RALEIGH, North Carolina. As the Carolina Hurricanes prepare to take the Stanley Cup on its first tour of tobacco country, National Hockey League officials say they will increase security against a risk the silver bowl has never faced before: smokeless tobacco, which is considered one of the four basic food groups by many NASCAR fans.
"Lord Stanley didn't donate his challenge cup to be used as a spitoon," said NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, "and our fear is that every Joe Don and Gene Ray in NASCAR country will #### it up with their spit."
Mike Helton, President of NASCAR, said he found Bettman's concern overblown. "Thath ith the motht dithguthting and inthulting sthereotype," he said as brown juice dripped from the corner of his mouth. "Bettman's jutht jealouth of our TV ratingth."
"Smokeless tobacco" is the sanitized term used by manufacturers of snuff and chewing tobacco, the two forms of the product that is referred to by its users as "chew", "chaw", "dip" and "plug". Snuff is fine-grain tobacco that a user "pinches" between his or her lower lip and gum, while chewing tobacco takes the form of shredded tobacco leaves that users put between their cheeks and their gums.
The Stanley Cup is a silver bowl that measures 7.5" inches in height and 11.5" across, and was donated by Lord Stanley, Earl of Preston and Governor General of Canada, as a challenge cup in 1892 to be awarded annually to Canada's champion hockey team. In donating the silver bowl, Lord Stanley said that he wanted it to remind hockey players of "the importance of having the game played fairly and under rules generally recognized, and not to be used as a cooler for Coors Light Beer, which will not be invented for another century."
Some NASCAR fans took offense at Bettman's statement. Jim Ray Embree, owner of an LP gas store in Aiken, South Carolina, said "Hockey dads in the Northeast kill each other over practice times, and they're looking down they're nose at us?"
Others said the NHL's was overreacting. "Nobody's gonna spit in it," said Darrell Dunham of Charlotte, North Carolina. "More likely the wimmen folk will use it for potato salad."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
