For Hockey Fans, It’s an Art to ‘Let the Octopi Fly’

It will happen. Count on it.

Today, somewhere in Southern California, a fan in a Detroit Red Wings hockey jersey -- probably a man, likely with a mullet haircut -- will walk into a fish market and order an octopus.

“How big?” the clerk will ask.

“How big you got?” will be the answer.

The octopus will get stuffed into a plastic bag and smuggled into Anaheim’s Arrowhead Pond. At a moment timed for the highest impact -- the opening face-off, or after the first Wings’ goal -- the octopus will land with a revolting splat on the ice in front of 17,000 screaming hockey fans. This is tradition. It cannot be denied.

For the third time in their 10-year franchise history, the Mighty Ducks are in the National Hockey League playoffs against the Detroit Red Wings. The defending Stanley Cup champions beat the Ducks in four consecutive games in 1997 and again in 1999. Hockey doesn’t have the same historical heft with Southern Californians as baseball, so the local excitement surrounding the Ducks’ playoff run isn’t quite at the level of the Anaheim Angels’ campaign to win the World Series six months ago.

But hockey fans are paying attention. Their reward: watching “the octopi fly,” a bizarre 50-year Detroit tradition that has evolved from gross local custom to a symbol of the depths of fan loyalty and creativity.

“I guess it is in some ways an art form,” said Tim Ryan, general manager of the Arrowhead Pond, who has developed a grudging respect for both the tradition and the fans’ dedication. “It’s a kind of cat-and-mouse game to try and figure out how they do it.”

There are different strategies. Some tuck small, bagged octopuses in pockets or sleeves. Larger ones can be dangled inside the leg of a baggy pair of pants. Where there is a will, there is a way. The same goes for security guards: Ryan estimated that 20 octopuses are confiscated at the gate for every one that Detroit fans manage to smuggle in. During the two home games in the 1999 series, about 30 octopuses were stopped at the door, though Ryan didn’t remember how many others ultimately thwacked on the ice.

“We have been extremely successful in our pursuit of the octopi,” Ryan said. “On the other hand, some folks have obviously been successful at sneaking them in.”

The tradition began innocuously enough. In 1952, when the NHL consisted of six teams, it took eight playoff wins -- two best-of-seven series -- to win the Stanley Cup, hockey’s championship trophy.

Wings fans and brothers Peter and Jerry Cusimano, heading off to watch a playoff game, made the symbolic connection with the eight legs on the octopuses they sold in their Detroit fish shop. So they boiled one up and headed down to the arena and, after a go-ahead goal by Hall of Famer Gordie Howe, tossed the creature on the ice. The Wings swept the Cup in eight games.

Since then, countless octopuses have hit the ice. Most often it happens in Detroit, but expatriate fans at road games have heaved their share too. The largest octopus to date was a 50-pounder tossed in the Detroit rink during the 1996 playoffs, according to an NHL list of league trivia.

What isn’t clear is when Detroit fans decided to write their own language rules. According to dictionary definitions, the preferred plural for octopus is octopuses, which inconveniently rhymes with “wusses” -- not the kind of word to toss at a hockey fan.

In Detroit, the plural of octopus is octopi, a fractured nod to Latin even though octopus stems from the Greek words for eight and foot, okto and podos.

To this day, nothing says hockey in Detroit like octopus. Fans welcome the playoffs with chants of “let the octopi fly,” and before games, a 25-foot-wide fake octopus descends from the ceiling of Joe Louis Arena, the Wings’ home ice. He even has a name -- Al, for the poor rink worker who slides out on the ice with a coal shovel to scoop up the gelatinous mess.

Kathy Koehler, a 40-year-old computer programmer from Ann Arbor, Mich., has let the octopi fly. Once. Two years ago.

“It was a big one. It cost me, like, 12 bucks,” Koehler said by telephone from downtown Detroit’s Anchor Bar a couple of hours before the series opener last week. “It stunk a lot. It was leaking, so I stuck it in a Ziploc.”

As Koehler neared the arena gate, she tucked the bag under her arm inside her jacket and moved through security.

“They don’t pat people down, and they have a magnetometer, but [the octopus] wouldn’t set it off,” Koehler said. “During the game, I kept it under my chair. I could smell it the whole game. As the buzzer went off, I threw it over the glass behind the goal.”

The crowd cheered.

At the Pond, a flying octopus gets a mixed reception -- a round of boos from Ducks fans and cheers from Wings fans. Yet even some Ducks fans don’t mind, seeing in the gesture a connection to the kind of tradition and fan loyalty that the Anaheim franchise is too young to establish.

“My first thought when I first saw it was, what a waste of good food,” said Kim Risberg, 46, of Anaheim. As vice president of the Mighty Ducks fan club, she has built up a fairly strong dislike for the Red Wings’ loud fans.

“Then I thought, these fans will do anything. They’re so bold they’ll sit through a game with this smelly thing in a bag. That’s pretty amazing.”