Jon Cooper and that time he told his players to murder a bat
CHICAGO – Tampa Bay Lightning coach Jon Cooper is the kind of head coach that inspires confidence in his players. Do what he says, and find success. Follow his instructions, and glory awaits.
Which is why if Jon Cooper tells you to hunt down a bat flying over your rink and then murder it with your hockey stick, you hunt down that bat.
Cooper was the head coach of the Green Bay Gamblers in the USHL from 2008-2010. While we’d like to say he was an awkward, shifting in his shoes introvert who had yet to find his suave, confident tenor with the media … he was pretty much the Jon Cooper that’s lent some swagger to the Lightning’s Stanley Cup run.
Who else could be The Most Interesting Man In Hockey?
It was Dec. 2009, Cooper’s second season. The Gamblers were facing Cedar Rapids. In the third period, there was an uninvited guest to the game: a bat had flown into the arena, and was circling around the ice at a low altitude.
Green Bay goalie Steve Summerhays was genuinely freaked out by the winged rodent, which buzzed around his crease. He attempted to smack it with his goalie stick, to no avail. “That bat was behind me and I was trying to watch the play. I’d rather see a guy coming at me than a bat cruising behind my neck,” he said.
Rather than have all his players potentially become children of the night, Cooper decided to take action.
He made the call to send an elite bat assassination squad (a.k.a. three of his players) onto the ice, armed with their hockey sticks.
[WARNING: IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE A BAT HIT WITH A HOCKEY STICK, DO NOT WATCH THIS]
Play was halted at 16:42 of the third period as they carried out their mission. Two of the players, Brian O’Rourke and Christopher Crane, double-teamed the bat with a flurry of stick swings. They connected, sending the bat down to the ice. One of them wrist-shot it against the boards. It was disposed by the maintenance crew, shoveling it away.
(It’s here that we pause to mention that Crane also had two goals in the game. Plus a dead bat. That’s, um, quite a hat trick.)
The game was back on, and the Gamblers went on to win.
The incident gained national attention in the U.S., so it was only a matter of time before People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals entered into the fray. PETA said that the players’ bludgeoning of the bat was the wrong way to rid themselves of the creature.
“This might have been an annoyance but it was also a living being,” said Tori Perry, the Emergency Response Manager of Cruelty Investigations for PETA, said at the time. “If you have an animal that’s somewhere he’s not supposed to be, you call animal control. It’s not just something where you just go, ‘Oh, we’ll take some hockey sticks to him.'”
But the team did take hockey sticks to him, so Jon Cooper had to address the issue in light of that criticism.
“This has obviously turned into Batgate,” said Cooper. “But the rabies fear was a big one.”
The team says it has received some criticism for killing the bat.
“My thought was the welfare for obviously our players but more importantly it was the welfare of the thousands of fans in the crowd,” said Cooper. “If that bat would have gotten out of the ice surface it could have been a scary situation.”
The team accepted the criticism, and decided to take the bat that fell into their laps and do something good with it – by having fans toss rubber bats on the ice during games, selling them for $2 each at the team store.
“If they want to keep it, they keep it; if they want to throw it on the ice for the first [Gamblers] goal at every home game, we’ll pick them up and recycle them back into the team store [to be purchased and tossed again],” said Terry Charles, PR manager for the Gamblers, to Puck Daddy in 2009.
He said 100-percent of the proceeds from rubber bat sales will go to the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary, which helped nurse injured animals back to health — including bats.
Six years later, the man who ordered the ‘code red’ on a bat menacing the thousands of people at a Wisconsin junior hockey game is just two Tampa Bay Lightning wins away from capturing the Stanley Cup.
The bat, according to our sources?
Still dead.
