The Cincinnati Swamp: 25th Anniversary of the Not-So-Frozen Four : College Hockey News

March 30, 2021
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by Adam Wodon/Managing Editor (@CHN_AdamWodon)

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The site of one of the most infamous moments in rock & roll history, is also the site of the most infamous moment in NCAA hockey tournament history.

At least in hockey, no one died.

In 1979, Cicinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum hosted a concert by The Who. Eleven people were trampled to death when fans rushed the gates prematurely, leading to changes in how general admission crowds were handled.

It was also the last year hockey was regularly played in that arena for 18 years.

If you think this year’s Frozen Four is being played under weird circumstances, try 1996’s on for size.

They didn’t call it the Frozen Four yet. And good thing. Because it was not entirely frozen.

This is the 25th anniversary of a Frozen Four everyone would like to forget (everyone except Michigan), but many cannot.

* * *

Cincinnati was excited, in 1991, when it received a bid to host the 1996 NCAA hockey championships. Miami University got together with the local sports commission to make the bid, and both were trying to make a name for themselves again.

Miami hockey was largely an afterthought nationally at the time. Steve Cady was the team’s head coach from its inception in 1978, through its acceptance into the CCHA, until 1985, when he moved into the school’s administration. Its best record in those early CCHA years was 18-17-1. The next six years after Cady stepped down were far worse. George Gwozdecky — who later won two national championships as Denver’s long-time head coach — went 5-29-3 in his second season there. That was 1991.

Meanwhile, the Riverfront Coliseum was just trying to get hockey in there again. Its last hockey tenant was the Cincinnati Stingers of the WHA. The league, and the team, went away when the WHA merged with the NHL that year.

The NCAA was looking to expand its reach of places to hold the event. It wanted to move away from the same few cities, and smaller regional buildings, and spread college hockey around the country.

By the time 1996 rolled around, it meant there was no hockey in the Riverfront Coliseum in 17 years, other than an NHL exhibition game and the Riverfront Invitational, a holiday college hockey tournament that ran from 1986-89.

“There were some challenges going in because of that fact,” Cady said. But with five years since the bid was announced, there was plenty of time to plan.

It was the perfect reason to be excited. It was also the perfect storm.

* * *

In the intervening years since there was last hockey in Cincinnati, the NCAA decided to move the hockey goal line out two extra feet. Instead of 8 feet, the goal line was now 10 feet from the boards. The NHL wouldn’t make this change until 1998, so the college hockey final four was the first event there under the new rules.

That meant a different drilling location than ever before.

For practices, the drilling was shallow, only enough to hold breakaway pins. A work crew from Miami joined with the local ice crew to make sure things went smoothly.

Boston University coach Jack Parker surveyed the ice at the Wednesday practice. His team had just won its 30th game of the season the week before in Albany in qualifying for the final four. The year before, the Terriers won the national championship. It was the fourth of five consecutive final four appearances for BU.

“This may sound crazy, but it’s the best ice I’ve seen for an NCAA Tournament on day one,” Parker said to Cady.

Some Vermont players actually thought the ice was too hard and brittle.

The teams practiced … Michigan, looking for its first championship in 32 years, after being rejuvenated in the decade leading up to this by Red Berenson; Colorado College, looking for its first championship in 39 years, similiarly rejuvenated under Don Lucia; and Vermont, in its first final four, bolstered by a trio of spectacular juniors named Tim Thomas, Martin St. Louis and Eric Perrin, who had just dazzled in knocking off mighty Lake Superior State to get to Cincinnati.

Thursday, the rink was getting prepared for the national semifinals. Vermont and CC were the first game.

For the game, it was time for the ice crew to replace the breakaway pins with deeper posts that the net would sit on. That requires a deeper drill.

“One of the ways to do that is, you can bring an x-ray machine so you can see where the pipes are,” Cady said. “Or you just turn the system on and just by the lines in the concrete you’ll see where they are so you won’t hit one of those lines. And then once the new holes are drilled, you’re supposed to put a metal sleeve in there. So when ice crew comes out, it bottoms out in that sleeve.”

The metal sleeve is put in the hole, so that after the zamboni resurfaces, you drill back into the sleeve and then put the posts inside, and the net goes on top of that.

Someone forgot the metal sleeve.

When they drilled the holes for the posts, the drill went too far and hit the hose that contains the coolant, called glycol.

The glycol came spewing out. A foot in the air. In order to stop it, they had to shut off the entire cooling system.

Cady felt sick.

* * *

Rick Comley didn’t need this. The Northern Michigan head coach was in his last year as Chair of the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Committee, the culmination of a successful run that saw the tournament move to neutral Regional sites from its old best-of-3 format, and move to an objective selection system.

The Committee had also worked with ESPN for more exposure. The 1996 national semifinals were to be the first that aired entirely live on TV. ESPN2 in this case.

At first, the players were told the game was off.

“Some of our guys were dressed, some were half-dressed and they told us that we weren’t going to play that day,” Tim Thomas said. “So we all went up in the stands with our parents and we were talking to them getting ready to leave.”

Comley turned to Cady, “Steve, this is our first time we have chance to be on TV, what do you think? How can we make this go?”

Once the first game was done, they would have time to fix the hole in the pipe and get to the second game. But they didn’t want to take that time right away, because it would’ve delayed the first game too long.

They started calculating. How long could they go without the coolant system on, and still get the game in? 

“OK if you take from this point, finish warmup, and go out based on surface temperature that were on the machines, we can float this for 2 hours, 45 minutes and be OK. Yeah, we think we can float it to then.”

They told the players to wait, they were going to play after all.

A member of the ice crew took a piece of pipe with bubble gum and duct tape, and drove it down into the pipe that was punctured, then packed some sand in there that could hold it.

