There is a major problem on Long Island these days. When the Islanders score a big goal, it’s butchers hugging bakers or electricians hugging teachers, not an account executive Instagramming a picture from the lower bowl with a trendy restauranteur. When Nassau Coliseum is at her best, she captures this feeling and surrounds you with it. In my mind, this is a lot of what the Islanders stood for - they were a team of the community, not a product of a city. He wanted to live in a place where he could sit on his front porch and make his neighbors laugh as they walked past. Like Islander fans, Pop chose this physical place over the glitz of New York City. Pop never realized it, but he was a huge reason I loved the Islanders the way I did. In the old ABA days, Julius Erving regularly dunked there, as well. Elvis and Bruce Springsteen came, and Long Island’s own Billy Joel also rocked the house. Beyond the heyday of the Islanders, there were big concerts. If you go to hockey games simply to watch hockey games, you love the Nassau Coliseum.ĭecades ago, the Coliseum also was a cultural polestar. There isn’t a seat in the entire building where you lose sight of the puck, and the upper-deck seats are closer to the ice than some lower decks in modern arenas. In that era, the Islanders were so good that people started referring to Nassau Coliseum as “Fort Neverlose.”ĮSPN’s ranking system also didn’t take into account the Coliseum’s flawless sightlines. The Coliseum was the home of the 1980s Islander dynasty, a team of folk heroes that won four straight Stanley Cups and 19 (!!) straight playoff series. The place was built for jersey-wearing hardcore fans and those with an appreciation for the sport and the building’s history. ![]() No Islander fan will tell you that the Coliseum is state-of-the-art, and she certainly isn’t beautiful, but neither are the Islanders. Today, an arena is judged based on amenities and concessions rather than the in-game experience it provides. That’s dead last - a position we’ve grown far too accustomed to on Long Island over the last couple of decades as the team struggled.Īnd you know what? ESPN doesn’t have a clue. ![]() Just the other day, ESPN ranked the Coliseum as the 122nd-best home facility in the four major sports. It has long been called a dump and is famously mocked as the “Nassau Mausoleum.” Even the arena’s Wikipedia page calls it “obsolete.” By now, hockey folks have the world convinced that the Coliseum is as useful to the sport as Blockbuster Video is to Hollywood. Gloriously unsponsored, the Coliseum stands as a weathered monolith in Uniondale, an urbanized town right in the middle of the county. Nassau County is the home of the Islanders and the woefully-inadequate-by-modern-standards Coliseum. President.”Īll so many years later, when we would ask him if he got to touch her ass, he would saying nothing, but a sheepish grin would trickle across his face and his blue eyes would twinkle. ![]() The son of an Irish Immigrant, a man whose mother was widowed with eight kids after Pop was born, literally had set the stage for Monroe’s infamously taunty “Happy Birthday, Mr. None was more interesting than the time he, along with his partner Al Gore (not the guy who invented the Internet), served as bodyguards for Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962.Īs the story goes, Monroe’s dress was too tight for her to navigate the stairs, so Pop and Al Gore had to hoist her up to get her up on stage. ![]() Well-regarded by both his peers and supervisors, Pop began getting picked for some batty assignments. After a few years on the force, he joined thousands of other veterans and moved his family east to the suburbs. Pop served in World War II, came back alive, got hitched, and joined the New York (City) Police Department. He was, though, as much of a full-blooded Islander as anybody I knew. Born in The Bronx almost 90 years ago, there were way too many generational hurdles for him to get into hockey. Unlike his borderline lunatic grandson, my grandfather (“Pop”) never got into the Islanders. My family’s story is quintessentially Long Island. Everybody has a story about how they originally got where they came from.
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