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USAHOCKEYMAGAZINE.COM // 21 I N T H E CO R N E R S H E R O E S & H I S T O R Y g By Tom and Jerry Caraccioli The NHL and the Carolina Hurricanes also announced a $50,000 donation toward supporting long- term sustaining ball hockey programming as part of the NHL's Legacy Project. with plastic blades that were melted and attached on the end of the shaft for the summer season. Of course, the Stanley Cup was the dream for all of us, but our street hockey Holy Grail was the Caraccioli Cup. It was fashioned from old Pringles potato chip cans, Maxwell House coffee cans, elec- trical tape, Elmer's glue, a wooden base and a cut-off Styrofoam bowler hat that served as the cup. It was a precarious, silver spray painted piece of art that we wish we still had as a remembrance of a glorious part of our youth. Today, it appears a new generation of kids could be preparing for their own tarmac battles and homemade trophies. Street hockey is an afford- able way for kids to continue to expe- rience the game, especially while enjoying the warm weather outside. The National Hockey League recently announced a partnership with RCX Sports to launch "NHL Street," a North America-wide youth street hockey league, and the sound of sticks on pavement hopefully will be reverberating throughout many U.S. neighborhoods this summer. Will kids today play street hockey? "I would like to think so. And I really do hope so," Mullen wishfully concluded. P Tom & Jerry Caraccioli are the authors of STRIKING SILVER: The Untold Story of America's Forgotten Hockey Team. o kids today play street hockey? As young New York Rangers fans, we remem- ber the story of the Mullen brothers, Joey and Brian, who first learned how to play hockey on roller skates in the streets and playgrounds of their New York City West Side neighbor- hood known as "Hell's Kitchen," only blocks away from Madison Square Garden. "Street hockey was all we had. That's all we did," said Hall of Famer Joey Mullen, a three-time Stanley Cup champion, who was the first U.S.-born player to score 1,000 NHL points. "It was the reason we got interested in hockey. My dad worked at Madison Square Garden and our uncles all played roller hockey. With the Rangers being right down the street, our whole neighborhood was a hockey-crazed place." Like the Mullen brothers, we could relate. Our neighborhood was in upstate Oswego, N.Y., where the hockey season had a definitive time- frame. It was a winter sport played between early- October and mid- April. It began with "The Clinic" at Romney Field House run by the Oswego State Great Lakers head coach Herb Hammond and went until our final tournament in Lake Placid. Organized spring and sum- mer hockey didn't exist for us in the late-1970s and early 1980s. During the weeks that fol- lowed, when the ground was still too wet and cold for baseball sea- son, we got our hockey fix by play- ing street hockey with our friends. Driveways and streets became our summer rinks. We reverently named them in honor of the plac- es we watched games broadcast from each week on "Hockey Night in Canada" and Sunday afternoon on NBC—Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, the Montreal Forum, Madison Square Garden in New York, Boston Garden, the Spectrum in Philadelphia and the Omni in Atlanta. The corner of Seventh and Albany Streets, along with our drive- way, became a hotbed of street hock- ey action just about every day at the "Caraccioli Gardens," "Seventh Street Spectrum," and "Albany Street Omni." Pucks were replaced by tennis balls and hard orange balls that left marks just as black and blue as any puck did when you got in front of someone's shot. Broken sticks from the winter season were recycled Where The Streets Had A Name D VIDEO NHL Street Hockey PHOTO COURTESY OF Joey Mullen