the highly successful coach of Montreal's top farm team at a time when the Canadiens were prominent among the NHL's most respected and successful franchises.
Not long after getting the job, Creamer was touring the workout facilities at the Civic Arena and interacted briefly with some players who were in there. After he departed, center Dan Quinn pointed out to a couple of reporters who happened to be on hand that Creamer's, uh, body structure bore a striking resemblance to that of Fred Flintstone.
In that instant, a nickname was born, and Creamer was known in media circles during his lone season behind the bench (and for all the years that have followed) simply as "Fred."
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Lou Angotti was livid.
He was pacing in the small, ice-level room at Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., hours before his Penguins were to play a late-season game against the Devils, their only real rivals for last place in the 1983-84 overall standings.
Would finishing at the bottom of the league be embarrassing?
Sure.
Would it be a good move for a bad team?
Absolutely, because whoever ended up last in the league in those pre-lottery days would be guaranteed the No. 1 choice in that summer's draft -- which meant the right to put Lemieux on the payroll.
Angotti's animated, profane diatribe was inspired not the idea of getting Lemieux, but by a published report in which Bob Butera, then president of the Devils, accused the Penguins of intentionally trying to finish last. That, of course, was precisely what the Penguins had in mind, as evidenced by some of the personnel moves they made as the season progressed that were suspect (in the short term, at least). The Penguins, though, were not willing to publicly acknowledge that they believed Lemieux was a player who could resurrect a moribund franchise, and Angotti put on quite a performance to express his purported outrage at Butera's charge, stringing together vulgarities in groundbreaking combinations and stopping just short of tossing around the cheap and sparse furniture in the room.
The Penguins, by the way, lost that night, 6-5, and locked up last place less than a month later.
Angotti, alas, never got a chance to benefit from Lemeiux's arrival, because Berry replaced him as coach before the following season.
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The score was 6-0. There were 20 minutes to play. The outcome was inevitable. The unthinkable was imminent.
The second intermission in Game 6 of the 1991 Stanley Cup final at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minn., was winding down, and I left my seat for a quick walk around the press box before play resumed. Shortly after I began making my way through the people mingling there, I made eye contact with McMillan, who was at the game for the Post-Gazette.
We didn't exchange a word. Didn't need to.
Both of us had been following the Penguins since around the time of the 1967 expansion, and had witnessed the many miseries the franchise and its fans had endured. The loss of Michel Briere, who suffered mortal injuries in an auto accident. Blowing a 3-0 lead over the Islanders in Round 2 of the 1975 playoffs. The bankruptcy that followed a few months later. The crushing overtime losses to the Islanders and Blues in the deciding games of the 1981 and 1982 playoffs, when the Penguins had been so close to pulling off stunning upsets.
It had been a franchise submerged in failure and frustration for most of its existence, but that all was about to change. When the formality of the third period passed, the Penguins had an 8-0 victory and their first Stanley Cup.
Countless thousands of words would be written about that game, that series, that championship. None, however, would capture what happened that night nearly as well as that look of absolute disbelief that the two longtime followers of the franchise exchanged as the impossible was playing out before them.