As seen on The New York Times
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
The Bruins' Mike Milbury being restrained. He and all but one of his teammates went into the stands after a victory over the Rangers.
Video of Bruins' Brawl (YouTube)
Ray Stubblebine/Reuters
The Bruins' Terry O'Reilly, climbing over the Garden glass railing, was suspended eight games. Thirty years ago, on Dec. 23, 1979, Bruins defenseman Mike Milbury whacked John Kaptain, a Rangers fan from New Jersey, with a shoe during a bizarre altercation in which all but one Bruins player went over the glass and into the stands at Madison Square Garden. The incident, after a 4-3 Bruins victory, resulted in three players being suspended, lawsuits and the installation of higher glass in the arena. It remains one of the most memorable fan-athlete confrontations in sports. It all unfolded after Phil Esposito of the Rangers smashed his stick on the ice and skated off to the locker room after failing to convert a breakaway in the waning seconds. When the buzzer sounded, Al Secord, Boston’s rugged left wing, decked the Rangers’ Ulf Nilsson.
As a scrum of players exchanged words, Kaptain, who was 30 and owned an executive recruitment firm, reportedly reached over the low glass panel and hit Stan Jonathan, the Bruins’ enforcer, with a rolled-up program, drawing blood beneath Jonathan’s eyes. He then made off with Jonathan’s stick.
“He just reached over the glass and whacked me with it,” Jonathan said. “I put my stick up to protect myself, and he just took it, and I can’t be hitting no fan with a stick, really, eh, so I just let him take it.”
Bruins forward Terry O’Reilly, who engaged in a career-high 22 fights during the season, thought that Jonathan had been punched by a fan. He was the first player to climb over the glass to confront Kaptain, who, he said, was wielding Jonathan’s stick as if he were “cutting down a hayfield.”
Kaptain, who has since died, admitted at the time that he had struck a player, but said he did so because his brother had been hit.
“I may have hit Jonathan when he was on the ice,” Kaptain told reporters. “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.”
Peter McNab, who had only four penalty minutes the previous season, shed his inhibitions and followed his linemate into the stands.
“Peter was usually the guy who’d pick up our gloves for us after a fight,” Jonathan said.
Don Cherry, who had coached the Bruins the season before and watched the game on television, said he was pleased to see McNab acting out of character. “I was quite proud of him,” he said.
Milbury and Boston’s goalie, Gerry Cheevers, had reached the locker room when the players went into the stands.
“I went from happy and content, and ready to go home for Christmas, to full combat mode in about 20 seconds,” Milbury said.
Cheevers, meanwhile, wanted no part of the action. “I was already on my second beer,” he said, laughing.
O’Reilly insisted that he had entered the stands merely to “detain” Kaptain.
“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,” O’Reilly said. “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.”
Cherry had a different recollection. “Never in my life did I see Terry O’Reilly covering up during a fight,” he said.
Kaptain managed to break free of O’Reilly but was corralled several rows up by McNab and Milbury, who pinned him across a seat.
“I grabbed his shoe, took a little tug on it, and then sort of double pumped,” Milbury said. “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.”
Eighteen Bruins went into the stands. Milbury said, “If you watch the tape — and I can freely throw my teammates under the bus now after 30 years — people were throwing some serious shots down below us that were obscured by the fact that everybody was focusing on the idiot highest up in the stands hitting somebody with a shoe.”
Security guards eventually separated the combatants. John Kaptain, with his brother, James; his father, Manny; and a friend, Jack Guttenplan, were charged with disorderly conduct. After the game, a crowd of about 300 Rangers fans rocked the Bruins’ bus and had to be dispersed by eight mounted police officers.
Robert Seagriff, then the Garden’s assistant director of security, said there was trouble whenever the Bruins came to town. “There would always be a big contingent of Boston cops that would come down for the games,” he said. “And there were always problems between the cops and Rangers fans. When Boston came in, we’d beef up security wherever the cops were sitting.”
A month later, the N.H.L. president, John Ziegler, suspended O’Reilly for eight games and McNab and Milbury for six. They were each fined $500 and the rest of the Bruins, except for Cheevers, were fined up to $500.
An outraged Bruins organization tried unsuccessfully to overturn the suspensions in court. Paul Mooney, the team president, said in a statement, “We do not accept his findings, and we are very proud of our players and the way they conducted themselves under very difficult circumstances.”
On Jan. 23 1980, the Kaptain family held a news conference at the St. Moritz hotel to announce they were filing a lawsuit. “We wanted the public to know we weren’t animals,” John Kaptain said at the time.
The suit was ultimately abandoned. “There was no money, no apology, nothing,” said Irwin Levy, the Kaptains’ lawyer.
The charges against the Kaptains and Guttenplan were eventually dropped, and the Manhattan district attorney declined to press criminal charges against the players. No one was seriously hurt in the incident.
The altercation did nothing to damage the career prospects of the players involved. Nine went on to N.H.L. coaching careers, and several worked as scouts or broadcasters.
Bruins fans, in particular, still relish the incident. E. M. Swift, who covered hockey for Sports Illustrated, played in a college game in 1972 when one of his Princeton teammates was beaten with a “stale Italian sub” by the Colgate athletic director while he grappled with Milbury. “We hate everything New York here in Boston,” he said, “so the fact that it was the Rangers and New Yorkers getting beaten with a shoe, those guys are folk heroes up here.”
The actor Denis Leary, who is from Massachusetts, may reflect the feelings of many Bruins fans. In an e-mail message, he said that anyone who believed “that two tickets and four plastic cups” of beer entitled you to “antagonize men who beat the living headlights out of each other for a living deserves to have his keister kicked.”
He added, “That’s what I call thinning the herd.”
The Rangers, meanwhile, have the model Carol Alt in their corner. Alt has what she referred to as “one foot in each cage” as a “huge Rangers fan,” the ex-wife of the former Ranger Ron Greschner and now the companion of Alexei Yashin, a former Islander who plays for SKA in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League.
It was important to keep the “herds in their respective cages,” Alt said in an e-mail message from St. Petersburg, Russia. She said it was Milbury who should have been beaten with a shoe.
“Players with padding are like mammoths in the stands running over unarmed, shoeless, domestic house pets,” she said.
Milbury acknowledged that many people outside hockey did not laugh at the incident. “None of us wanted to be in the toothless Neanderthal grouping,” he said. “In the greater public’s view, it re-emphasized stereotypes of hockey players.”
Despite having to repeatedly defend their actions, the three suspended Bruins say they were justified.
“Under the same circumstances, I don’t think I’d go through a process of sorting through the rules and regulations and legal consequences,” O’Reilly said. “I think I’d jump over the glass and grab the guy again.”
The Kaptain brothers have died, but their father, a World War II infantryman who is now 84, still loves hockey, and their mother still hates it. Manny Kaptain holds no grudge against the Bruins, although he has not been back to a game since the night his son John had to walk home with only one shoe.
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