Local Hockey Team With Best Record? The ‘I’ Has It

It is the other league. They are the other team. He is the other player.

Darryl Williams rubs his left ear, which moments ago was relieved of a winding track of stitches, and tells a story about his mom.

“The other day she sent me something I wrote in first grade,” he says. “The whole essay is about how I wanted to be a National Hockey League player.”

He looks around the cramped equipment room, glances outside to where he just helped his team win a hockey game before 6,231 fans, some of whom spent the entire night with balloon animals on their heads.

Small race cars tooled around the ice between periods. Cheerleaders stayed warm despite tiny red shorts. A giant dog skated.

The NHL? This is not it. The first-grader was not prescient.

But Darryl Williams, for the moment, does not care.

He smiles again as if to remind you, some of the happiest endings are the ones that catch you by surprise.

“I am who I am,” he says.

Just like his team, the Long Beach Ice Dogs of the International Hockey League, unknown but unembarrassed.

They are who they are. In a hockey environment dominated by Kings and Disney royalty, they are background noise.

Yet they have the best record of any winter sports team in this town, having won 70% of their games in a regular season that ended Saturday.

They have the best home record of any winter sports team, having won 30 of their last 31 games at Long Beach Arena.

And they have the best chance to do something unique by bringing the Turner Cup--emblematic of the blue-collar IHL championship--to the West Coast for the first time in its 51-year history.

Flint, Saginaw, Muskegon, Peoria, Fort Wayne . . . and now Long Beach?

Their march through potentially four playoff series begins Friday at home at 7 p.m. against, well, somebody. Could be the Chicago Wolves. Could be the Milwaukee Admirals.

The thing about the Ice Dogs--and take this from somebody who attended his first game only after being goaded--is that it doesn’t matter.

You come to watch, up close, for an average of $10 a ticket, hockey that is only half a step below the NHL.

You hear the players shout, the goal pipes clang. You don’t need binoculars to see guys play an entire period with cotton stuffed up their red-caked noses.

You bring the kids for everything else, including air hockey in the lobby and a bulldog mascot that will make them howl.

This is not “Slapshot.” The average salary is $60,000-$70,000. The rosters are filled with mostly former NHL players caught between hockey’s present and their past.

Many are purchased by the NHL to fill temporary needs. Many would remain there, except for their size.

This is not the same Ice Dog team that wallowed in the L.A. Sports Arena last year. This team has a new local owner--Hollywood guy Barry Kemp--and the Long Beach community has increasingly embraced it with a late-season increase to about 3,000 fans a game.

And this team has winger Darryl Williams.

No. 17. Little guy. Well, OK, they are mostly little guys. He’s the little guy with an attitude.

Williams mutters at opponents during faceoffs, hacks them in the corners, is second on the team in penalty minutes, 13th in points, has played all of the team’s first 80 games.

Beginning when he was 17, he has spent 12 years banging around places like Hamilton, Canada, and New Haven, Conn. Only twice in that period has he actually played in an NHL game.

The first time, with the Kings four seasons ago, this happened:

“I was sitting down after warmups and I noticed that my skate blade had cracked. By the time I got it fixed and got to the ice, I had missed the national anthem. Both of them. In my NHL debut.”

Then this happened:

“I had a breakaway and I took a shot and I thought it went between the goalie’s legs and I raised my hands . . . and then I saw the puck in the corner. It had gone around the goalie.”

In his other NHL game, also with the Kings, Williams played one 10-second shift, leaving after a fight had delayed the game long enough for others to get their rest.

“There comes a time in your life when you realize your ultimate goal might not be attainable,” he says. “So you adjust. You do the best you can.”

The other night he won an ultimate award. This area’s most unsung team voted him its most unsung hero. He was genuinely pleased at the announcement, taking off his helmet, waving to standing, cheering fans.

If he closed his eyes, he could have been anywhere. Looked as if he never even thought of it.