Rangers vs. Islanders: The Roots of This Rivalry Are Long and Tough

It begins in the Midtown Tunnel when the cars heading against traffic into Manhattan sound their allegiance on their horns. Five beats, staccato: Let’s go, Eye-Lan-Ders!

It begins on the Long Island Rail Road, the larger crowd boarding the train on the Madison Square Garden side of Jamaica. Four beats, sing-song: Let’s Go Ran-Gers!

For the players it has been special at least since they dressed and put their heads out the door for pregame warmups and the Rangers saw the Islanders, and the Islanders saw the Rangers.

“You might kid with players on the other teams before game time, but not with the Islanders,” mused Don Maloney from the unfamiliar perspective of the Islanders’ pregame skate. That after 10-plus seasons of something approaching hatred.

There are few rivalries in existence that have the roots of the Islanders and the Rangers.

“I loved playing the Islanders; I despised losing to them,” Maloney said. “From the Ranger point of view, they were the new kid coming to school and picking up your best girlfriend.”

Of course there was some jealousy, the way the rivalry built up. In the earliest years the Islanders didn’t understand why there were so many fans who rooted against them in their own building, but that was the quirk of history.

“Two different generations,” Bryan Trottier said. “Lots of those people were Ranger fans before there was an Islander team.” The collective mentality is often revealed in Islanders sweaters with Rangers emblems on the underwear.

Hockey is a strange game in lower North America; there might be only 35,000 fans in the whole area but there are 16,500 fans in the Garden or the Coliseum when the Rangers and Islanders meet. Always.

The current series is the most deeply felt between the two clans since the first round of the playoffs in 1984. Islanders who were there recall that series as the most intense, the best hockey of any series in their five trips to the Stanley Cup finals.

Neither team has had a chance to win much of anything since then. But this time the Rangers have won a regular-season title for the first time since 1942, and the Islanders are on a comeback, having squeaked into the playoffs by winning their last two games -- and getting some help.

The fans hide little in either building. In suburbia, they are more laid-back, content to let the event come to them. Rangers fans are more creative.

There was the fish Rangers fans always threw onto the Garden ice at the appearance of the detested Denis Potvin. And the squid. “And the chicken,” Trottier recalled. “Or maybe it was a duck.”

A Long Island duck or a chicken, the implication was clear enough.

And the dove. “Last year I went with a priest to the Bronx, to Arthur Avenue, and I met the guy who brought the doves,” Maloney said. “He brought them in a bag and let them go in the blue seats.”

Ah, the blue seats, that vile snakepit -- or rather the people in the blue seats. They are vocal. When he was hurt, Maloney often would go to the Rangers’ broadcast booth just below the blues. “I’d go there and people would say, ‘Hi, Don,”’ Maloney said. “If we were behind, before the third period they’d be yelling, ‘Hey, you bum, why aren’t you out there!’ ”

On occasion players’ attention is diverted from the action on the ice to the action in the stands, neighbor against neighbor. “You don’t want to make it overt that you’re watching,” Maloney said, “but I’ve seen some beauties there.”

Between the teams and the fans there was and still is jealousy. The Islanders had their building tradition, winning four successive Stanley Cups; the Rangers had their building. “Madison Square Garden,” Maloney said with some unintentional drama, “center of the greatest city on earth.”

“There is that aura there,” Trottier said.

And 50 years, now, of frustration. There is this genetic heritage of having the new kids in town win and win, and the Rangers having gone all these years. It casts its pall over the Red Sox and the Cubs and the Rangers, too. “There is that sense of it you have,” Maloney said.

He was traded from the Rangers to Hartford last season and felt crushed by the event, had his enthusiasm for the game blunted and almost broken until he caught on with the Islanders as a free agent in September. “The only way I got over it was coming to the Islanders,” he said.

“The Islanders hated Carol Vadnais,” said Maloney. “He used the stick a lot. Everybody, you’d give an extra elbow in the corner.”

And that series of 1984. They call it that series. “I never thought we were equal to them until that series,” Maloney said. “We had good coaching (in Herb Brooks) and they were on the downswing.”

It was the first round but the intensity was such that Maloney and some of the Islanders who were there think it contributed to their loss to Edmonton in the finals. The Islanders won the series, three games to two, on Ken Morrow’s goal in overtime.

“I didn’t see it,” Maloney said. “I must have been tying my skate. I heard the roar of the crowd. I thought we were going to win it. We wore them down.”

Now positions are reversed. The Rangers can win something.