Trophy Date

Babies have been christened in this silver chalice that grown men with sticks fight to possess.

Traditional ethnic meals have been served from it.

Animals--real ones, not just NHL team enforcers--have eaten from it.

It has been stolen by disgruntled Montreal fans, and bounced off the edge of a swimming pool. It has been to a mountaintop and it has traveled to Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Australia and Japan. It drew larger crowds than Lenin’s tomb during a visit to Red Square.

It has gone fishing, and has been to a strip club--at least once.

The Stanley Cup, hockey’s equivalent of the Holy Grail, has traveled and been used for more things than its donor, Lord Frederick Arthur Stanley of Preston, England, the governor-general of Canada from 1888 to 1893, ever dreamed of.

The nine-time champion Detroit Red Wings and the upstart Carolina Hurricanes begin the Stanley Cup finals tonight in their crusade to take home what is perhaps the most hallowed trophy in sports, and certainly the most colorful.

At 110 years, the Stanley Cup is the oldest professional sports award, but that cache is secondary to the symbolism embodied in the silver bowl that stands on a nearly three-foot base that was added in the 1940s.

It’s the only professional sports trophy awarded to those who actually do the work.

The winners of the Super Bowl and World Series may have rings to flash. But the team owner is handed the championship trophy in each of those sports, with new trophies doled out each year.

In hockey, the players who earn the Stanley Cup get the Stanley Cup. The trophy is returned to NHL officials each October and is presented to the new champion. After victory, etiquette calls for the cup to be handed first to the winning team’s captain, who traditionally circles the ice with the cup hoisted high for fans to see.

Later, the trophy will be etched with the names of every winning player. What follows is a tradition that sets the Stanley Cup apart from all other honors in professional sports:

Each player from the winning team gets to spend a day with the Stanley Cup and do with it what he pleases, “within reason.”

Sometimes, “within reason” gets tested.

When Lord Stanley ordered the silver hockey trophy crafted in 1892, he could never have imagined the journeys it would take, or the antics it would endure.

This cup runneth over with tales of, well ...

Cup of Nourishment

“When you talk to guys about what they want to do with the cup, it all relates back to how they got to where they are today,” said Phil Pritchard, director of hockey operations and curator at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, which assigns one of its members to accompany the cup at all times. “Whether it was a defining moment in their youth or something that is important in their life. It’s usually something personal.”

Brent Severyn of the Dallas Stars planned for years what he would do. When the Stars won in 1998-99, Severyn took the cup to Vegreville, Alberta, a town of 5,000 founded by Ukrainian immigrants. There, his grandmother made pirogi, mashed-potato-filled turnovers that were served from the cup.

“Whenever my parents came to visit me ... they always brought me pirogies,” Severyn said. “They knew it was my favorite food. I thought it was fitting to have them from the cup.”

Of course, some meals have not been deemed fitting for the king of cups. The New York Islanders’ Charlie Gillies caused a furor in the 1980s when he allowed his dog to eat out of it. Times do change, though. In 1994, no one seemed to mind when the New York Rangers’ Eddie Olczyk let a racehorse eat out of it.

But mostly, players use the cup to celebrate with those who supported them along the way to victory, or take it to a cherished spot.

When New Jersey goalie Martin Brodeur had his turn in 2000, the goalie took the cup home to Montreal, blocked off neighborhood streets and held a hockey tournament. The winners held the cup for an hour. That evening, Brodeur took his children, and the cup, to the movies, where they all ate popcorn from its bowl.

His teammate, Scott Niedermayer, haggled with the NHL to take the cup to the top of British Columbia’s Fischer Peak--9,300 feet above sea level. The league relented, and Niedermayer took a helicopter to the top and spent half an hour there, posing for photos with the cup.

“From Cranbrook, where I live, it’s the landmark you can see from town,” Niedermayer later explained.

Cup of Mischief

Lord Stanley paid 10 guineas--$48.67 in Canadian dollars at the time--to have the 16-kilogram trophy made by silversmiths in England, either Sheffield or London; where, exactly, isn’t clear. He wanted to help fuel the growing sport of hockey.

“I have, for some time, been thinking it would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup, which should be held, from year to year, by the champion hockey club of the Dominion,” Stanley wrote in letter to an aide in 1892.

Originally, the trophy was for amateur hockey teams, and each year the winning team could use it to challenge a competitor. As the sport grew and professional leagues sprouted, the amateurs were pushed out. The NHL took possession of the cup in 1926 and has controlled it ever since.

Players were officially allowed to have “A Day With the Cup” beginning in 1995.

But there were many unofficial “days” before that.

As early as 1924, Montreal Canadien players of questionable sobriety “borrowed” the cup, then left it on the side of the road when their car broke down on the way to a victory party.

In 1978, Montreal’s Guy Lafleur noticed the cup while leaving the old Montreal Forum one day, and took it home.

There are tales of a drunken celebration lasting through the night, ending with the cup being dropped into Ottawa’s Rideau Canal in the 1920s. In 1962, a Canadien fan, unhappy that his team was losing in the semifinals to the defending champion Chicago Blackhawks, stole the cup from its display case in Chicago Stadium, although he didn’t get out of the building with it. Montreal fans struck again in the 1970s, this time swiping the cup from the Hall of Fame.

New York center Mark Messier took the cup to a strip club after the Rangers won in 1994. Such things are now prohibited under the “within reason” clause.

“I think what makes it so special is the history of it,” Mighty Duck captain Paul Kariya said. “It’s obviously such a prized possession, but at the same time it’s treated like ... uh ... haphazardly.”

