“OVER THE GLASS, A SHOE IN YOUR ASS” and “THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL II”
#968/#967
968. NEW YORK RANGERS VS BOSTON BRUINS
DECEMBER 23, 1979
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
QUALITY OF PLAY—5.92
DRAMA—8.76
STAR POWER—6.66
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—5.36
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—8.15
LOCAL IMPACT—7.22
TOTAL: 42.07
“OVER THE GLASS, A SHOE IN YOUR ASS”
Games between the New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins were always combative, on the ice and in the stands. The Original Six franchises captured the brute essence of the longstanding sports rivalry that exists between the two cities. As Robert Seagriff, Madison Square Garden’s assistant director of security in 1979 said, “There would always be a big contingent of Boston cops that would come down for the games. And there were always problems between the cops and Rangers fans. When Boston came in, we’d beef up security wherever the cops were sitting.” Serve and protect, gents…
But back in 1979, on a Sunday evening just before Christmas, the shoe was on the other foot—as well as upside the head of one unfortunate Rangers rooter.
The Bruins and Rangers entered the early-season game in second place (New York behind Philadelphia in the Patrick Division, Boston behind Buffalo in the Adams) and had played the night before. The Rangers won to improve a skein that saw them win ten of their last eleven games, but they remained well behind the Flyers, who beat Boston for their 29th straight game without a loss (a number that would reach an NHL-record 35 in a row). Both teams were missing key players, including defensive stalwarts Brad Park and Barry Beck, along with Rangers forward Walt Tkaczuk, who had gotten into a car wreck three nights earlier.
The Rangers managed just three shots on goal in the first period, but scored on one of them, with Mario Marois beating Gerry Cheevers. Boston tied the game in the second period, but the Rangers answered back almost immediately on the power play, Don Murdoch deflecting one in. After that, both Cheevers and Rangers netminder (and future broadcaster, and briefly team president) John Davidson took turns making spectacular saves. With just under two minutes to play in the second, Anders Hedberg scored on a 2-on-1 to give New York a 3-1 lead after forty minutes.
The lead barely lasted two minutes of the third. O’Reilly blasted home a goal to make it 3-2, and shortly thereafter Bobby Lalonde took a pass from a Bruins rookie named Ray Bourque and beat Davidson from the left side to tie the game.
With six and half minutes to go, Bruins left wing Stan Jonathan let fly a speculative shot from forty feet out. As though magnetized, the puck slipped past half a dozen players and through a screened Davidson, who never saw the winning goal as it went past. New York’s great goal scorer Phil Esposito had a breakaway chance in the final seconds to tie it, but Cheevers bested him, and the Bruins held on for a 4-3 victory.
Late in the game, Boston’s Al Secord threw a nasty elbow at New York’s Ulf Nilsson. “I remembered the sucker punch he gave me earlier in the game, so I thought, an eye for an eye, and I suckered him,” Secord said. At the final horn, several players got together for some jawing and shoving as a result, though nothing serious by NHL standards. They got up against the glass at the Eighth Avenue end, glass which was quite low by contemporary standards. It appeared a fan was hit by a stick or glove, though it is difficult to tell for sure.
What is certain is that a fan reached over the sideboards and sucker-punched Jonathan. The fan’s name was John Kaptain, a 30-year old who owned an executive recruitment firm. Jonathan assumed it was a fist that drew blood under his eye, but in actuality Kaptain nailed him with a rolled-up game program. He then swiped Jonathan’s upraised stick.
“I may have hit Jonathan when he was on the ice,” Kaptain told reporters later, after subsequent events made him notorious. “I’m not saying I’m right in hitting him. I don’t even know if I hit the right player. But my brother [Jeff Kaptain] got hit by one of them first.”
O’Reilly was a bruiser who officially had 22 fights in 1979. But this uncounted one was his most famous. He immediately launched himself, skates and all, into the crowd in order to a) retrieve Jonathan’s stick, which he said Kaptain was wielding like he was “cutting down a hayfield,” and b) to exact some frontier justice. “There was no way he was going to strike one of my teammates and steal his stick, wield it like a weapon and then disappear into the crowd and go to a local bar with a souvenir and a great story,” O’Reilly remembered.
He was joined by a dozen and a half Bruins, 18 in all, including milquetoast Peter McNab, hardly a fighter, and the considerably more bloodthirsty Mike Milbury, who was almost to the locker room when the fracas began. He charged out and launched himself into the stands, about to create the indelible moment of the already incredible scene.
