Game Over 
The Ice Bats Cometh
Minor league hockey in Texas? You bet your skates. Fans are packing rinks from Amarillo to Waco, and nowhere more than Austin, whose winged wingmen endure long road trips and low pay— all for the love of the game.
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At least they don’t have to pay for food when they’re on the road. Each player’s per diem totals $25 a day. A ten-spot is more than enough to cover dinner on this day, which they pick up at a KFC fried- chicken joint in Lubbock. Six hours later, the bus cruises into Albuquerque, passing a shopping mall with an Olive Garden. “Didn’t we eat there before?” someone wonders. “No,” Wally replies. “That was Amarillo. Here it was Pizza Hut.”
PRACTICE, EAT, NAP, GAME, DRINK.” That’s Bobby Wallwork’s description of game day. But what he omits is the time spent dressing and undressing. The locker room is a sea of plastic, foam, fiberglass, and tape, the players encased in bulky kidney protectors and giant shin guards that double the size of their calves. In this almost daily ritual, habits and superstitions rule: Bobby Wallwork and Andy Ross always put on their left pads first, and Kyle Haviland tries to be the last guy dressed.
Practice on game days is an abbreviated affair, with just enough skating to get the team loose. The afternoon is for lunching and napping, and then it’s time to think about New Mexico. The Scorpions are owned by active NHL players Joe Murphy and Bernie Nicholls plus John Wetteland, the hockey-crazed Texas Rangers reliever (and isn’t that fun to say?). What’s important to the Bats, though, is that the Scorpions are in first place and have already beaten them three times. Only one of those games was close. In the locker room, the Bats begin to psyche themselves up. They cheer (“C’mon boys, C’mon boys!”), state the obvious (avoid stupid penalties, play good defense), and talk strategy (exploit the goalie’s tendencies). Then they march out to yells of “big tilt,” a trail of rubber matting protecting their skate blades and leading to the rink like a red carpet.
The game of hockey is pretty straightforward. It’s played in three 20-minute periods, and each team puts six guys on the ice at a time: the goalie, two defensemen, and three forwards (the center and the right and left wings). The forwards advance the puck while the defensemen trail the play. Some defenders specialize in scoring; others remain close to the goal they’re trying to protect. A dominant performance in hockey is determined not just by how many goals a team scores but by how many chances the team has to score.
The players rotate on and off the ice in three sets, or lines. The top two lines are the scorers; the third is the checking line, dedicated to defense and harassment. The game’s signature element is penalties, most of which involve holding, interference, or overly zealous use of the stick or the body. When a penalty is called, the offending player goes to the penalty box, usually for two minutes (grievous offenses draw five), and the other team gets a power play, a chance to take advantage of its one-man edge. Failing to score on a power play is like striking out with men on second and third.
The most exciting thing about hockey is the perpetual motion. The game is all breathtaking buildup, a series of hits, passes, missed chances, and good defense that pile up until, boom—a great pass or a little mistake and watch it, don’t blink, goal! There is nothing like the anticipatory swell of a crowd when the home team is on the move, followed by a violently cathartic explosion of cheering if they score or a giant groan if they don’t.
On this night the crowd in New Mexico does little groaning. After the first period, it’s Scorpions 1, Ice Bats 0, a score that doesn’t begin to reflect how badly the Bats have been outplayed. Stoughton says as much back in the locker room. “The puck is bouncing off the stick,” he says, mocking one player’s excuse. “Don’t give me that shit. I played the game.” The guys take the talk to heart in the second period, but they don’t get any breaks, and the Scorpions’ unbeaten goalie Tony Martino is just too sharp. The Bats are down 4—0 after two periods.
To make matters worse, Kyle Haviland breaks his wrist during a body check. He retreats to the locker room, face aflame but eyes dry. Haviland, who’s 25, is the team captain and one of the Bats’ toughest characters on the ice. In the NHL, clubs have large enough rosters to have specialized goons, players whose only job is to fight. In the WPHL, where there are fewer men on a team, everyone can skate, and most everyone can throw down too. But Havs is good enough at fighting that he rarely has to. He’d had only one fight all season, partly because no one wants a piece of him and partly because the team needs him to stay out of the penalty box. “Fifty percent of the game is putting the puck in the net,” he says, “and fifty percent of the game is intimidation.”
