Balanced Bruins

Though baseball is popularly supposed to be America's sweetheart, most popular U. S. sport is basketball, which last year drew some 95,000,000 paying customers.

Ninth in the affections of U. S. sports fans* is hockey, a magnificent spectacle, like polo, of trial and error. Its followers are few (6,000,000) but frenetic. Of these, not more than 20% get excited about hockey's one major league (the National Hockey League).

Last week New York Ranger Coach Frank Boucher had some hot words for these million-odd rink-siders. Few of them, said he, knew what the world's fastest game was all about. To most of them hockey was a haphazard free-for-all in which someone occasionally slammed the puck into the net. Advised he: "Forget about the puck for a while and watch the way attack and defense form." To the average fan, this was a counsel of perfection. So fast is hockey that players have to make their snap decisions while spurting 30 ft. a second. Fans have all they can do to follow the zigzagging black puck. Nevertheless, as all hockey players know, most goals are the result not of luck or individual brilliance but of teamwork and well-timed, long-rehearsed plays.

Goals are the business of a hockey team's forward line, and the best forward line in hockey is the Boston Bruins' famed "Kraut Line": Right Wing Bobbie Bauer, Centre Milt Schmidt, Left Wing Porky Dumart, who grew up together in Kitchener, Ont., Canada's "Little Berlin." Last season (their first in the big time) they spread-eagled every other forward line in the league by scoring 61 goals--more than a third of the Bruins' total for the season.

Last week, behind the Kraut Line, the Bruins snowed the New York Americans under, 8 goals to 3, to salt away their third straight National Hockey League title (26 wins, 8 losses, 12 ties). The Bruins had just managed to nose out Toronto's Maple Leafs, who had the same number of wins, six fewer ties, six more losses. Never before had any team won three titles in a row. Starting the season sluggishly, the Bruins suddenly clicked, went 23 games without a defeat, an all-time record. Chortled Manager Art Ross: "My gang would be great in any era."

Balance is the word for the Bruins. Their second line, almost as good as the Krauts, has Centre Bill Cowley, at week's end the league's leading scorer (15 goals, 44 assists). Their third line is not to be sneezed at. Neither is Defense Man Dit Clapper, sole remaining star of the Bruins' championship 1929 team, who has a better than even chance to end up the season with the league's Hart (most valuable player) trophy. Only native American on the team is Goalie Frank ("Kid Zero") Brimsek, of Eveleth, Minn., who as a rookie three seasons ago gave the Bruins six shutouts in his first seven games. With two games to go last week, Brimsek was just three goals behind Detroit's Johnny Mowers in the battle for this year's goalie honors. In 46 games he had allowed only 99 goals to be scored against him.

Still ahead of the Bruins were the annual Stanley Cup play-offs -- one of the silliest competitions in all professional sport. Emblematic of the world's professional championship, the Stanley Cup is awarded, not to the winner of the National Hockey League's season schedule, but to the winner of a postseason, round-robin tourney between the league's top six teams. In other words, the regular season's play does nothing but eliminate one team (the seventh). Any team, even the lowest-ranking, stands to win the playoffs. But even the addicts wanted heavy odds against the potent Bruins for this year's Stanley Cup.

*First eight, in order: basketball, softball baseball, football, boxing, horse, harness, dog-racing.

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