He’s Put a Lot of His Goals Behind Him

Some hockey goalies speak softly while carrying their big sticks, but the Detroit Red Wings’ goalie, Glen Hanlon, is a talker. Hanlon enjoys jabbering at his enemies as they skate past, and never more so than when the teen idol from Los Angeles, Jimmy Carson, is the one zeroing in on him.

Carson, who was raised in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, points out that whenever he shoots one wide of the net during a King visit to Joe Louis Arena, Hanlon inevitably yells through his mask: “That one’s on its way to Grosse Pointe Woods!”

Well, Hanlon and the Red Wings, riding a nine-game unbeaten streak, came to the Coast for a game last Saturday night. There were 16,005 fans in the Forum for the Wing-King wingding that night, and, although some of those people were there to see if Hollywood’s hockey team could slide another inch closer to a playoff spot, others were there to watch the Jimmy Carson Show.

Carson, 19, is one of the hottest shows on ice. With the regular season nearing an end, the Kings center can become the only teen-ager other than Wayne Gretzky to score 50 goals in one National Hockey League season, and the only American-born player other than Bobby Carpenter to score 50 goals in a season.

Furthermore, no American has ever racked up 50 goals and 50 assists in the same season. Carson has 48 goals and 47 assists, with 5 games to play.

Hanlon, as usual, was ready for him.

“Nine shots!” Carson said a couple of days later, over lunch in Marina del Rey. “I had nine decent shots at him, and I could only get one past.”

After one of those shots, Hanlon’s fright mask scowled back at him, and Carson heard the voice say: “No, you don’t. You’re not getting your 50th goal against me, boy.”

At least the Kings won the game, 7-4, with Carson also getting a couple of assists. It was, as they say, a spirited affair, one that Carson said he enjoyed as much as any game all season, notwithstanding the fact that the referee got so fed up, while breaking up a fight, he kicked both squads off the ice with 1 minute 40 seconds remaining in the first period, assessing nine penalties and tacking the time onto the beginning of the second.

The Kings are lucky to have Jimmy Carson on their side, because if the Red Wings had taken him instead of Michigan State’s Joe Murphy with the No. 1 pick of the 1986 NHL entry draft, Detroit might be looking at the prospect of an Edmonton-like dynasty now. The Kings picked next and got Carson, clearly getting the best of it.

Their draft choice would have been Jimmy Kyriazopoulos, if Carson’s grandfather hadn’t done something about that. After moving to Michigan from Greece as a young man, he changed the family name.

He also bought some land near the Olympia, once the palace of Detroit sports arenas. Kitty-corner from the stadium, Grandpa Kyriazopoulos opened the New Olympia Lounge, where Red Wing players often came to eat before a game, or to drink after one.

Carson says: “I still remember Gordie Howe telling me how he ate there before his first NHL game. It sure didn’t seem to hurt his career any.”

The family also turned the nearby property into a stadium parking facility, so the hockey connection existed in Jimmy’s life, right from the start. He was a “rink rat,” by his own description, who spent as much time as possible around the players. By age 4, he was skating, and wearing jerseys with Marcel Dionne’s No. 12. At Red Wing games, he sat on the lap of Dionne’s wife, Carol.

One of his favorite times of year was playoff time, back before the Wings became so bad that they began missing the playoffs. During playoff time, a Detroit tradition, started nobody knows where, called for live octopuses to be thrown toward the ice by spectators, the instant a Wing scored a goal.

“This one poor old lady got hit with an octopus--splat, right in the eye,” Carson recalls. “I think she got knocked cold for a few minutes, just from the surprise.”

Evidently there was at least one old Detroiter in the audience last Saturday, because even though the playoffs haven’t started yet, an octopus came sailing out of the crowd after one Red Wing goal. Carson loved it. He tried to explain it to any teammates who didn’t understand.

During his first two years with the Kings, Carson’s teammates have tried to explain to him why the franchise fails to move up in the standings. They tell him about the draft choices the team has squandered, about the men who would have been Kings if the draft pick hadn’t been traded away, men such as Ray Bourque, the Boston defenseman, or Tom Barrasso, the Buffalo goalie.

“What do you think we need to do to make this more of a hockey town?” Carson asks at lunch.

“Win,” he is told.

“I think you’re right,” he says. “The franchise has been on a treadmill. If they’d hung onto some of those draft picks, this might be a real strong team right now. But I think they understand that, finally. I think we’re on the right track.”

Carson is encouraged. The Kings have a new owner, Bruce McNall. A new coach, Robbie Ftorek. They even are about to get a new look, ridding themselves of their purple and gold, and even that crown on their jerseys. The Kings don’t want to be thought of as the Lakers’ junior partners. They want their own identity. So, next season, their jerseys will be black.

“Somebody finally asked the players what they wanted,” Carson says. “The players have never liked the way we look now.”

Things are looking better. Crowds seem to be getting larger, and maybe Jack Nicholson isn’t at rinkside, but such Hollywood Canadians as John Candy, Michael J. Fox and Alan Thicke sometimes are. The Kings are attracting more stars all the time, on and off the ice, and if they could, say, upset the Calgary Flames in the first round of the playoffs, you never know what response they might get.

Carson has two games with Calgary and a season-closer with Edmonton coming up, although he could reach his 50-50 totals either tonight at home against the New York Islanders, or Saturday with the Chicago Blackhawks in town. The 50 goals mean more to him than the assists, considering the company, Gretzky, in which they would put him.

There’s still room for improvement. Ftorek took away some playing time recently to motivate Carson to work harder on defense, and the Canada Cup coach cut him from the squad last summer, for reasons Carson still can’t fathom.

Still, life isn’t bad at all at 19. Carson just bought a house in Redondo Beach, having been living with an uncle in South Pasadena. A year ago, he was living next door to his old friends, the Dionnes, who cooked dinner for Jimmy and Luc Robitaille and gave them rides to the game. “Their kids called us Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Luc,” he says.

Now, kids come up to him for autographs and call him Mr. Carson.

“I just laugh and say, ‘Don’t call me Mr. Carson. I’m only 19.’ But, I’m happy to sign all day if they want. I remember what it was like when it was me going up to the players for an autograph. It wasn’t all that long ago.”

Besides, autographs aren’t nearly as much trouble as they might have been.

He could have been signing them, Jimmy Kyriazopoulos.