The Bats do have a few players who seem to prefer the solitude of the “sin bin.” One, 33-year-old Scott Shaunessy, is also the team’s executive director. Shaunessy came out of injury-induced retirement early in the season because the Bats needed more bodies; after nine games he was the team’s most penalized player. Another is Ryan Anderson, a.k.a. “Kid,” a 21-year-old rookie from Manitoba with long blond hair and a pale baby face. Anderson’s youth and tenacity give him a chance to move up to a better league, but right now his job is, as he puts it, simply to “bang around.” In one game, he was ejected for fighting less than a minute after the opening face-off.
In New Mexico he lasts a little longer. The Scorpions’ number 17 has been playing nasty all night, so with the game out of reach and tempers heating up, Anderson attacks him. It’s only after the ejections are handed out that Anderson realizes he went after the wrong player—number 27, who has a similar haircut, and well, all Anderson really saw was that second number before he threw the first punch. But he enjoyed it anyway. As he’s escorted off the ice, Anderson is feted by the New Mexico fans, a particularly ornery bunch prone to passionate displays of jeering and profanity. He triumphantly raises his arms up in the air. The Bats may have lost the war tonight, but he knows he won his battle.
AFTER THE UNINSPIRED EVENING IN NEW MEXICO, the Bats win two out of three before returning to Austin. In a way, though, Austin isn’t where they want to be; heading into December, the team is 6—5 on the road and a disappointing 2—4 at the Expo Center. On the other hand, home is what the Ice Bats are all about. The players moved here for the golf, the weather, the bars, and the girls. The franchise itself has a relationship with the community that’s not about tax breaks or sky boxes, but rather, players delivering for Meals on Wheels, promoting the Great American Smokeout, and signing autographs for free.
The Bats know they aren’t merely playing a competitive sport; they’re also putting on an event. Games at the Expo Center have laser shows, a mascot named Fang, and Texas Lottery promotions. A four-wheel drive Hummer cruises the ice between periods, and kids selected from the seats perch on top of it, tossing Bats paraphernalia to the crowd. For December’s first home game, the Bats brain trust makes a clever sideshow out of the team’s home-ice struggles. They recruit a guy to dress up as “Koho,” a Native American healer, and announce before the game that his father blessed the 1980 American Olympic team before it defeated the heavily favored Soviet team. Koho takes to the ice outfitted in a ceremonial headdress and, of course, an Ice Bats jersey. He does a little dance to some disco, and then the game begins.
And what do you know, the Bats get a dominating win against El Paso! If there’s any juju on their side, though, it surely belongs to 31-year-old goalie John Blue, a California surfer and NHL alum. Blue is a big home-crowd favorite; like Bruce Springsteen and Cowboys fullback Daryl “Moose” Johnston, he has a cheering section that to the uninitiated could appear to be booing: “Bluuue! Bluuue!” the crowd cries whenever he makes a play. Tonight he can do no wrong, snatching one puck out of the air like an errant housefly, blindly smothering another under his side. And maybe there’s something to the shaman as well—the game kicks off a 6—2—1 home record for December.
The Austin crowd knows its hockey. Unsurprisingly, some of the most devoted season ticket holders are transplanted Yankees, like Bridget Novak and Mark Zaleski, Motorola employees from New York State whose tickets put them in perfect position to taunt the opposing goalie for two periods: “You’re a sieve, you’re a vacuum cleaner, you’re a black hole, you just suck!” Getting on the referee is also a hobby. “Hey Huber, shake your head, your eyes are stuck,” one fan yells when the ref misses a call. “The refs are just like us,” cracks Bobby Wallwork. “They’re in the minor leagues for a reason.”
But that reason isn’t simply because they’re not good enough to keep up with the big boys. It may be the ultimate bush-league cliché, but these guys play because they like to. If they couldn’t do it for the Ice Bats, they’d do it out on the pond or in a community league. Unlike minor league baseball, or even the AHL, quixotic ambitions are not part of the package. These are not prospects on their way up, nor are they old-timers desperate for one last taste of glory. They are hockey players—in Texas. Maybe someday, as the sport grows, the Bats will compete with the Cowboys, the Longhorns, and high school football for space on the front page of the local sports section. And maybe someday, as the WPHL expands to seven or eight Texas teams and if the NHL comes to Houston, one of those high school foot-ball players will put down the pigskin for a stick and a puck. He may not become the next Bobby Orr, but he could be the next Bobby Wallwork. Now if they could just figure out a way to keep the ice cold.
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