Not everyone realized what was happening. Cheevers “was in the locker room, having a smoke” when the melee erupted. Others were all too aware. “Nobody wanted to get too close because they were afraid of getting hurt. I figured let those fans, those monkeys, go at it,” said Rangers forward Don Maloney.
The monkeys surrounded O’Reilly and began whaling on him as he grabbed Kaptain, who broke free and scampered up several rows, only to be caught and pummeled by McNab and Milbury. Boston’s “Big Mike” tugged off Kaptain’s loafer, hesitated for a moment as though realizing what a crazy thing he was about to do, shrugged, and beat the Rangers rowdy with his own shoe. He then tossed the shoe on the ice, which brought attention to his deeds, even though multiple Bruins were committing far more violent assaults in lower rows.
Order was finally restored after what seemed like hours. A large crowd rocked the Bruins team bus as it tried to depart for LaGuardia Airport after the game, only dispersing after a determined charge by mounted police. Kaptain, his brother, his father Manny, and their friend Jack Guttenplan were arrested for disorderly conduct.
AFTERMATH
O’Reilly was suspended eight games, Milbury and McNab six apiece. Every Bruin player except Cheevers was fined. The Bruins franchise expressed defiance in a statement, one that read “We are very proud of our players and the way they conducted themselves.”
Charges against the Kaptain family and Guttenplan were dropped. O’Reilly considered pressing civil charges, but soon realized it would be “costly and time-consuming…a hassle.” Both Kaptain brothers have since passed away, though Manny, a WWII veteran, was alive to remember the incident on its 30th anniversary in 2009. He never went to another hockey game.
Legally, the incident amounted to nothing, but in the minds of hockey fans, especially those in Boston, it was a signature moment in the sport’s history. I still vividly remember jumping up and down with excitement watching the melee at home, and tearing off my brother’s shoe in order to recreate the whomping. In Beantown, O’Reilly and Milbury in particular became folk heroes for giving it good to a rude and violent New Yorker. Masshole comedian Denis Leary applauded the fight, calling it part of “thinning the herd.” The shoe-beating especially followed Milbury as he became a coach and GM for the Islanders for a period, and as he has continued on his often-controversial broadcasting career.
The NHL also—belatedly—raised the glass that encloses rinks as a result of the fight.
WHAT THEY SAID
“Under the same circumstances, I don’t think I’d go through a process of sorting through the rules and regulations and legal consequences. I think I’d jump over the glass and grab the guy again.”
—Terry O’Reilly
FURTHER READING:
Over The Glass And Into Hockey Lore, by Dave Seminara, The New York Times
VIDEO:
967. ZEV VS PAPYRUS
THOROUGHBRED MATCH RACE
OCTOBER 20, 1923
BELMONT PARK
QUALITY OF PLAY—6.51
DRAMA—7.89
STAR POWER—8.00
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.85
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—5.85
LOCAL IMPACT—5.98
TOTAL: 42.08
“THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL, PART II”
The Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race, held at Pimlico in 1937, is probably the most famous head-to-head horse race of all time. But prior to that the biggest by far took place in New York, in the fall of 1923, when England’s finest racehorse attempted to reverse the result of the Revolutionary War, at least in miniature.
Zev was the winner of the 1923 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, along with multiple other stakes races. Something of a wild-card, his owners hadn’t even bothered to attend the Derby and were shocked to hear Zev had won America’s most famous race. In part that was because that year the Preakness Stakes was run before the Kentucky race, and Zev had finished a disappointing 12th behind Vigil. Zev didn’t lose again as a three-year old, but doubts remained as to his quality.
Nowhere more so than in England, the spiritual home of horse racing. Papyrus was the winner of Britain’s equivalent of The Run For The Roses, the Epsom Derby. Like all races on the Sceptered Isle, the Epsom was run on grass at a mile and a half. The long distance allowed Papyrus to come from behind and defeat the favorite, Pharos, thanks to a timely whip hand from Papyrus’s legendary jockey, Steve O’Donoghue.
Basil Jarvis, who trained Papyrus, convinced owner Benjamin Irish that Papyrus could best Zev with one fetlock tied behind his back. A trans-Atlantic challenge was thus issued, and a match race set for October. Papyrus vs Zev for three-year old bragging rights—plus, more importantly, a massive purse of $100,000, with an 80/20 split to the winner. The race would be held at August Belmont’s Park in Elmont on Long Island. The surface, of course, would be dirt, an advantage for Zev. So the distance was made a mile and a half. Jarvis and Irish thought that would be an advantage for Papyrus, though Zev won the Belmont Stakes at that distance in June.
