John U. Bacon

Steve Kampfer grew up in Jackson, and learned to play hockey well enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Michigan. He was a good student and a good player on some very good days, but few expected Kampfer to make it to the NHL. I confess that I was one of them.

What chance he had seemed to vanish on an October night in 2008, when he was leaving a campus bar. He started jawing with another student, who happened to be on the wrestling team. Things got hot, but it was all just talk, until the wrestler picked up Kampfer and turned him upside in a single, sudden move – then dropped him head first on the sidewalk.

Kampfer lay there unconscious, with blood sliding out of his mouth. His stunned friend thought he might be dead.

They rushed Kampfer to the hospital, where they discovered he’d suffered a closed head injury and a severe skull fracture, near his spine. He woke up on a flatboard, his head in a neck brace and tubes running out of his body.

His coach, Red Berenson, talked to him about the possibility – even the likelihood – that he would never play hockey again. The goal was simply to make a full recovery, but they wouldn’t know that for three months.

Kampfer was a student in my class at the time, which met twice a week at 8:30 in the morning – not the most popular hour for college students. Just one week after the incident, at 8:30 Monday morning, Steve Kampfer walked back into my class, wearing a neckbrace. He never discussed the injury. He never made any excuses. He never missed a single class.

But his life was far from normal. I found out just how far only this week, when his mom gave me a paper he had written for another class. In it, he explains how hard it was just to eat, shower, go to the bathroom, or read a book. Nothing was the way it had been – not even sleeping.

Beyond the inconvenience, there was fear. When he looked in the mirror and saw his neck supported by a huge plastic brace, he knew if he turned his neck just an inch, he could be paralyzed forever. Anytime somebody ran toward him, it scared the hell out of him.

After a few weeks, he started going back to the rink – not to skate, but to ride a stationary bike for five minutes a day. Then eight. Then ten. It was the best part of his day, when he would imagine his bones healing, his neck turning, and himself skating again. And on some days, he let himself dream every hockey player’s dream, of raising the Stanley Cup over his head.

After two months, Kampfer started skating again, and got to work building up his legs, and his heart. Instead of becoming gun-shy, he got tougher, and faster. The next year, he had a strong senior season, earned his degree, then reported to the Boston Bruins’ top farm team in Providence, Rhode Island.

I thought that was great, but was as far as he was going to get. But the Bruins called him up in December 2010, and he played very well, before he injured his knee. Boston went on to win the Stanley Cup for the first time in almost four decades, when Number 4, Bobby Orr, was still a young star.

Kampfer had played in 38 games, three short of the 41 required to get your name engraved on the Stanley Cup. But Boston’s general manager petitioned the league, in the hopes of getting Steven Kampfer’s name on the same silver cylinder as Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky and Steve Yzerman. Those legends all have bigger names, of course, but not better stories.

Last week, Steve Kampfer got the Stanley Cup for a day, one of the NHL’s most cherished customs. He could have held his party in Boston or Ann Arbor, but chose to take the greatest trophy in team sports to downtown Jackson, surrounded by his friends and former coaches and teachers.

Naturally, they all wanted to get their picture taken with Kampfer, hoisting the Cup over his head – and that sucker weighs 50 pounds. I saw him do it over a hundred times. I had to remind myself this was the same kid who, not so long ago, couldn’t lift his own head.

After Kampfer’s friends took their last picture, I said, “Hey Steve – you must have gotten a hell of a workout tonight. Are you feeling it?”

“No way,” he said, with a deeply satisfied smile. “This thing never gets heavy.”

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the upcoming “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football,” due out Oct. 25. You can pre-order the book from Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor or on Amazon.com.

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John U. Bacon

Hard-core hockey fans – and really, are there any other kind? – are all pumped up this week because on Wednesday night, the Chicago Blackhawks scored in overtime to win their first Stanley Cup since 1961. And that harkens back to the era of the so-called Original Six.

But if you’re not a hard-core fan, you probably don’t know what Original Six means. The Hard-Cores will be quick to tell you the Original Six is code for the first six NHL teams. They’re easy to remember, if you think of them in pairs: New York and Boston, Montreal and Toronto, Detroit and Chicago.

Hockey fans revere the Original Six the way basketball fans gush about the Celtics-Lakers rivalry and classical music buffs go on about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. The Original Six has become such a popular catch-phrase, it’s now on a baseball cap, featuring all six team logos. It outsells the caps of most individual teams.

I’ve always suspected the Original Six is such a hot catch-phrase because, for the Hard-Cores, it doubles as a secret password. If you know what the Original Six is, you must be Hard-Core. And if you don’t, you ain’t.

The elusive dream of all Hard-Core hockey fans is another Stanley Cup Final between two Original Six teams. That hasn’t happened since in 1973 1979.

That’s why, when the Red Wings got knocked out of the playoffs by the San Jose Sharks, the Hard-Cores figured, Hey, no problem, the Blackhawks will win the West – which they did.

Now all the Hard-Cores needed was an Original Six team to make it through the Eastern Conference, where four Original Six teams play. But the Philadelphia Flyers came from behind to upset the Boston Bruins, and then took out the legendary Montreal Canadiens, too. And that meant just one Original Six team left standing: The Chicago Blackhawks.

It was no small consolation to the Hard-Cores that the Blackhawks beat Philadelphia in overtime Wednesday night, to notch another Stanley Cup for the Original Six this year. But there’s a catch: The Original Six weren’t original, and there weren’t even six of them.

As George Will once wrote, the best cure for nostalgia is a little history.

When the NHL started in 1917, the league had just five teams, including Montreal and Toronto – the Original Two, if you will. But they also had teams like the Quebec Bulldogs, which became the Hamilton Bulldogs, which became … extinct.

All told, in the NHL’s first 25 years, the league launched 12 teams, but had to move four and kill six, including such bottom feeders as the St. Louis Eagles, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Quakers – who, I’m guessing, were not allowed to fight.

Finally, in 1942, the NHL had boiled the league down to what we now call the Original Six. And that’s how it stayed for the next 25 years, until the NHL expanded again in 1967, ultimately building the current 30-team league.

So the next time you hear some Hard-Core fan gushing about the Original Six, you can one-up the poor guy by saying, “Original Six, eh? Pretty cool. But do you know what would be even cooler? If the Original Six were either.”

While your hockey pal is trying to figure out what you just said, you can walk away with the smug satisfaction of knowing you just bested a Hard-Core – and you didn’t even have to buy a hat to do it.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism; and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.