This Day in Hockey History – December 23, 1979 – Bruins, Rangers, Stick, and Shoe

Dec 23, 2018

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In the next issue after the events of December 23, 1979, both the Boston Globe and the New York Daily News featured the same photo on the front page. The Globe captioned it “Skater vs. Spectator,” while the Daily News exclaimed “A stick save – and a beauty!” The photo showed Bruins Terry O’Reilly diving into the stands at Madison Square Gardens to retrieve teammate Stan Jonathan’s stick from the spectator who stole it. In the articles that followed, the Boston and New York papers relayed the same story from quite different viewpoints. Amidst finger pointing and justifications, it was clear that the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers aired some on-ice tensions as the game between them ended. Then a spectator reached over the glass to hit Jonathan and took his stick, prompting Bruins skaters to jump over the glass into the stands. The melee took on the feel of a scene from Slap Shot as Bruins defenseman Mike Milbury took the shoe off the instigator and hit him with it. Even after the players were cleared from the stands and the ice, the departing crowd of about 300 swarmed the empty Bruins bus until eight mounted police officers dispersed them and security brought the bus inside.

Until near the end, the game on December 23, 1979 was fairly typical. The Rangers and their fans had their mood reversed as the Bruins came from behind in the third period to win 4-3 (after trailing 3-1). The final straw came during the last five seconds as former Bruins and current Rangers star Phil Esposito had a breakaway shot grabbed by Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers. Esposito skated away, slammed his stick on the ice until it broke, and left for the locker room. After the buzzer sounded, Bruins wing Al Secord tripped and punched Ulf Nilsson of the Rangers. Secord explained, “I remembered the sucker punch he gave me earlier in the game, so I thought, an eye for an eye, and I suckered him.” Rangers goalie John Davidson had had enough, and he skated over to berate Secord. Afterwards Davidson stated, “Secord suckered him. Secord is a guy with no guts, no class, a cheap-shot artist. He goes after a guy with class, a guy who puts people into buildings.” The issue for Davidson was actually that the referees seemed to have an extreme bias against the European players and had let players get away with actions against Nilsson. While this was happening, the spectator took his own action.

The Bruins’ winning goal had been scored by Stan Jonathan in the last seven minutes of the game. As Jonathan skated along the boards towards the locker room, John Kaptain, a New Jersey businessman, reached over the glass and hit him with a rolled up program. With a cut on the left side of his nose, Jonathan relayed the incident. “It felt like a helluva good jolt and I didn’t know where it came from. I put my stick up as a reflex action and the guy grabbed it. Then the rest of the guys went up.” Kaptain justified himself stating, “I’m not saying I’m right in hitting him. I don’t even know if I hit the right player. But my brother got hit by one of them first.” Upon witnessing this, Bruins forward Terry O’Reilly (known for his fighting) climbed up over the glass towards Kaptain, who was swinging the stick around. According to O’Reilly, “There was no way he was going to strike one of my teammates and steal his stick, wield it like a weapon and then disappear into the crowd and go to a local bar with a souvenir and a great story. As soon as I got him into a bearhug, I felt like I was being pummeled by multiple people. All I could do was cover up.”

When they saw their teammate mobbed, the Bruins felt they had to protect him. Peter McNab, who Jonathan commented “was usually the guy who’d pick up our gloves for us after a fight,” was the second one into the stands. He explained, “So many guys jumped on Terry, the rest of us had to go up there. It’s not something you’re particularly proud of, with little kids at the game at Christmas time and all. They see their heroes up there swinging and swearing. But you couldn’t leave Terry there alone. The guy had a stick and was swinging it.” McNab was joined by Mike Milbury, who had already been celebrating in the locker room when Cheevers told him about “some sort of beef going on.” While Cheevers stayed out of it, Milbury said, “I went from happy and content, and ready to go home for Christmas, to full combat mode in about 20 seconds.” He later said, “I wanted to protect him, the team. It was the thing to do.” Once Kaptain broke away from O’Reilly, McNab and Milbury pinned him down over a seat. Milbury described the scene, “I grabbed his shoe, took a little tug on it, and then sort of double pumped. I don’t know if I hesitated for a minute because I thought I’d be vilified for the next 30 years, but I gave him a cuff across the leg, and then I did what I thought was probably the most egregious thing of all: I threw his shoe on the ice.” O’Reilly thinks that “under the same circumstances,” he would “jump over the glass and grab the guy again.” However, he said, “None of us wanted to be in the toothless Neanderthal grouping. In the greater public’s view, it re-emphasized stereotypes of hockey players.”

In all, 18 Bruins players ended up in the stands after the game. The television commentator noted, “Well, the Bruins are at a decided disadvantage with those skates, and somebody could get seriously hurt.” Their general manager, Harry Sinden, and their coach, Fred Creighton, assisted the security guards in clearing them out. Creighton said that he original thought Davidson was just going to congratulate Cheevers as part of “the goaltenders’ union thing,” but instead, “I went up into the stands to get people out of there and make sure it didn’t become a really bad situation.” Meanwhile, the Rangers players stood on the ice at the boards watching the melee. Finally, Kaptain and his party were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. One of the witnesses from the press box, Larry Brooks (writer for the New York Post) later said, “It was just a wild night. The whole night was amped up. The atmosphere was so much different back then. It was never sanitized. It was a little bit coarse, I guess.”

A month after the game, NHL president John Ziegler sent down the punishments for the Bruins. As the first, O’Reilly received an eight-game suspension while McNab and Milbury each would miss six games. The three were fined $500 while all of the other Bruins (except Cheevers) were fined up to $500. Bruins president Paul Mooney gave a statement saying, “We do not accept his findings, and we are very proud of our players and the way they conducted themselves under very difficult circumstances.” They were not successful in overturning the suspensions. Even so, in their next 13 games, the Bruins won ten, and the “altercation did nothing to damage the career prospects of the players involved.” The one lasting result of the events of December 23, 1979 is that the height of the glass on the boards was raised “to prevent future brawls with fans.”