It would seem that being a New York Ranger in the Big Apple would bring enough notoriety, not to mention the commensurate pressure to perform when the puck drops at Madison Square Garden. It’s all true, until you get to a Stanley Cup Final.
Then, as Adam Graves found out in 1994 — the last time the Rangers played for the championship — you really experience what it’s like to be a New York Ranger.
"Because we were in May and beginning of June," recalls Graves, a winger on that 1994 team that brought New York its first Rangers Stanley Cup in 54 years, "it’s early in the baseball season. The training camps are just coming into play in the NFL, the NBA is coming to a close…
"Now, all eyes in the whole city are on the Rangers. That’s why the excitement level gets so high. You’re not sharing the spotlight with all these other sports. Although they’re going on, you become the focus."
That year, the Knicks were in the NBA Finals against Houston Rockets, which made for some pretty cool energy around the Garden every night. Generally speaking, though, New York City is the Yankees’ town.
The Giants and Jets likely rank next, ahead of the Knicks and Rangers. But when you prove yourself worthy of competing for a big silver trophy, as this season’s edition of the Rangers has, the reward is you get treated like the Yankees for two weeks in June.
"You’re under a microscope. That was part of the ride, part of the intrigue," says Mike Keenan, the Rangers head coach in ’94. "From a coaching perspective, you’re focused on the event rather than the outcome. When the outcome comes in a positive way, then it dawns you what the magnitude of the event was."
Rangers captain Mark Messier commenced one of the all-time Stanley Cup tours, starting out on David Letterman’s show and fanning out across New York. How does the old line go? If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
"The attention that was paid to the game was incredible," Messier told the New York Times in the giddy aftermath of 1994. "I’ve been in the game 16 years and won five Stanley Cups before this. And I have never experienced anything like the last two months.
"I thought I had seen it all," he said. "I room with Brian [Leetch]. We’ve spent a lot of time together in the last two months, and I wasn’t really saying much. But in my own mind, I was going, ‘This is absolutely incredible.’ "
Should the 2014 Rangers surprise the odds makers and prevail over Los Angeles, they will be treated to a parade unlike any parade in North America.
"That parade down the Canyon of Heroes — absolutely unmatchable," says Graves. "You go from street to street, and you think it might be five, six, 10 people deep on the cross streets? Well, it was 200, 300 people deep. The ticker tape coming out of the building, it was surreal. You felt like you were in a movie. Absolutely incredible."
Defenceman Jeff Beukeboom’s memory jumps straight to that parade when he is taken back 20 years.
"You’ve grown up remembering the photos from when the veterans came back from war and were paraded down this route," Beukeboom says. "For a farm kid from Ontario to have the opportunity to ride a float down Broadway, celebrating a championship, seeing all the paper coming down from the windows…. Then we went to City Hall and got a key to the city. These are things you’d never think you’d get to do. I remember standing on the float saying, ‘This can’t be happening.’ "
"A million people at a parade?" asks Keenan. "Nowhere else are you going to have that, outside maybe in Toronto."
Somehow, the process of winning the Cup remains a bit of a blur for these men. As if the work, the sweat, the pain of the moment all gets compartmentalized, and the elation of the end result is what they want to talk about today.
For each, there is a moment that stands out from the spring of ’94. For Beukeboom and Graves, who both had Stanley Cup rings from their days with the Edmonton Oilers, it was that fabulous parade. For Keenan, who had lost his first three Stanley Cups as a coach with Philadelphia and Chicago, his moment is when he finally got his hands on the Cup.
"When Messier skated across the ice towards the bench," Keenan recalls, "I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. And then he handed me the Cup. When I raised it, the noise in the building was like the roof was going to be blown off. That image always surfaces for me when I think about that Cup."