Phoenix Coyotes: Pierre the Snowman, Great pic, great story!

HFBoards.com, a great hockey message-board site, was where I found "Pierre the Snowman" tonight. Man are these funny. Or is it just me?






Thanks first off to Barb Bailey, who send the below picture in after I remarked that I didn't have a picture of Michael-Lee Teslak as a Bulldog. Wow, 03-04, it feels like 10 years ago! Thanks again Barb.

And finally, my thanks to Nancy Doucette (Joe Scali's billet mom when he was a Bulldog) for sending me this neat story!

This article was on the "Ecac hockey" site in the news, thought I'd share..................I thought it was pretty funny, yet cool...........Nancy

No need for icy relations

by:Matt Rybaltowski

Of any sport, visiting hockey teams are among the easiest for home fans to jeer. Looking for any excuse to get riled up, the crowd usually gets it courtesy of a mistimed check to the boards or an illegal slash.

This weekend when Cornell visits Union for a best-of-3 ECACHL quarterfinals series, you might want to think twice before showering the Big Red players with your best Don Rickles-like verbal assault. Under the gruff exterior of players such as 5-foot-11, 195-pound sophomore penalty killer Joe Scali is a soft side that helps others in times of need.

Last Saturday night around 11:30, I was headed out of Ithaca after spending the day at the New York State Indoor Track Championship when Mother Nature intervened. Snow and rain during the day soon changed to ice, turning the blacktop on Ithaca's famed College Street into the surface at Messa Rink and causing a reported 33 accidents on the night.

Unable to make it up the incline on College Street, I was forced to turn left down Cook Street. My car slalomed down the hundred feet or so on the steep decline and I was headed toward my third accident on assignment in the past six months (Jeff Gordon, I'm not.)

Thankfully, as my car rested on a 45-degree angle, four Canadian members of the Big Red hockey team came to my aid. Proving that endless wall sits eventually pay off, the Cornell players pushed my car into a driveway and out of danger.

That gesture, alone, would have been nice enough. But farther down on the hill, a young woman's SUV blocked the middle of the road and I was grounded for the night. Seeing my predicament, the players invited me in to their basement apartment to watch hockey.

To break the ice, I told them about an encounter I had with one of the Hanson brothers of "Slapshot" a couple years ago. With his team short on sticks and pads in a game several decades ago, Hanson explained how his squad started a bench-clearing brawl, just so their manager could steal as much of their opponents' equipment as possible and load it on to the bus.

"Maybe Schafe (Cornell coach Mike Schafer) will let us do that if we need any equipment," a player quipped.

The stranded SUV wasn't towed for several hours, and I crashed on the couch in the living room (though not before a player asked if I was a serial killer). There couldn't have been a more fun end to an icy situation, thanks to the generosity of the players.

Though it won't come close to repaying them, I'll try to attend one of their games this weekend and cheer on the Big Red -- unless, of course, the forecast calls for ice.

--------------------

Matt Rybaltowski, a local freelance writer, is a frequent contributor to the Times Union. He made it to Rochester in time to cover the state wrestling tournament on Sunday without further incident and with his car intact.

Sounds like the good ole' Joe I know. Good stuff! Nic and Mara you did good!!

Hammer