Al The Octopus
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Al The Octopus
Al the Octopus is the mascot of the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League. During many games, octopuses are thrown onto the ice by fans for good luck, this usually occurring after the national anthem is sung or after a goal is scored. This Legend of the Octopus tradition, started on April 15, 1952,Starkey, Joe (May 30, 2009). "Octopi to fly at Joe Louis Arena", originally published in the ''Pittsburgh Tribune-Review''. Distributed nationally by McClatchy-Tribune News Service. when two brothers, Pete and Jerry Cusimano, who owned a fish market, decided to throw an octopus onto the ice at Olympia Stadium, with the eight tentacles of the octopus symbolizing the eight wins it took to win the Stanley Cup at the time.Ryan, Shannon (May 19, 2009). "Flying octopi: When Red Wings fans throw 'em, he picks 'em up", ''Chicago Tribune'', p. I3.Newman, Stanley (November 25, 2006). "Mascot's past fishy", ''Windsor Star'', p. G6. The Red Wings were a perfect 7–0 in the playoffs and we ...
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Detroit Red Wings Vs
Detroit ( , ; , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the Canada–United States border, United States–Canada border, and the County seat, seat of government of Wayne County, Michigan, Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of United States cities by population, 27th-most populous city in the United States. The metropolitan area, known as Metro Detroit, is home to 4.3 million people, making it the second-largest in the Midwestern United States, Midwest after the Chicago metropolitan area, and the 14th-largest in the United States. Regarded as a major cultural center, Detroit is known for its contributions to Music of Detroit, music, art, Architecture of metropolitan Detroit, architecture and design, in addition to its historical automotive background. ''Time (magazine), Time'' named Detroit as one o ...
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Mascot
A mascot is any human, animal, or object thought to bring luck, or anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name. Mascots are also used as fictional, representative spokespeople for consumer products. In sports, mascots are also used for merchandising. Team mascots are often related to their respective team nicknames. This is especially true when the team's nickname is something that is a living animal and/or can be made to have humanlike characteristics. For more abstract nicknames, the team may opt to have an unrelated character serve as the mascot. For example, the athletic teams of the University of Alabama are nicknamed the Crimson Tide, while their mascot is an elephant named Big Al. Team mascots may take the form of a logo, person, live animal, inanimate object, or a costumed character, and often appear at team matches and other related events, sports mascots are of ...
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Detroit Red Wings
The Detroit Red Wings (colloquially referred to as the Wings) are a professional ice hockey team based in Detroit. The Red Wings compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a member of the Atlantic Division (NHL), Atlantic Division in the Eastern Conference (NHL), Eastern Conference, and are one of the Original Six teams of the league. Founded in 1926–27 NHL season, 1926, the team was known as the Detroit Cougars until 1929–30 NHL season, 1930. For the 1930–31 NHL season, 1930–31 and 1931–32 NHL season, 1931–32 seasons, the team was named the Detroit Falcons, before changing their name to the Red Wings in 1932–33 NHL season, 1932. , the Red Wings have won the most Stanley Cup championships of any NHL franchise based in the United States (11), and are third overall in total Stanley Cup championships, behind the Montreal Canadiens (24) and Toronto Maple Leafs (13). The Wings played their home games at Joe Louis Arena from 1979 until 2017, after playing for 52 years ...
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National Hockey League
The National Hockey League (NHL; french: Ligue nationale de hockey—LNH, ) is a professional ice hockey league in North America comprising 32 teams—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. It is considered to be the top ranked professional ice hockey league in the world, and is one of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. The Stanley Cup, the oldest professional sports trophy in North America, is awarded annually to the league playoff champion at the end of each season. The NHL is the fifth-wealthiest professional sport league in the world by revenue, after the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the English Premier League (EPL). The National Hockey League was organized at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal on November 26, 1917, after the suspension of operations of its predecessor organization, the National Hockey Association (NHA), which had been founded in 1909 i ...
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Legend Of The Octopus
The Legend of the Octopus is a sports tradition during Detroit Red Wings home playoff games involving dead octopuses thrown onto the ice rink. The origins of the activity go back to the 1952 playoffs, when a National Hockey League team played two best-of-seven series to capture the Stanley Cup. Having eight arms, the octopus symbolized the number of playoff wins necessary for the Red Wings to win the Stanley Cup. The practice started April 15, 1952, when Pete and Jerry Cusimano, brothers and storeowners in Detroit's Eastern Market, hurled an octopus into the rink of Olympia Stadium. The team swept the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens en route to winning the championship. Since 1952, the practice has persisted with each passing year. In one 1995 game, fans threw 36 octopuses, including a specimen weighing . The Red Wings' unofficial mascot is a purple octopus named Al, and during playoff runs, two of these mascots were also hung from the rafters of Joe Louis Arena, s ...
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
The ''Pittsburgh Tribune-Review'', also known as "the Trib," is the second largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Although it transitioned to an all-digital format on December 1, 2016, it remains the second largest daily in the state, with nearly one million unique page views a month. Founded on August 22, 1811, as the ''Greensburg Gazette'' and in 1889 consolidated with several papers into the ''Greensburg Tribune-Review'', the paper circulated only in the eastern suburban counties of Westmoreland and parts of Indiana and Fayette until May 1992, when it began serving all of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area after a strike at the two Pittsburgh dailies, the ''Pittsburgh Post-Gazette'' and ''Pittsburgh Press'', deprived the city of a newspaper for several months. The Tribune-Review Publishing Company was owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, until his death in July 2014. Sca ...
