February 1997
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.
THIS IS WHAT THE MEMBERS OF THE Austin Ice Bats see as they skate out for practice: a Fitting Stool shoe store, a Hallmark Crown card shop, and a guy pushing a mop in a Furr’s cafeteria. It’s eight in the morning on the Friday before Thanksgiving, and the Bats are on the rink at Northcross Mall, which is empty save for a few seventy-something couples on their morning stroll.
Northcross is the team’s official second home. And why does Austin’s only professional sports franchise need another home? Because its primary residence, the Travis County Exposition Center, was built to showcase livestock and farming equipment, not Canadians and Zambonis, and at the moment, the Expo Center is hosting a tractor pull. It’s probably just as well, since what they call ice at the Expo Center is actually, at least in November, more like a soup of slush, fog, and dirt. Welcome to hockey in Texas.
There are 103 professional hockey teams in the United States, and 10 of them are in Texas—the most of any state in the Union. Dallas, of course, has a franchise in the topflight Na-tional Hockey League, having swiped the North-stars from Minneapolis in 1993. The American Hockey League serves as the NHL’s farm sys-tem; just below that is the International Hockey League, which has clubs in Houston and San Antonio. Below the AHL and the IHL are five roughly equivalent minor leagues; one of them, the Central Hockey League, has franchises in San Antonio and Fort Worth. But the main reason Tex-as has become a hockey mecca is the brand-new, six-team Western Pro-fessional Hockey League, which has franchises in Ama-rillo, Austin, El Paso, Waco, and Belton. (Albuquer-que rounds out the list.)
The emergence of hockey in Texas is actually part of a trend that started with the NHL, which spent the early nineties renewing its marketing efforts. In 1994 it inked its first network television contract in years—with Fox—and it has expanded southward to cities like Tampa Bay, Miami, and Phoenix. At the same time, minor league teams in locales like Memphis and Oklahoma City were drawing impressive crowds. Enter the WPHL, which began play last year and was founded by an investment group that included businessmen from the Southwest, Canadian entrepreneurs, and NHL players. The Ice Bats ownership is headed up by physician Daniel Hart, who went to the University of Texas at Austin before ending up in Cincinnati, where he fell in love with that city’s IHL club, the Cyclones. He is joined by Ed Novess, a master brewer for Miller Brewing Company in Cincinnati who once lived in Fort Worth; Paul Lawless, a seven-year veteran of the NHL and onetime standout for the Cyclones who also plays for the Bats; and coach and general manager Blaine Stoughton, a former Cyclones assistant who starred for the NHL’s Hartford Whalers.
The Austin franchise was originally going to be known as the Outlaws, but the more inventive name Ice Bats prevailed, inspired by the colony of winged mammals that live under the city’s Congress Avenue bridge. The borderline silly name is firmly in a tradition that includes the Louisiana Ice Gators, the Kentucky Thoroughblades, and the Macon Whoopee. The other clubs in the WPHL are more prosaically monikered, though the Waco Wizards have problems with the local Baptist community (i.e., Waco), which thinks the name has satanic connotations.
The WPHL has gone out of its way to explain this strange new game to Texas. Each team has flyers explaining everything from ice making to icing, the sport’s most frequently invoked rule. In Belton the Central Texas Stampede put a page in their program with rather superflu-ous translations of hockey lingo into basketball terms: a face-off is a jump ball, the rink is the court, and so on.
After a little more than three months of action, the WPHL’s draw has been pretty good, ranging from about six thousand fans a game in the larger cities like Austin and Albuquerque—as many as nine thousand have come out in New Mexico—to more than four thousand in El Paso, Amarillo, and Belton (those Pagans, er, Wizards up in Waco aren’t doing as well). The league honchos are so pleased with those numbers that they’re already moving forward; next season there will be teams in Odessa-Midland, San Angelo, and Louisiana cities Lake Charles and Shreveport. The more distant future may include locales in Arizona and Colorado. The expansion will cleave the WPHL into two divisions and make it more entertaining for fans and players alike: Currently, the league schedule is a rather redundant gauntlet, with each club playing the five others twelve times, and then four of the six going on to playoff action.
