This iconic silver trophy, which is handed out each year to hockey's champion, carries with it the marks of another, quieter history -- decades of botched spellings, spacing gaffes, repeated words and the unsightly results of attempts to fix them.
The Stanley Cup has more than a dozen engraving typos ranging from misspellings and spacing gaffes to repeated words and deletions. As more players with hard-to-spell names enter the league, the engraver says the challenge is growing. Click to see a brief history of the engraving errors on the Stanley Cup.
Over the years words like "Ilanders" (Islanders), "Leaes" (Leafs) and "Bqstqn" (Boston) have found their way onto the cup, while more than a dozen players and coaches have had their names butchered. Former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jacques Plante had the misfortune of having his first name spelled four different ways in the span of five years.
Wary of the Russians
This season, thanks in part to the growing ranks of players with Eastern European and Scandinavian roots, the engraver may have to contend with the likes of Ruslan Fedotenko, Dustin Byfuglien and Niklas Hjalmarsson.
"With the Russians' names, you have to double-check and re-check again," says Ms. St. Jacques, who has been the exclusive silversmith working on the Stanley Cup since 1989. "Sometimes you go, 'Oh, is that how it's spelled?' "
The original Stanley Cup was a punch bowl purchased in London for about $50 in 1892 by Sir Frederick Arthur, Lord Stanley of Preston, a governor general of Canada who donated it to be presented to the winners of an early hockey championship played in Canada. By tradition, each team that wins the Stanley Cup gets to put 52 names on it (a recent allowance), and over the years, more silver bands have been added to accommodate them all. Every 13 years, an old band is removed and placed in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.
Hockey's top prize, the Stanley Cup, is engraved by hand. The human touch is the reason that, for several NHL teams and players, their claim to fame is literally misspelled.
The NHL could cut down dramatically on these quirks by employing laser-etching tools that would make the letters and names perfectly uniform. Instead, the league aims to preserve tradition by sticking with the old system.
So after a new champion is crowned, the Hockey Hall of Fame sends the cup and the list of names, which have been approved by the NHL, to Boffey Silversmiths in Montreal, the firm that has been handling the engraving since 1980.
Tiny Metal Letters
At the shop, the bands are removed from the cup and attached to a circular "jig" that's about the same shape and size as the cup. There, Ms. St. Jacques painstakingly hammers the 52 names into the bands using tiny metal letters. The process takes weeks, mainly because the spacing has to be perfect. "It demands a lot of concentration," says Ms. St. Jacques, who says mistakes are a constant source of anxiety. If the phone rings or somebody walks in, she says, "that can really do it to you."
The Morning Tip-Off
The mistakes date back at least to the 1930s, when Pete Palangio of the Chicago Blackhawks had his name mistakenly engraved twice -- once spelled incorrectly as "Palagio." Toronto Maple Leafs player Gaye Stewart's name has been misspelled twice -- once as "Steward" and once as "Gave." Maple Leafs goalie Walter Broda got his name on the cup twice after winning in 1942, once as Walter and once as "Turk," his nickname.
Unfortunate Job Title
One cup quirk isn't actually a mistake, but a victim of an unfortunate change in popular lexicon. Frank Selke was an assistant manager for the Maple Leafs when they won the cup in 1945. His title is abbreviated as "ass man." Says Philip Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, "We don't tell a lot of people about the ass man," he says. "Players love the story, though."
Players have mixed reactions when their names end up misspelled on the cup. Mike Bolt, a "keeper of the cup" whose full-time job is to travel around with the Stanley Cup and make sure nothing happens to it, says he was the person who broke the news to Red Wings goalie Manny Legace that his last name was spelled "Lagace" after the 2002 Stanley Cup.
It was opening day the following season, he remembers, and Mr. Bolt opened his speech by saying, "Well, there's good news and there's good news." He told Mr. Legace that his name had been spelled wrong on the cup, but added that the error would make him forever a part of Stanley Cup lore. "Manny got it," says Mr. Bolt. (The NHL eventually had the engraver fix the name by turning the a into an e.)
The Stanley Cup in May 1996
It's hard to imagine hockey players, who take checks to the boards without wincing, getting too upset about a spelling problem. Mr. Pritchard, who begs to differ, says he witnessed the reaction of Colorado Avalanche player Adam Deadmarsh, whose name was spelled "Deadmarch" after winning the 1996 Stanley Cup. "He was almost in tears," says Mr. Pritchard.
A Row of X's
Not all the gaffes were the engraver's fault. Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington actually had his father's name engraved onto the cup after the team won the 1984 championship. The NHL asked Ms. St. Jacques to cover up the name, so she concealed it by hammering in a line of X's.
A replica of the Stanley Cup, which is displayed at the Hall of Fame in Toronto when the original cup is not there, has had all the known mistakes corrected. In recent years, the NHL has had a few errors corrected. But when it comes to all the old mistakes, the NHL says it prefers to keep them the way they are.
"You don't go back and change history -- that's why the older names are left the same," Mr. Bolt says. "Every publication, any book out there has got spelling mistakes. Of course, on the Stanley Cup, it's a little more permanent, but it gives it that human element."