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McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Tribune Content Agency (TCA) is a syndication company owned by Tribune Publishing. TCA had previously been known as the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (CTNYNS), Tribune Company Syndicate, and Tribune Media Services. TCA is headquartered in Chicago, and had offices in various American cities (Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Queensbury, New York; Arlington, Texas; Santa Monica, California), the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong. History Sidney Smith 's early comic strip ''The Gumps'' had a key role in the rise of syndication when Robert R. McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, who had both been publishing the ''Chicago Tribune'' since 1914, planned to launch a tabloid in New York, as comics historian Coulton Waugh explained: Patterson founded the Chicago Tribune Syndicate in 1918, managed by Arthur Crawford.Watson, Elmo Scott"The Era of Consolidation, 1890-1920" (Chapter VII) in ''A History Of Newspaper Syndicates In The United States, 18 ...
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Olympia Stadium
Detroit Olympia, also known as Olympia Stadium, was a multi-purpose arena in Detroit. Nicknamed "The Old Red Barn", it was best known as the home of the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League (NHL) from its opening in 1927 to 1979. History Several Detroit businessmen organized the Detroit Hockey Club, Inc. in 1926 and purchased the Victoria Cougars hockey team, along with a site at the corner of Grand River Avenue and McGraw Street to construct an arena and engaged Detroit-based Walbridge Aldinger as general contractor. In July 1926, the Detroit Hockey Club unveiled drawings for the Olympia Stadium to be built on the site. The cornerstone for the building was laid by Mayor John W. Smith on March 8, 1927. The Olympia opened on October 15, 1927; at that time the only other buildings that exceeded its seating capacity were Madison Square Garden and the London Olympia. The opening event was the International Stampede and Rodeo, which ran from October 15 to October 22. Shortl ...
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Hartford Courant
The ''Hartford Courant'' is the largest daily newspaper in the U.S. state of Connecticut, and is considered to be the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States. A morning newspaper serving most of the state north of New Haven and east of Waterbury, its headquarters on Broad Street in Hartford, Connecticut is a short walk from the state capitol. It reports regional news with a chain of bureaus in smaller cities and a series of local editions. It also operates ''CTNow'', a free local weekly newspaper and website. The ''Courant'' began as a weekly called the ''Connecticut Courant'' on October 29, 1764, becoming daily in 1837. In 1979, it was bought by the Times Mirror Company. In 2000, Times Mirror was acquired by the Tribune Company, which later combined the paper's management and facilities with those of a Tribune-owned Hartford television station. The ''Courant'' and other Tribune print properties were spun off to a new corporate parent, Tribune Publishing ...
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Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television are named), it remains the most-read daily newspaper in the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region. It had the sixth-highest circulation for American newspapers in 2017. In the 1850s, under Joseph Medill, the ''Chicago Tribune'' became closely associated with the Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln, and the Republican Party's progressive wing. In the 20th century under Medill's grandson, Robert R. McCormick, it achieved a reputation as a crusading paper with a decidedly more American-conservative anti-New Deal outlook, and its writing reached other markets through family and corporate relationships at the ''New York Daily News'' and the ''Washington Times-Herald.'' The 1960s saw its corporate parent owner, Tribune Company, rea ...
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Windsor Star
The ''Windsor Star'' is a daily newspaper based in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Owned by Postmedia Network, it is published Tuesdays through Saturdays. History The paper began as the weekly ''Windsor Record'' in 1888, changing its name to the ''Border Cities Star'' in 1918, when it was bought by W. F. Herman. The ''Border Cities Star'' was a daily newspaper published from September 3, 1918, until June 28, 1935. The founders W. F. Herman and Hugh Graybiel purchased the existing daily newspaper, the ''Windsor Record'' (known as the ''Evening Record'' from 1890 to November 1917), from John A. McKay on August 6, 1918. There was some conflict before the men purchased the newspaper. The ''Windsor Record'' had only partial wire service, and some felt that the national and international news was not sufficiently covered. Originally, the ''Border Cities Star'' was intended to be a rival daily newspaper to the ''Windsor Record''. However, Herman's application to Canadian Press Limited for f ...
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Al Sobotka
Al Sobotka (born October 16, 1953) is the former building operations manager for Olympia Entertainment. His responsibilities included day-to-day operations at Little Caesars Arena. Sobotka was fired on March 30, 2022. He was also involved in the operations of Cobo Arena until Olympia Entertainment relinquished management in 2011 and Joe Louis Arena until it closed for good in 2017. Sobotka is known mostly for driving the Zamboni during Detroit Red Wings games for the past 30 years and for collecting the octopuses thrown on the ice during Red Wings playoff games. The official mascot of the Red Wings is named after Sobotka. Sobotka came in second with 97,261 votes in Zamboni News' 1999 Zamboni "Driver of the Year" Award. Sobotka's role as Zamboni driver Sobotka had been driving the Zamboni between periods at Joe Louis Arena for over 30 years until the arena's closure in the spring 2017 and currently drives the Zamboni between periods at the new Little Caesars Arena, beginning in the f ...
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