By blending family-friendly entertainment with Slap Shot-style antics, the minor league Danbury
Whalers have found a formula for success.
Story: Matt Caputo
Photos: An Rong Xu
Julian Fraser is listed at six-foot-three, 215 pounds in the Danbury Whaler’s game program, but that
second stat may be a bit inflated. The wiry 22-year-old looks to be about a buck-ninety, but whatever he
lacks in bulk, he makes up for in grit. “Let’s go to fucking war tonight, boys,” he growls through a gap in
his top front teeth a Zamboni could fit through, clomping with the rest of his teammates toward their
home rink at the Danbury Ice Arena. “If we work hard it won’t be a fucking game,” howls back Mike
Brown, a veteran minor leaguer and the Whaler’s starting goalie.
It’s hockey night in Danbury, Connecticut, and the Whalers will skate in front of a packed house for the
start of a three-game home stand, the last of the season. “Packed,” that is by the standards of the
Federal Hockey League (for teams last year; six on tap for 2014-15) – a weekend bus-travel circuit
composed of young guys trying to scrap (often literally) their way up the pro-hockey ladder, and older
guys skating out their final days as “pros.” (Hockey movie aficionados will recognize the name “Federal
League” – it’s not an accident, but more on that later.)
There are almost 2,300 spectators in the building tonight, taking up most of the seats and all of the good
standing room around the glass. Count the kids skating under disco lights in the adjacent rink, ladies
working the concession stands, the cops and fire marshals, and you could claim the attendance
approaches 3,000 people. The arena is a rowdy downtown “barn” where the home team plays a rough
and emotional – as opposed to skillful and strategic – brand of hockey. There isn’t a video scoreboard
and most seats are bleachers, but there’s cheap beer, great sight lines, and the occasional fistfight. It’s
the Whaler’s last Friday-night home game of the year, and everyone in the building gets pumped when
the puck drops.
Tonight’s opponents – the Danville Dashers – took a 14-hour bus ride to get here from Illinois, and
they’ve been in last place for most of the season. Brown’s pregame howl proves accurate, as the
Dashers play like a last place team stiff from a long bus ride and get outskated early. The Whalers score
on their first shot and glide to a 5-2 win.
Postgame, the action shifts to Two Steps Downtown Grille, a dimly lit bar/restaurant that is one of four
places in the Whalers’ party rotation. Two Steps is a three-minute walk from the arena, and it’s packed
with Whalers fans looking to raise some victory beers. Tonight, injured Whalers veteran Matt Caranci is
the first guy with a pitcher in his hand, chatting up a girl who has followed the team since its inception.
“I’ve been through a lot of minor-league hockey cities, and I’ve never seen more loyal or passionate
fans,” Caranci says, filling his pint glass. “The lifestyle is that you’re living on buses and out of a suitcase
for weeks at a time. At this level, for guys to play for what we’re making, they’ve got to really, truly love
the game.”
Danbury is a city of roughly 80,000 people. Before minor-league hockey arrived in 2010, the city’s
biggest claims to fame were its nationally ranked NCAA Division III Western Connecticut State University
(“West-Conn”) Colonials football team and its Federal Correctional Institution, which housed George
Jung, the drug-dealing antihero of the movie Blow.
Ninety minutes by care from the home of the NHL’s New York Rangers, and roughly an hour from each
of Connecticut’s two NHL-affiliated minor-league clubs in Bridgeport and Hartford, Danbury has provedto be an ideal place for an independent pro team to develop a devoted fan base, but, mind you, the
story of hockey in Danbury is not something out of Mayberry.
The man who brought hockey to the city – the man they call the “Godfather of Danbury Hockey” – is,
well, a godfather. His name is James Galante and he was a trash-disposal mogul with ties to the
Genovese crime family. Before he pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering, wire fraud, and defrauding
the IRS, Galante owned waste-management businesses reportedly worth $100 million. In 2004, he
bought franchise rights in the now defunct United Hockey League, a second-tier minor league, for
$500,000. Naming his club the Danbury Trashers (note, that’s Trashers – after his business – not
Thrashers), Galante installed his 17-year-old son, A.J., as team president. (Why The Sopranos never
fictionalized this we’ll never know; the kid’s name is even A.J.!)
The Trashers brought in the best talent they could, and the quickly became a contender in the UHL, but
their road to success was littered with shady deals. Galante paid players and their wives for “no-show”
jobs at his various companies, circumventing the UHL salary cap by nearly half a million dollars. In 2006,
after Galante was hit with 72 criminal charges and then sentenced to 87 months in prison, the Trashers
folded.
LIFE IMITATES ART
A few teams in the floundering regional leagues tried to fill the void, but no club lasted two seasons.
Finally, in 2010, a scrap-metal king from Brooklyn named Alan Friedman and a career minor-league
baseball executive named Herm Sorcher came up with the idea of bringing the Whalers back to
Connecticut – 13 years after the NHL’s Hartford Whalers packed up and left for North Carolina. Instead
of trying to join one of the existing minor leagues, Friedman and Sorcher helped found their own – the
Federal League, or “the Fed” – and put their new Danbury Whalers into it.
