Everyone has their favorites at Thanksgiving: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing or green bean casserole.
My favorite? My wife’s made-from-scratch cranberry sauce (maybe I’ll stick the recipe in the comments —it’s life-changing).
It also seems like every Thanksgiving has some bizarre food or ritual that has carried on from generation to generation and makes its annual appearance. Maybe your Thanksgiving includes the pecan pie your Grandma Lucy always made, even though your nephew Cameron has a severe nut allergy. Sorry, Cam — if you can’t survive being around Lucy’s pecan pie, you can’t come to Thanksgiving.
Lastly, everyone’s had that uncle or sister-in-law who stays at your home for the long weekend and clips their fingernails at your kitchen table or turns your bathroom upside-down.
So in honor of Thanksgiving, I asked a handful of Hurricanes a few questions — a couple with a hockey angle — to which we all can relate: which player has the strangest superstition, who keeps the messiest hotel room and what is their favorite late November holiday food.
Who has the weirdest superstition or ritual?
My brother was an Orioles fan when we were kids, and his favorite player was Ken Singleton. Singleton played the last 10 years of his career in Baltimore, earning MVP votes six times before handing the reins of the O’s to Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken Jr.
That’s not why my brother liked him. He gravitated to the Orioles slugger because of his quirky routine. Singleton would pick up three pebbles from the batter’s box during each at-bat as a reminder that the pitcher needed three pitches to strike him out, while he needed just one good swing to win the duel.
There are plenty of rituals and superstitions that are well-known in the NHL, including whether or not to touch the Prince of Wales Trophy or Clarence S. Campbell Bowl after winning a conference title, and not touching the Stanley Cup until you’ve won it.
When Dougie Hamilton was with the Hurricanes, he used to have a routine of circling the net and then mimicking a shot toward the opposing goalie at the start of each period. Current defenseman Jalen Chatfield, in the words of Brady Skjei, does three or four “stop and starts from the blue line to the top of the circles.”
But the most interesting thing I found when asking around about superstitions was summarized by coach Rod Brind’Amour — who used to put his gloves on the wrong hands in team pictures — when I asked him about things he saw during his playing days.“The thing about superstitions is, if they’re done right, nobody else really knows that you’re doing them, to be quite honest,” he said. “So everybody has ’em. Most people don’t even know the majority of them. So I wouldn’t be able to tell you because I don’t know.”