While the great number of northern and Midwestern transplants in Texas probably has something to do with the league’s early success, it really isn’t so unlikely that Texas, ever the football state, would be the perfect place for hockey. It’s a rough-and-tumble sport played by well-mannered hotheads, blue-collar workers, and prodigious snuff dippers. Really, the only difference between a small town in Alberta and a small town in Texas is the frozen pond in the back. Hockey is a fairly simple action-packed game that offers a little of everything to fans of more familiar sports. Enjoy the way football combines speed, grace, and violence? Try it on ice skates, with the occasional brawl added in. Prefer the subtle pleasures of baseball? Well, the mano a mano duel between pitcher and hitter is approximated when the goalie faces down a winger on a breakaway. Hockey also has the constant motion of basketball, but without that damnable habit of constant scoring. If anything, the game is most like soccer, except you don’t use your head. That’s what your teeth are for.
THE EXPO CENTER’S BIG TRACTOR pull isn’t merely turning the team into the Mall Bats; it’s also putting them on the WPHL’s longest possible road trip—a straight shot to Albuquerque, then back through Amarillo and El Paso. The Bats are shuttled around in a Gray Line bus that’s custom painted with the team’s logo and equipped with a TV and a VCR. Bobby Wallwork, the team’s 28-year-old player—assistant coach, has his own strategy for long trips: Don’t sleep the night before. Clearly he leads by example. Over the course of the day the team turns the bus into an obstacle course as guys sprawl across the aisles, lie on the floor, and stretch out over chairs. The last row of the bus is occupied by Kyle Haviland and Ryan Anderson, two of the team’s biggest brutes, who are reclining together on the couchlike bench, shirts off, snuggling underneath a shared blanket.
Wallwork (or Wally, as he is known) chooses the day’s video selections, which include Slap Shot, the comically violent Paul Newman vehicle that is to minor league hockey what This Is Spinal Tap is to heavy metal—satirically ridiculous but frighteningly familiar. All of the Bats have seen Slap Shot a million times, and the bus fills with the sounds of guys shouting out their favorite lines.
Other players occupy themselves with newspapers or magazines. Jeff Gabriel, the only Bat who sports hockey’s classic one-tooth-missing look, does the crossword puzzle every day. “It keeps me sharp,” he says, prompting his five-foot-six, 150-pound teammate Jon Poirier to inquire if Gabriel is smarter than his wife. “No one’s smarter than his wife,” Gabriel replies, showing himself to be a very wise man indeed. Poirier is a bit highbrow too: He majored in art in college and only plans to play hockey until he can begin a formal apprenticeship with a master glassblower in Sweden.
Wallwork was the first player to join the Ice Bats; he’s a top scorer and quickly became a fan favorite. He also helped recruit the rest of the team. Wallwork played in Cincinnati for Coach Stoughton, and he brought along three friends from his previous team in Muskegon, Michigan, including scrappy defenseman Haviland (“Havs”). The rest of the team came from all over—Memphis, Jacksonville, Rhode Island, Alberta.
Stephan Desjardins, the team’s most recent acquisition and its first French Canadian, doesn’t really know his new teammates yet, but he’s happy to be here because he thinks the Bats will take the WPHL crown. He passes much of the bus ride writing a song to his girlfriend of nine years, who is in Montreal. His lyrical efforts proclaim the expected yearning, devotion, and lust but also rhapsodize about his new hockey team and its shot at the championship.
Slap Shot aside, the cinematic hit of the bus ride turns out to be Happy Gilmore, the story of a hockey player who finds success as a professional golfer. “Happy, all you ever talk about is being a pro hockey player,” Happy’s girlfriend gripes at the beginning of the film. “Sounds like my wife,” an unidentified Bat shouts back. The golf-hockey connection is rather apt as it turns out; one reason many of the Bats moved to Austin was the chance to hit the links year-round. This was particularly important to veteran defenseman Jim Burton, who has completed the playing portion of his Professional Golfers Association card and will soon hang up his skates to join the tour.
Even if he never leaves the nether regions of pro golf, Burton will probably earn more money in the PGA; with a few exceptions, the Bats make $300 to $600 a week, depending on their experience, and their contracts aren’t guaranteed. But the cost of living is reduced considerably because the team takes care of rent—all the players live in the same plush Northwest Austin apartment complex. Their income is also augmented by money from personal appearances, but in the off-season, most of them have to work for a living: Bats have been employed as roofers, bartenders, construction workers, and movers.
