Well, we have something of a perfect storm brewing Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, don’t we?
We have a Game 7, and those two words are more than enough. But when you add six more to that, as in “Game 7 of a Stanley Cup playoff round,” well, you have just about the most incredible thing in sports. If you are a Rangers fan, and you are still on speaking terms with your Islanders-fan friends, ask them if their stomachs or their chests have recovered yet, two weeks later.
We have the Rangers at home, where in the past few years they have been all but invincible while facing elimination. The Sabres outgunned them, 5-4, on May 6, 2007, at the Garden; that was the last time the Rangers have been forced to shake hands on home ice. They have to feel good about their chances, and so do you.
Most of all, though, we have in our midst – and you have in your sights, if you will be one of the 18,006 people who have a ticket for Game 7 – a genuine, 100 percent, honest-to-goodness, big-game villain.
Take a bow, Alex Ovechkin.
He has all the elements, after all. He is, in a word, superb. If you don’t have a dog in the hunt in this series, and you just watch Ovechkin, he is one of those players it’s impossible to take your eyes off – even if he hasn’t had a point since Game 2. What he does on skates can make you shake your head in awe.
Or in agitation. And if you are rooting for the Rangers, as much as you are inclined to mock him, razz him, slander him … well, you also know he’s fully capable of ending the Rangers’ season by himself. So that’s No. 1.
But he also has the innate ability to infuriate, maybe not to the level or the degree of Sidney Crosby, but certainly to the point where past New York nemeses have gone. It wasn’t enough that after beating Henrik Lundqvist in Game 1, he famously sneered “All series, baby!” No, after Game 6, he said, “We’re going to come back and win the series.”
Now, if we’re being honest with each other, that isn’t exactly “I got news for you: We’re gonna win the game, I guarantee it!” which is the grand-daddy of all guarantees, the one Joe Namath decreed three days before Super Bowl III. It isn’t even “We’ll win tonight!” — which Mark Messier didn’t even think was much of a guarantee 21 years ago, though it did cement his legacy here.
But for the purposes of villainy?
Then that, friends, is a Grade-A, FDA-approved guarantee! Especially since Ovechkin’s own coach apparently believes that’s what it was.
“His whole career, he’s said stuff,” Barry Trotz said Monday. “Every year, he says stuff that’s bold – and he backs it up, usually.”
So he joins a proud lineage of villains who have tried to ruin New York’s day, and who in certain instances have succeeded. Brooklyn Dodgers fans always wanted to cast Stan Musial as one, because Musial at Ebbets Field may have been the greatest hitter of all time. But who could hate Stan Musial? Mostly, in exasperation, they’d mutter, “Here comes That Man again,” so instead of vilifying him they invented one of the greatest nicknames in sports history.
Giants fans tried to detest Jim Brown and Jets fans never much cared for the way Ben Davidson used Joe Namath as a tackling dummy, but neither really took. Knicks fans wanted to loathe Pearl Monroe, except they kept dreaming about what it would be like to have him on their side someday.
No, it took Pete Rose nearly decapitating Buddy Harrelson in the 1973 playoffs to introduce the perfect New York villain. Mets fans threw whiskey bottles at him, cursed him, and then Rose hit a game-winning home run the next afternoon to send the NLCS to a deciding Game 5. It was perfect.
And it set the path for folks like Reggie Miller, whom the Garden would routinely serenade with “Reeeeee-GGGIIIEEE” … usually a moment or two before he would crush its soul with another 25-foot dagger (and for kicks, he once forced overtime in a playoff series with the Nets with a crazy 35-footer at the buzzer. Zip codes didn’t matter to Reggie). Rangers fans still regularly remind Denis Potvin that they remember him, all these years later … and Potvin has four rings to raise to his ear if should he ever want to encourage them to get louder.
Pedro Martinez? He took villainy to a whole different level. He got his swings in. But the Yankees did too, including chasing him from his last start ever, which was also the night the Yankees won their 27th World Series.
You know what you have to do. You know how you have to behave. You have a genuine villain in your midst, with a series to win and an opponent to intimidate. Does Ovechkin [stink]? Is the Garden his daddy? It’s time to find out.