Jarvis assumed besting Zev would be the easy part—getting Papyrus to America in condition to race was the real challenge. He pulled out all the stops, including booking passage on the Aquitania, the era’s foremost liner. The huge ship put Papyrus up in a light and airy stall in the D-deck baggage compartment, where the pitch and roll of the ship were less likely to affect him. The deck itself was covered in cork, so the horse could walk and trot in safety and comfort. Huge amounts of hay and oats were brought aboard, and the US Department of Agriculture had to sign off on the horse food entering the country when it docked in New York. Papyrus’s stablemate Bar Gold came along for company, as did a friendly cat named Tinker. O’Donoghue skipped across the pond to ride his horse, of course, of course.
During the weeks-log buildup, the race caught the fancy of a rapidly expanding sports media. A dozen daily newspapers in New York vied for attention from readers, while the newfangled medium of radio was just expanding into sports, with baseball at the forefront. Graham MacNamee was earning plaudits for his call of the 1923 World Series even as the match race was being broadcast over radio, the first time a horse race was delivered over the airwaves. Only the fact that the Series pitted two NYC teams, the Yankees and Giants, prevented the horse race from seizing the moment away from America’s Pastime.
On a wet Saturday morning, October 20, 1923, a police escort accompanied Papyrus from the barn to the Belmont track. An enormous throng mobbed the paddock to get a close-up look at the two competitors. Zev, wearing blinders, was snorting, dancing, tugging on his bit, clearly agitated. Earle Sande, his jockey, easily identifiable in his white suit, could do little to calm him. By contrast, thought the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “Papyrus was steady as a rock before and during the race, thoroughly poised, calm, dignified. He evoked no end of admiring comments for his grace, suggestion of power, and general demeanor. Truly a noble animal.”
The two horses set out on a lap around the track at a walk. The Standard Union captured the scene. “Papyrus… walked calmly. In fact, if he was a street horse in front of a street cleaning department wagon, he could not have been more reserved…Zev was bowing and bowing and prancing like a circus horse. He seemed to realize that the crowd was cheering for him, for he must have bowed his head a thousand times in the parade.”
The 70,000 fans in attendance were rewarded with a break in the weather, as the steady rain relented and the clouds parted. The film crews from Pathe and local rights holders rejoiced at not having to constantly clear their camera lenses of water. In another breakthrough, aerial film of the race was being taken, and just before post time smoke machines released a large fog that hovered over the track, while a dozen strategically placed mirrors reflected the wan sunlight upward—all to prevent interlopers from filming the race by aircraft. Meanwhile, millions of fans tuned in at home on the radio, glad they didn’t have to brave the wet and the crowds to enjoy the excitement of the day.
All was primed for a contest between nations for the ages.
Unfortunately, the race itself was a letdown. The rain had turned the track to mush. Zev was outfitted with mud caulks, proper shoes for the slop, but Papyrus’s trainers declined them. The shoeing made all the difference. Papyrus slipped and slid around the muddy track while Zev handled it adroitly. He broke out to an early lead and kept it at five lengths for virtually the entire trip around the mile and a half.
“The English in the stands and field, and there were many of them, were stunned by the failure of Papyrus to win,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “They were confident that the great English Derby winner would triumph over the American entry. … The long trip across the Atlantic, the fond hopes based on the apparently poor condition of Zev, and the great record of Papyrus had all ended in disappointment.”
With the win Zev’s career earnings surpassed those of the great Man o’ War, over a quarter of a million dollars.
AFTERMATH
Zev had another match race the next month, taking on In Memorium at Churchill Downs. It was a far more exciting—and controversial—race. Zev was declared the winner by millimeters, but later examination of the films showed that In Memorium actually crossed the line first. Regardless, Zev was named Horse of the Year in 1923, and retired the following year as history’s greatest thoroughbred to that point, at least by career earnings.
Papyrus went on to live until 1941, spending most of those years at stud. His bloodlines produced some racing legends, including Secretariat and Sham.
WHAT THEY SAID
“I have no excuse to offer whatsoever; The best horse won under the conditions. I have nothing further to say.”
—Steve O’Donoghue
FURTHER READING:
The New York Times coverage of the race is here.
VIDEO: