Then Wayne Said to Mario

The National Hockey League employs people to travel with the Stanley Cup. This is in part because the Stanley Cup does a lot of traveling. Each member of the team that wins it gets to take it home, even if that member lives in the Czech Republic. Or Miami. Or New Jersey.

But the Cup also needs a custodian because despite their alleged reverence for it, players have been known to toss hockey’s symbol of excellence into swimming pools and roadside ditches. They’ve been known to fill it with chicken wings and cereal. They’ve been known to feed horses from it, and to set it up on stage during rock and roll shows.

These stories are all in Then Wayne Said to Mario, and there are other stories as well, such as the one about how Toronto Maple Leaves Coach Punch Imlach motivated his 1967 team to win the Cup by bringing a lot of cash into the locker room and piling it on a table and reminding everybody that that was why they were playing…which sort of undermines all the business about the Cup, eh?