The Garden in winter

Sporting News, The, Jan 30, 1995 by Pat Jordan

Rats and monkeys lived there in harmony, separated by a vast space as befits their natures. The rats lived in the bowels of Boston Garden where, one night, they ate through an electrical wire and plunged the fourth game of the 1988 Stanley Cup finals into darkness. The monkeys escaped from a visiting circus one night and took up residence so high in the rafters, hanging by their tails and jabbering as monkeys are wont to do, that they could not be dislodged. Both rats and monkeys thrived in the Garden on a diet of discarded foodstuffs - peanut shells, hot dog skins and stale crusts of buns - that always littered the Garden floor, and, some say, on the thick, crud-like fungus that grows on the underside of concrete and steel girders and is though to be some form of mutated toxic waste. "We were thinking of packaging and selling it," says one Garden executive. "Boston Garden Moss." The executive was not entirely kidding. Neither was Tommy Heinsohn, the former Celtics star, who said, "The place has always smelled like a circus."

Visiting hockey players hated to come to the Garden because its undersized rink threw off their game. When Bruins bodychecked them, they were crushed against the boards they didn't realize were there. Visiting basketball players hated to come to the Garden because its ancient, aesthetically pleasing, parquet floor contained so many "dead spots" that often they would dribble a ball to the floor where it would, miraculously, stick there, like one of those trick balls used by the Harlem Globetrotters. But mostly hockey players and basketball players alike hated the Garden because of its visiting-team dressing room. It was too small and too hot or too cold, and often the fights would go out It had only one toilet and two shower heads, both of which produced ice-cold water without warning. Often, the towels supplied by the hosts were, inexplicably, already damp. One hot, early-summer night the L.A. Lakers refused to dress there unless air conditioners were installed. Red Auerbach, the curmudgeon who runs the Celtics, promised them air conditioners and the Lakers relented. When they arrived in the dressing room they found two boxes marked "air conditioner" in the center of the room. They were expected to install them themselves, which they didn't. Hockey players, on the other hand, often wasted hours sharpening their skates in the dressing room only to step out onto a hallway without rubber mats. They had to walk over a beige linoleum floor to the rink, which dulled their blades and left fine-lined, black swirls in the linoleum that look like Japanese pen-and-ink drawings.

"The goal was to make the visiting teams as miserable as possible," a young Garden employee says.

And then, of course, there were the Garden fans, who had a reputation for belligerence. If an opposing player displeased them, they could reach over a railing and punch him. That's why the Garden refers to the tunnel leading from the visiting team's dressing room to the rink as the Steve Yzerman Tunnel. It was there one that the Red Wings player was punched out by Bruins fans, who were as hard on one another as they were the opposition. It was not uncommon to see two Bruins fans trading blows in the balcony.

Ironically, the Garden fans were never treated much better than visiting teams. They sat on slatted, wooden seats the color of mustard (French's, not Gulden's) which, rumor has it, were once used to convert heretics. Many of those seats were behind concrete pillars the size of redwood trees that obstructed the fans' view of play. Blocks of those obstructed-view seats were usually reserved for visiting teams' fans. The Garden had only one elevator and 10 bathrooms for 1,500 fans. At intermission, the long lines outside the restrooms snaked through the Garden's musty, concrete corridors like conga lines.

In the winter, the Garden was so cold most fans didn't even bother to remove their overcoats. In the early summer, since the Garden could not be wired for air conditioning, the fans - and players - were so swelteringly hot they sometimes passed out. Late-season basketball games often were played in a fog caused by the hockey ice underneath the parquet floor condensing from the heat. One Celtics championship game against the Lakers in 1984 became known as the "sauna game" when temperatures rose past 100 degrees. Players were so dehydrated they could not break a sweat and had to be given fluids intravenously at halftime.

And finally, there was the Garden dirt, accumulated lovingly over the years since it was built in 1928. It didn't so much rest on seats and floor as become, over the years, part of every seat and the floor. Which is why Garden fans tended to dress down, rather than dress up as they do at most other arenas. The L.A. Forum and Madison Square Garden are often fashion shows of brightly dressed peacocks, strutting their fame or wealth. Woody Allen with his stepdaughter/ girlfriend, Soon Yi. Jack Nicholson resplendent in his Ray Ban shades and the aqua sportscoat he wore as the Joker in "Batman." People go to the Forum and Garden to be seen, gawked at, and entertained by sexy cheerleaders, hightech scoreboards and TV replays of what they have just seen but can't quite figure out. It's their social event.