STANLEY CUP FINALS : Ranger Title Would Make One Mom Proud

Margaret Cater’s name won’t be engraved on the Stanley Cup if the New York Rangers win the NHL championship, but maybe it should be.

If not for Cater’s interest in hockey, her son, Neil Smith, wouldn’t have had anyone to shoot pucks at in their driveway as a child. And if not for that, Smith might not have grown up to become general manager of the Rangers, who can win their first Cup since 1940 with a victory over the Vancouver Canucks tonight at Madison Square Garden. The Rangers take a 3-1 lead into the game.

“She’s how I got involved in hockey,” Smith said. “She’s the reason I’m here today.”

Smith carries in his wallet a black-and-white picture of his mother taken in 1937, when she played for the Winnipeg Olympics of the Canadian Ladies Hockey League. Shades of “A League of Their Own,” except on skates.

“The joke about it is that the uniform was the same colors as Ranger colors--red, white and blue,” Cater said from her home near Toronto. “Isn’t that funny?”

Cater, in her mid-70s, played defense in the ladies’ league for three years, until World War II shut it down.

“I played hockey with the boys from the time I could remember,” she said. “I loved it. I still love to watch it. Although today, with hockey, if they don’t stop that hooking and holding and (neutral zone) trap it’s going to be boring and they’re going to lose fans. They’ve allowed hooking and holding and interference to go beyond a certain point.

“I don’t want to see bodychecking thrown out. But they have to remember sports are entertainment.”

Cater was a dancer when she met Smith’s father, a professional musician. He died when Neil was 10, and she enrolled her son in youth hockey programs to ensure that he had male companionship in a family that consisted of her, her mother and Neil’s older sister, Patricia.

“He started playing for Civitans (a local club) when he was 9, which was late really to start skating,” she said. “I had taken him out to teach him how to skate. That summer, his dad died, and I was left to take him where he wanted to go. I was always there and I kept going because if something happened to him, I didn’t want to find out from someone else.

“It was hard because it wasn’t like today, when there are so many single parents. I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Smith, 40, remembers his mother’s guidance fondly.

“She wasn’t a stage mom,” he said. “I remember that I wanted to play road hockey, and she’d tell me to put on my skates because that was going to do me more good. She’d say, ‘Don’t waste your time having fun. You should always do something that will improve yourself.’ ”

Smith improved enough to win a scholarship to Western Michigan. He had a tryout with the New York Islanders, but never made it to the NHL.

His hockey dreams didn’t end there. Smith took a job in New York with a company that sold purse mirrors and began to scout Ranger games voluntarily for the Islanders. Cater wasn’t sure where that would lead, but she supported him.

“One time, he phoned me and said, ‘Mom, I don’t think I’m staying here, I don’t care how much money I can make,’ ” said Cater, who remarried after Neil left home. “I told him, ‘Neil, if you leave New York, I don’t want to hear, “What if?” If you don’t make it, you can always come home.’ He always loved New York.

“A lot of the boys of his generation had no goals. My daughter had a goal, to become a schoolteacher, and that’s what she is. Neil had a goal, to be a general manager.”

Smith was hired by the Islanders as a full-time scout and left in 1982 to become assistant general manager of the Detroit Red Wings. He succeeded Phil Esposito in New York. Since then, through excellent drafts and trades, he has built the Rangers into a two-time winner of the President’s Trophy as the NHL’s top team and taken them within one more victory of the Cup.

Cater has been behind him all the way. Using the fax machine he bought her, she sends him clippings from Toronto newspapers and other hockey publications. She also keeps him posted on what’s being said on Toronto’s all-sports radio station and New York’s all-sports station, which she tunes in late at night when it can be picked up in Toronto.

She’s also not shy about giving her own opinion, sometimes calling him between periods of games.

Like any good son, Smith listens to Mom. “She knows as much or more than anybody here,” he said. “She goes all the way back to Babe Pratt (a star of the 1930s and ‘40s) and all those people.”

Cater was in New York for the Rangers’ semifinal series against the New Jersey Devils but went home when her husband, Jim, became ill. She’s not sure if she will be in New York tonight, but there’s no question which team she’s rooting for.

“I certainly hope the Rangers win, and not just because it’s my son. it’s because they have the better team,” she said. “And it would be kind of nice for me not to hear that 1940 business. I’m sure the fellows on the team can’t stand it, either.”

*

The Rangers, who returned from Vancouver Wednesday afternoon, were calmly preparing for tonight’s possible clincher. “We feel comfortable and confident at home,” center Mark Messier said. “We’re just going to continue to do what we’ve done all through the playoffs and not look further beyond the first 20 minutes (tonight). . . . Now is not the time to be looking too far ahead. We’re not going to fall into that trap.”

Two convincing Ranger victories at the Pacific Coliseum left the Canucks facing a deficit only the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs have overcome in the finals. The Canucks erased a 3-1 Calgary lead in the first round of the playoffs, an experience they say they can draw on now, yet they know a repeat would be difficult because the Rangers are gathering strength from game to game. A sixth game would be played Saturday in Vancouver and a seventh on Tuesday in New York.

“We’re not going in there to just hand them the Cup,” defenseman Dave Babych said. “We know we can play with those guys. Everybody is going to have to throw everything at them.”

Throwing in a few power-play goals would help. The Canucks are one for 27 in the series and aren’t getting off many shots against the Rangers’ aggressive penalty killers. Finding a way to stop Brian Leetch would help, too, though there might be no way to keep the Ranger defenseman from winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the playoffs.

“Things don’t look great right now,” Canuck center Trevor Linden said.

To the Rangers, things look promising enough to smile--but no more. “All through the playoffs we’ve been saying we haven’t won anything yet, and we really haven’t,” defenseman Jeff Beukeboom said. “Obviously, we’re happy with where we are, but we’re not getting ahead of ourselves.”

Neither team practiced Wednesday after arriving from Vancouver.

*

The NHL wants a separate parade in New York for the Rangers if both the Rangers and the NBA’s Knicks win championships.

However, because of the expense involved with cleanup and police protection, it’s likely they would share a celebration.