It’s Stanley Cup playoff time and that always gets me thinking about the movie Slap Shot. Here’s the plot. Paul Neuman portrays Reggie Dunlop, the player/coach of the Charlestown Chiefs. The team stinks, but Paul turns the team around by getting his players to play like a bunch of goons.
At the end of the movie, the Chiefs play Syracuse for the championship of the Federal League. Can anyone tell me the name of the Syracuse Team? While you’re at it, what are some of the other teams in the Federal League?
Well, the IMDB says it was the Syracuse Bulldogs, but doesn’t list any of the other team names.
I thought this was gonna be about what a hottie Lindsay Crouse was when she was younger. Not too bad-lookin’ today, either (her most recent big role was Prof. Maggie Walsh in Buffy TVS).
Professional sports? You mean, where you sit in your living room and watch a bunch of other guys get paid to play a game? It’s just a fad, it’ll never catch on.
That has to be the only sports picture I ever liked.
I went because of Paul Newman and expected to hate it, but it was great.
I think that’s because it was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd, and so it didn’t just look at the man’s point of view.
Dowd, by the way sometimes writes credited as Ernest Morton or Rob Morton, so she can sell scripts easier. She also wrote for North Dallas Forty, Swing Shift, White Knights,…
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That scene where one of the three brothers skates along the opposing bench and hits every player in the face with the blade of his stick? One of the top 5 funniest clips in all of moviemaking.
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And even if it does catch on, which I can’t fathom, then surely sitting in your car, listening to a bunch of guys at a radio station, talking about watching a bunch of other guys get paid to play a game will never catch on.
I was born and raised in Johnstown, PA, where Slapshot was filmed, and people there still talk about when Paul Newman and the film crew came to town.
The “Chiefs” were based on the Johnstown Jets of the Eastern (and later North American) hockey league, and team members portrayed some of the players in the film. The team renamed itself following release of the film and continues to operate as the Johnstown Chiefs of the East Coast Hockey League. They still play home games in the War Memorial Arena, where much of the film was shot, and the interior today remains instantly recognizable to those who have seen the film.
The Eastern Hockey league was a somewhat volatile organization but teams playing the 1971-72 season included:
Northern Division - Clinton Comets, Johnstown Jets, Long Island Ducks, New Haven Blades and Syracuse Blazers. Southern Division - Charlotte Checkers, Greensboro Generals, Jacksonville Rockets, Roanoke Valley Rebels and St Petersburg Suns.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the names of the fictional teams in the movie.
I knew the Charlestown Chiefs were based on a real team. I didn’t know which one. Good information to know. Did any family or friends wind up as extras in the movie?
I’ve only ever seen it on broadcast TV, with the naughty language and whatnot censored out. There’s one guy who says a particular bad word fairly frequently, that got replaced with “flesh”. For example, someone said something like, “We can have beers by the pool!” and this guy said “We can have FLESH by the pool!”
