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They Shoot, They Score!

An NHL team puts 'Islanders' on its jerseys, and LI on the map of sports

By John Jeansonne | Staff Writer

We can say with certainty that Long Island put the map on the New York Islanders. But besides the design of the hockey team's logo, the converse is also true: When Bobby Nystrom scored an overtime goal on May 24, 1980, to secure the first of the Islanders' four consecutive hockey championships, the only surviving big-time sports team east of the Queens-Nassau border left its mark on Long Island as well.

Though composed entirely of Canadians at the time, the Islanders became "Our Boys." They became part of the public memory, the flip side of such later identifiers as Hurricane Gloria or the Long Island Lolita. They made headlines; they worked their way into the lingua franca at the local deli or barbershop.

"Sometimes a place gets a bad identity; there's a lot of bad news," said Michael D'Innocenzo, a Hofstra University history professor who has taught courses on sports history. "But the very name, 'Islanders,' helped to give a thrust of territoriality -- our area against other areas -- and that is something that some people respond to, particularly young people."

At the time, Newsday columnist Steve Jacobson wrote that the Islanders were "worth a good substantial yell for their contribution to our sense of well-being. They made a lot of us feel better about ourselves." An estimated 30,000 hockey fans and Long Island chauvinists showed up for a parade along the Nassau Coliseum access roads to celebrate, and then-Nassau County Executive Francis Purcell proclaimed that the Islanders' championship "gives us an identity we've been striving for for a long time. People won't say, 'Where's Long Island?"'

Maybe people do ask, nearly two decades later. After all, the Islanders have spent the 1990s muddling in mediocrity; attendance is down and there have been threats to move the team, whose ownership recently changed hands. But the issue of Long Island's ongoing search for its identity, in the shadow of the Center of the Universe known as New York City, did resonate with the Islanders' birth here in 1972 and with their quick road to the top.

As a National Hockey League expansion team, the Islanders -- like most of the younger generation on Long Island in the 1970s -- had not come from somewhere else. They fit the description of all those residents "not choosing suburbia anymore, those born to it," D'Innocenzo said. They grew up in the equivalent of Levitt housing: the no-frills, affordable Nassau Coliseum.

"There was a sense of community with the Islanders," said Art Feeney of Seaford, an Islander season-ticket holder through all 26 years of their existence. "From the early '70s on, even those first couple of terrible years, there was a sense of difference from New York City, which we never had before."

What made the difference even better was that the team the Islanders dismissed in their first trip to the playoffs was the team of Long Islanders' parents, the New York Rangers. It was the Islanders' bar mitzvah.

They may not have thoroughly represented the Island's expanding cultural diversity -- mostly Canadian, thoroughly Anglo-Saxon, the NHL still has no Latino players and few black players -- but the Islanders were rare evidence that the Island could offer something the equal of what Manhattan had. "It was like trumping the city," D'Innocenzo said.

And, adding to the hominess of the team was the fact that its officials and players were suburbanites to the core, decidedly not New York City people. Coach Al Arbour, the architect of their four championships, had to be flown to the Island from his previous job in St. Louis and shown the trees and grass to convince him this was not the skylines and concrete of Manhattan. When the Islanders won their first Stanley Cup, and it was called New York's first such victory since the Rangers had won in 1940, Islander goalie Bill Smith responded pointedly, "The Stanley Cup is not in New York. It's on Long Island."

Longtime fan Feeney remembers driving away from the Coliseum the afternoon the Islanders won the Cup and being stopped "on Wantagh Avenue by a 70-year-old man who wanted to know what the fuss was. I asked him if he ever had heard of the Islanders and he said no. But when I explained that Long Island's team had just won the hockey championships, he turned the lights on his car and joined the celebration."

Before the Islanders, there were the Long Island Ducks, a minor-league team (1959-73) whose owner, Brooklyn-born Al Baron, called the proximity to New York City "the good news-bad news situation" for sports franchises on the Island. In 1972, the NHL hurriedly had placed an expansion team here, primarily to block competition from the fledgling World Hockey Association. Both leagues recognized that Long Island was the 11th largest metropolitan community in the nation. It had more people than Cleveland, Miami, Atlanta and Denver.

But marketing research done by the Arrows, an indoor soccer team that failed to survive a brief existence at the Coliseum, soon found that there was no clearly defined "Long Island sports market." Television, history and day-to-day business all tied much of the Island to the "New York market." Even the name used by the team -- New York Islanders -- purposely played on the perceived marquee value of Big Town.

The basketball Nets never were quite accepted on Long Island, in spite of featuring two superstars: Rick Barry and, later, Julius Erving. It was widely believed that the Nets were league-impaired -- they were in the newer, less-accepted American Basketball Association until 1976, their final year on the Island before moving to New Jersey. Also, in the early 1970s, all of professional basketball wrestled for a time with a perception that largely white audiences wouldn't support a sport beginning to be dominated by black players.

Just as obviously, long before the Islanders materialized in 1972, Long Island was world famous for "The Great Gatsby" and Levittown, Grumman's lunar module and the Hamptons. But the Islanders' high-profile presence did have something to do with tying together this difficult-to-label place: We are not a state, not a county, not a city. Just home to a four-time hockey champion.

It helped that the Islanders deepened their local roots with years of community service and the fact that several of their players settled here after retirement, among them Bobby Nystrom and original captain Ed Westfall.

And when management changed the team's logo three years ago -- to a design that seemed to be an ad for fish sticks -- it was shouted down by fans. They got the Long Island map back on the Islanders. And perhaps subliminally, vice versa.