If it weren’t for Danbury, there probably wouldn’t be a Federal Hockey League at all – in real life,
anyway. The original Fed exists in the movie Slap Shot (where it will live forever, since Slap Shot is the
greatest sports movie of all time, but that’s another article). Sorcher, Friedman, and the league’s other
investors lifted it wholesale for the name of their league. And the similarities don’t end there: if you put
some thick-framed glasses on the wiry, long-haired Whalers scrapper Julian Fraser, he could easily take
the place of one of the Hanson brothers on their promotional tours. One of the Whalers first publicity
stunts, in 2010, was to sign wild-man pro skateboarder Mike Vallely to a contract with the team. To play
ice hockey, Vallely, who would go on to a stint as the lead singer of Black Flag (we’re not even making
this up), got into a fight in the first shift of his first game with the team and broke his arm. He recovered
to play two games the next season before calling a halt to his pro-hockey career. He’s still tops among
Whaler player jersey sales. “We’ve probably had orders for about six Mike Vallely jerseys over the years
now,” Sorcher says with a chuckle.
FAMILY FRIENDLY LIKE VEGAS
The Danbury Ice Arena is too small for second-tier minor-league hockey by today’s standards, so the
level the Whalers and their ilk occupy hovers just slightly above ‘glorified beer league.” You could even
argue that the FHL was created to give Danbury a league to play in, with the other outfits invited in to
try to emulate the Whalers’ success in Danbury. Of the original six (ha!) FHL teams, only the Whalers
remain in their original location. There aren’t a lot of high-quality skaters in the Fed or a ton of tape-to-
tape passes, but the Whalers are the defending champs, there’s the aforementioned brew, the Danbury
fans aren’t afraid to cut loose, and there are plenty of activities for the kids. It’s here that the Slap Shot
comparisons start to wane. Danbury takes a decidedly family-friendly approach to their enterprise.
Fights do happen, but not much more often than they do in the NHL. The Whalers’ enforcer Fraser
racked up 139 penalty minutes in 34 games last season, a not-too-crazy average of about four minutes
per game.
At one time, fighting sold lots of tickets in minor-league rinks, especially in the southeastern United
States. Goons from Canada and New England populated the minors and became stars in their own right,
legends beloved by diehard local fans and internet hockey geeks. Whalers’ coach Phil Esposito –
hilariously not the hockey Hall of Famer of the same name – was a minor-league enforcer known as
“Fighting Phil” during his decade-plus on the hardscrabble circuits.
“In 11 years I got into a couple hundred fights. I understand why [the NHL] wants to do away with
fighting, but I think it takes away from the game,” says Esposito, still looking capable of breaking a nose
or two. “They want to make the game more family-friendly and less violent so they can put it on TV, but
the funny thing is, everything you see on TV now is violent.”
“When I was playing, I didn’t like the banter that went on between the two teams. When I lined up
against the other guy, they only thing I wanted to do was to hurt that guy,” Esposito says. “It’s a totally
different style of game now. Totally different.”
Danbury, like most minor-league teams these days, has recognized that a family atmosphere drives
group ticket sales. And since most leagues have shortened rosters, enforcers are less common.
“With the Hartford and Bridgeport AHL teams so close, people wonder how we can compete,” says
Sorcher, who was an intern for the Hartford Whalers during his college days. “We show people a good
time.”
On Saturday morning, a Whalers booster has set up tin trays of hot food after the team’s morning skate.
There’s a game later, so it’s mostly rookies and guys like Caranci who are nursing injuries in attendance.
The boys are all hungry once they’re off the ice, but they peel back the covers of the tin trays to find
some soggy-looking corned beef and cabbage – likely held over from St. Patrick’s Day the Monday
before.
“Lunch smells like a sweaty pair of hockey underwear today,” says one Whaler.
While the players walk around in various stages of undress, two of the most seasoned members of this
year’s roster are holding court in the tiny lounge, which is squeezed into a hallway between the team’s
offices and locker room. Plopped on the couch next to Coach Esposito, veteran goalie Brown is tending
to the tape on his stick. A Syracuse, New York, native, Brown was drafted by the Boston Bruins in 2003
and spent some time with their top farm team. The closest he came to the NHL was when he was on-call
as a back-up goalie for the Bruins. He was once a few hours away from getting the call, until the team
traded for another goalie on game day, costing Brown a chance to dress in the show.
“The [Federal] league has its issues, with [only] four teams, ridiculous travel, getting sticks and
equipment, and getting paid on time,” says Brown, who works in the maintenance department of an
auto dealership when he’s not playing. “Off the ice, there’s that group looking to get to the next level,
and another looking to have fun and look to the next stage of their life.”
When they’re not on the ice or the bus, the Whalers enjoy their share of partying, as well as the kind of
micro, hyperlocal celebrity the Charlestown Chiefs enjoyed. There are late nights, more complimentary
beer, and plenty of women. And while the Whalers may never see their jerseys handing from the arena
rafters, they do have some goods stories – even heroic ones. Like the time in November 2010 when for
Whalers Devin Gut and Ryan Donovan jumped out of the team bus on the way home after a road game
and pulled a woman from a pickup truck that had spun out of control, flipped into a ditch, and rested
precariously against a tree. Guy and Donovan risked being crushed underneath the truck to free the
driver. They were honored by the Red Cross and cited for heroism by local police.
