Forty Years Being There

© January 13, 2008 by Norman Stolpe

Cheer for my hometown Oakland Seals or the local Minnesota North Stars? I had been to a couple Seals games with my Dad as a kid growing up in Oakland. They were one of the signs that Oakland was coming of age, no longer in the shadow of San Francisco. But I was on a double date with a Minnesota girl. Even if she wasn’t much of a sports fan, I didn’t want her to think I didn’t like her state. A college student on January 15, 1968 I had only been in Minnesota a year. My housemate and his date weren’t either Minnesotans or Californians. An NHL hockey game was just a good opportunity to be with the girls.

Casually following the action on the ice was all I needed to do play-by-play for my date. I wasn’t all that interested in impressing her with my hockey knowledge. It was just an excuse for the conversation I was eager to cultivate. I didn’t know the players, not even the Seals’ players. “Wow! See that hit! The guy carrying the puck went right over backwards. … His head sure made a loud crack. … Hey, he’s not getting up, not moving.”

Everything stopped. The stretcher came out. After a long time, they carried North Star Bill Masterton off the ice. A crew came out to clean up where he had been lying. Was it blood? From junior high gym class football on asphalt playgrounds, I knew the ring of a head crack on a solid surface. At thirteen none of us had either the speed or mass for the kind of crack we had just heard.

Leaving the game, we turned on the car radio and heard that Bill Masterton had died. And we were there; we saw and heard it happen.

Those NHL expansion teams have matured, moved on. No Seals in Oakland or North Stars in Minnesota. The North Stars became the Dallas Stars. On January 13, 2008, now a resident of Dallas, Texas, I opened the Dallas Morning News sports section to a front page, color picture commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Bill Masterton’s death. His retired number 19 hangs in the American Airlines Center where the Dallas Stars play.

I read the key paragraph to my wife. “We were there with Ted and Ellie.” She laughed. “His name was Tim. You lived in the same house with him your senior year of college. I think you’re losing it.”

Two more weeks until our 39th wedding anniversary. I may well be losing it, but we’ve been there to see and hear it happen.