Only problem was, they had to turn off the compressor that ran the coolant. The bubble gum solution was not strong enough to hold up under pressure.

“When not under pressure, it held.”

Game on.

The timing calculation, however, had a fatal flaw. Hockey games sometimes go to overtime. And, of course, this one did.

“And it wasn’t just one — we had multiple OTs,” Cady said. “So by then, it was like a river. It was in very bad shape. And literally Rick Comley and I were standing at the end of the rink behind the Vermont goal. He looked and said, ‘How much time you think we have before we lose the whole ice, and it breaks away from the cement?’ And I said, ‘Probably 15 minutes.’

“We were close to losing the whole thing.”

A minute later, Colorado College scored the winning goal.

But of course, that’s not the end of the story, because it shouldn’t have even been the winning goal.

Thankfully for the ice crew, there was no video review.

Not thankfully for Vermont, there was no video review.

* * *

In what you could call the tournament’s secondary debacle, there is still question to this day whether the goal Colorado College scored was a good one.

The ice was already a problem for Vermont. Its top line of St. Louis, Perrin and J.C. Ruid thrived off speed. Well, at least two of them did. The duo were Hobey finalists, each with 85 points. They dazzled people in Albany that had never seen them play, and quickly did the same in Cincinnati.

But the ice conditions were slowing them down. At least enough to keep the game even. Three times CC scored a goal, and all three times Vermont matched it.

But conditions were getting even worse in the overtime. In a nod back to the old days, they were breaking the OTs into 10-minute halves, so the teams could switch sides out of fairness. “You’d fall down, and get up all wet and weigh about twice your weight,” St. Louis said.

Late in the first half of the second overtime, Jay McNeil deked a defender and took a shot that hit the goal post to the left behind Tim Thomas. The puck then ricocheted behind Thomas to his right. McNeil had continued down the slot, leapt in the air Bobby Orr-style, and knocked the puck down with his glove, where it went back across the crease to Thomas’ left again. Thomas looked around for the puck, while Chad Remackel came from behind the net and banged the loose puck off of Thomas’ leg and in.

The referees conferred, but there was no video replay.

If there was, you could’ve figured on about a 10-minute review, followed by the end of the second OT. At which point, you would’ve needed a boat to continue.

Instead it became known as the hand-pass goal. In a lake.

Video review was eventually put into all NCAA Tournament games, following another instance in 2000 where Colgate appeared to defeat Michigan in overtime, but the referees on the waived off what should’ve been a good goal.

* * *

While Vermont stewed over the way the game ended, the arena crew — which had been fidgeting to get out there for hours — bolted out with jackhammers to chop up what was left of the ice.

By now, it was close to 7 p.m. The compressors had been off since 2.

“How long before you can get it going,” ESPN asked, as the crew was on its hands and knees patching.

It was 8 p.m. Time for more calculations.

“I’d say by 11,” Cady said.

“You have until 9,” ESPN said.

Cady had the job of relaying that demand to the head of the ice crew.

“You should’ve seen the look on his face. He wanted to say, ‘You dumb SOB.’ But he didn’t,” Cady said. “He put his head down and went cranking away. There was so much water on the ice, the only chance we had was getting that off. So he took one of the zambonis out there, made sure the blade was up, maybe barely touching, and on the zambonis there is a pump on there that he basically went around pumping the water off the ice into the zamboni. Getting the water off, so it had a chance to freeze back up.”

They didn’t get it done by 9. They got it done by 9:15.

BU and Michigan was ready to go. And so it was that at 9:35 p.m. in Cincinnati, BU and Michigan started the second game.

“The ice crew from Miami pulled something off that no one thought could happen. Jack and Red both thought the tournament would be canceled for good.”

Michigan defeated Boston University in the finale.

“I thought the ice was slow, not a great surface,” Parker recalled. “It was pathetic for the first game. We should’ve probably postponed for a day and see if we could start over. But TV dictates that stuff. They have a slot to fill.”

“Had it not been live TV that’s what we would’ve done,” Cady said. “But … there was expectations. That played into it.”

Michigan went on to win the national championship, in overtime, on a goal by Brendan Morrison. Two classic games, overshadowed forever (except to Michigan fans) by the ice debacle.

“All because someone forgot to put a metal sleeve in there,” Cady said.

* * *

Cady looks back now and feels bad for what happened, but also knows a lot of people put in a lot of hard work, and deserve credit.

“You’re having these dialogues in the middle of something where just before puck drop and this is what you’re faced with. It’s 20 or 30 minutes to make a decision. You look at it like you do as a coach. During a game, stuff happens. You take the info in and make the best deicsion you can, and hope at the end of the night you make more good decisions than bad ones.

“It’s a shame because we were so excited to host the event and worked hard to have everything ready. Yet I’m very proud of all the people that worked on that to get it repaired and get the second game on board. It was absolutely phenomenal. I don’t know anyone in the place who thought we could take that situation. It was not ideal, but they took a bad situation and turned it around.”

Said Comley, “The city itself seemed like a really good choice. It hadn’t been used much, so that put a little bit of trepidation into the Committee, but the people did a good job selling it. The fact we had some issues probably wasn’t totally surprising, but all in all it ended up being a good championship game. Having Steve there, he was a master at running things. There was no panic.”

The year after, Riverfront Coliseum was renovated with $14 million in upgrades. And it got a new hockey tenant, an ECHL team called the Cyclones. They still play there to this day.

The NCAA returned to the arena in 2014, when it was then known as U.S. Bank Arena. Regionals were played there in 2014, 2016 and 2017.

Miami hockey went on to thrive. Gwozdecky got the program to respectability. And later, his protege, Rico Blasi, took the team to multiple NCAA Tournaments and Frozen Fours.

The new rink at Miami, opened in 2006, is named after Steve Cady.

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