Then there were the, uh, less honorable tales. Like the one about the veteran defenseman who in a
moment of drunken foolishness, pulled two live lobsters from a tank with his bare hands at a chain
restaurant and dangled them in front of his son in jest. The post-practice drinking session had started
with a drink-and-dash at a downtown bar and ended with one of the three players involved having his
possessions emptied onto the lawn outside the apartment by his engaged girlfriend. This one is known,
euphemistically, as “the Lobster Story.”
There’s also, according to some, a “”Super Bowl-Suite Group Sex” story, but the details and the
accompanying video have been lost to history.
EXORCISING THE DEMONZ
Saturday night presents Danbury’s biggest challenge of the home stand. The Dayton Demonz are in town
– having traveled from Ohio (679 miles arena to arena) in an ancient bus that was once used for Walt
Disney tours and still has temporary Tennessee plates. The Demonz met the Whalers in last year’s
Commissioner’s Cup Finals and recently knocked Danbury from first place.
The Dayton and Danville Dashers franchises have been relatively stable since entering the league two
and three years ago, respectively. Both play in real arenas as opposed to ice rinks, but neither can match
the Whalers’ fan base – in fact, it’s been hard for other teams to ever match the level of success that
Dayton and Danville have enjoyed in Danbury’s shadow.
“In the leagues infancy, I was paying for other teams, their travel, $1,000 here and $10,000 there,’ says
Friedman. “Year two, another team can’t make it, so I put my foot down. I’m not letting just anyone in
the league just to have a local road trip, because I know I’ll end up paying for them by March.”
So Friedman is pleased with the emergence of Dayton and Danville, but on this Saturday night, he’d like
nothing more than to put the Demonz back on their bus following a good hiding. Danbury takes a 2-1
lead, and late in the second period, the Whalers’ Tim Richter and Dayton’s Brett Wall square off for the
only fight of the entire home stand.
The fisticuffs seem to fire up the Whalers, and they come out of the game by a score of 5-1. Afterward,
Esposito is in on the joke when one of the Whalers delivers a “shaving cream surprise attack” on the
team’s media play-by-play man during the coach’s postgame interview.
KEEPING THE PRIVATEERS AFLOAT
Sunday night’s game starts at 5 p.m. – after the usual complement of about a dozen ceremonial face-
offs. A group of local grammar school students receive awards from the Whalers for improving their
grades. There’s a gang of wrestlers promoting an event at a high school – they get to drop pucks, too.
The crowd at Sunday’s game is about half the size of Friday’s and Saturday’s, but it’s still a good turnout.
And the Whalers are wearing replica jerseys from the old New Haven Nighthawks, a beloved AHL club
that operated from 1972-1992.
The Watertown Privateers are visiting; they’re a club being financed by the other owners in the league
since the Privateers’ ownership group ran out of money toward the end of the season. Having played in
a neutral-site game in Connellsville, Pennsylvania (where the FHL hopes to place a team), the night
before, the Privateers are winded and lose 5-2.
After the game, fans are invited to “Skate with the Whalers” and turn victory laps with the players.
Later, the party moves to TK’s American Café for beers and Buffalo wings. The owner, Tom Kennedy,
was sponsoring the Whalers’ annual New Haven night.
Kennedy goes on to note how much hockey has done for downtown Danbury, and it’s true. The sport
has given the town – geographically wedged between the edges of New England and the suburbs of
New York City – an identity. It’s a hockey town, and guys who play here exist in a bubble where they’re
treated like they’re members of the New York Yankees by locals, if not by owners. It’s a place where
families can come to a game at a reasonable price, and players can find a way station in their careers –
wherever they’re headed next.
“I’d gone to training camp with the Philadelphia Flyers before I worked in the oil and gas industry for
two years,” says Igor Karlov, an original Danbury Whaler. “The industry was unstable, so I went back to
playing.”
None of the Whalers are really sure what they’ll do when their playing days end. Most, like Caranci and
forward Matt Crowley, lack college degrees, but they’re happy with the cheap pitchers and easy access
to New York City that being part of the Whalers affords them. Karlov, 28, is joining the National Guard
when the season ends. Defenseman Shaun Fisher, who turned pro in 2001, is playing again after taking
three years off. He painted houses for his uncle and felt lost until he decided to lace ‘em up again. It’s
not an uncommon scenario in the Fed. Because despite the long bus trips, late paychecks, and shitty
lunches, the Whalers provide a chance for guys to get paid (a little bit, anyway) to play the game they
love in front of appreciative fans.
“This is my six-month vacation when I come here,” says Fraser, sucking a beer through his missing front
tooth. “But I bust my balls all summer by calibrating oil wells back in Alberta. My friends back home
working might have more money in their pockets, but I’ve got the better stories.”