Dents are common and a new one appeared on the base in 1999. One version of the story has Dallas players celebrating with Pantera, the heavy metal band that wrote and performed the team’s theme song. They were taking turns throwing the cup into a pool, and one player missed. Ding!

Another version has a Star jumping from a rooftop into the pool while the band played. The player made a big splash. The cup made a sickening sound. Clang!

Only the Stars know for sure and they’re not talking.

That, though, is the beauty of the Stanley Cup. The stories, real or exaggerated, make the legend grow.

Cup of Destiny

Many players who crave the cup refuse to touch it, since legend has it that if you touch the cup before you earn it, you’ll never touch it in victory.

In 1995, when New Jersey won the cup, the Devils’ Shawn Chambers wanted to share his day with Dallas’ Derian Hatcher. They had grown up together in Sterling Heights, Mich., playing hockey.

Hatcher refused.

“I told him I would have my day,” Hatcher said. “You only drink from the cup when you have earned the right.”

The Stanley Cup is commonly called “the People’s Cup,” because on any given day, anyone can find himself within arm’s reach of it. While other professional sports trophies sit in protective trophy cases, the Stanley Cup travels more than 300 days a year, from hockey exhibitions to minor league charity games. Fans wait in line for hours to catch a glimpse, pose for photos with it, run their fingers over it.

Nothing better illustrates the reverence with which hockey’s greatest prize is held than that it can drive a man from drink.

Tom Watt and Doug Risebrough were assistant coaches with Calgary during the 1988-89 season. They logged miles, running together mornings. They gave up alcohol for Lent together.

“Lent was over the last weekend of the season,” said Watt, now an assistant with the Mighty Ducks. “I said to Riser, ‘So, are you going to have beer after the game?’ He said, ‘No I’m not ... the next drink I take is going to be out the Stanley Cup.’”

Two months later, on a charter flight from Montreal, amid a delirious celebration by players, coaches, their families and friends, Risebrough drank the fruits--specifically fermented grapes--of victory.

Winning the cup takes blood, sweat and tears.

A team must endure an exhausting 82-game regular season, then survive four rounds in the playoffs. The team keeps the cup until the beginning of the next season, then returns it to the Hall of Fame. A smaller copy is given to the team.

The original bowl, worn and brittle, was replicated in the 1960s and now rests in peace in a vault. Every 13 years, the oldest remaining ring is removed from the base and a blank one put in its place to keep the cup from growing to an unmanageable height. The rings--upon which the players’ names are engraved--then remain on display at the Hall of Fame.

“That started on the 100th anniversary of the cup,” said Pritchard. “[Former New York Islander] Bryan Trottier once said the cup was 36 inches tall and that’s the perfect height to hold over your head, so don’t mess with it.”

Unless, of course, officials have to mess with it to correct a mistake.

King forward Adam Deadmarsh was surprised to find he had been renamed when he first saw the cup after helping the Colorado Avalanche win in 1995-96. He appeared as “Deadmarch” and became the first player in cup history to have his name corrected. All previous mistakes had been crossed out and rewritten. Still, it didn’t mar his day with the trophy, spent in his hometown of Fruitvale, British Columbia, just north of the Washington border near Spokane.

“I had it at the local arena for three or four hours so everyone could get their picture taken with it,” Deadmarsh said. “After that, we had a big dinner and then I took it to a bar.”

The Stanley Cup is the only sports trophy that can boast of not one but two television commercials to its credit, and is the only sports trophy to have such a leading role.

Federal Express used it tongue in cheek as an example of what could happen if you trusted another shipping company. The cup ended up in South America. A bag of coffee beans arrived at the arena.

The cup has also been in a MasterCard commercial. Pritchard is the co-star as they trace a day with the cup. The cup is insured for $1.6 million, but Pritchard said that’s as high as any insurance company would go. After all, he said he agrees with the commercial voice-over--the cup is “priceless.”

Although the cup is one of the most recognized symbols in sports, its not known to everyone.

“We took it Reno one time and this lady comes up to me and asked where the cups were,” Pritchard said. “I said, ‘Excuse me, I don’t understand.’ She said, ‘Isn’t that a coffee urn?’ So I guess it’s not known by everybody.”

But the cup is known by enough.

Detroit’s Joey Kocur took the cup home to Kelvington, Saskatchewan, a town of 900, in 1998. A crowd of 30,000 was waiting.

On his day with the cup, Colorado’s Rob Blake took it to Simcoe, Ontario, 90 miles southwest of Toronto. He had a little get-together with 1,500 of his closest friends. The next day, they held a parade and 15,000 showed up.

The cup’s most historical moment might have occurred in 1997, which underscored its worldwide popularity. Detroit’s Viacheslav Fetisov, Vyacheslav Kozlov and Igor Larionov took the cup to Russia for the first time.

“We had millions of fans who rooted for [the Red Wings] all the way,” Larionov told a crowd of 62,000, which included Boris Yeltsin, at a Moscow soccer stadium. “It would be unfair not to bring this cup and show it to them.”

In a country where hockey is politics, hoisting the cup in Red Square, brought home by Russian players, was a moment of national pride.

“It was a state event,” Pritchard said. “About 20,000-30,000 people a day came to see the cup. It was amazing.”

But then so is the cup.

“There are times where I’ll be coaching a team that is going through tough times,” Watt said. “But every now and then it’ll come back to me, ‘Yeah, I won the Stanley Cup.’ It hits you and you smile.”