STADIUM'S SLICK SET OF WHEELS (2024)

It had a four-cylinder Volkswagen industrial engine, a tubular frame with leaf-spring suspension at the rear aaannnddd nylon tires with tungsten tip studs. Standard.

"I'll take it," Bill Wirtz said.

Yes, Bill Wirtz, the Blackhawks' owner. You had him figured for a Mercedes or a Lincoln Town Car? Or maybe one of each? Not back in 1983. He wanted something noisy that didn't go very fast but could really handle the corners.

A new Zamboni.

Hockey coaches and announcers talk about players digging in the corners, trying to get a loose puck or slamming an opponent into the glass to keep him from getting it. But nobody goes into the corners like Danny Ahearn, and he's not even on skates.

Ahearn, 35, sits atop the Zamboni at the Stadium. If you go to a hockey game, you can't miss the Zamboni. It's that big machine that rumbles up and down the ice between periods and gives the ice a shave and a shower.

To keep the shaves close, the Zamboni gets a new blade every week and a tuneup twice a season. Ahearn says the machine never has failed to start, but it has broken down on the ice for thousands of fans to see. What do you do? Give it a push? Call for a tow? Try finding a Zamboni towing service in the Yellow Pages.

Hey, anybody have Zamboni jumper cables?

Ahearn didn't need any of that.

"A set of points broke. I fixed it right away," he said. That was in his second year with the Hawks. Ahearn has been there since the 1980-81 season and hasn't missed a game.

Like most guys, he enjoys talking about what he drives. Size of the engine. How it handles. How you have to put it together.

"When they come, they're not all assembled," Ahearn said. "You have to put some of the parts on."

Then take it for a test drive, but not too fast. No driver's side air bag.

"It has a bucket seat, though," Ahearn said.

From that seat, the Zamboni driver is king as the underside of the machine works its magic. The Zamboni weighs 6,500 pounds empty. Then add 200 gallons of ice-making water and 90 gallons of wash water. Stir gently. Drive carefully.

"There's an actual knife on it (77 inches long) that shaves the ice," Ahearn said. "A horizontal conveyor moves the snow to the center and it throws the snow into a vertical conveyor. That shoots it into the snow tank.

"Behind the blade there are two sprayers with wash water. They wash the ice behind the blade. It's real important. A lot of pro rinks don't use it. It washes all the snow out of the skating cuts, all the dirt and debris. There's a recovery pump that picks it up. You keep recycling that water. A strainer in the wash-water tank strains all the lint and dirt. The fresh water comes out the back, the hot water.

"At the end of one resurfacing, the strainer is full of lint. If you didn't use the wash water, all that junk would be frozen in the ice. The wash water makes a big difference."

Got that?

Ahearn didn't learn all about the Zamboni by poring over a manual. He is pretty much self-taught. Before he came to the Stadium, he worked at the now extinct Jim Campbell rink in Westmont. He had mastered the Zamboni before he was old enough to get behind the wheel of a car.

"I learned how to drive it on my own one day," he said. "I was in the Elmhurst rink to ref a hockey game. I'm 13 years old. The guy that was supposed to work didn't show up. They just had an open skate with about 350 people, and now there's supposed to be a hockey game.

"I said, `Hey, I backed this thing in and out of the garage.' So I drove it on the rink. I knew all the controls. I didn't hit anything."

Avoiding collisions isn't easy at the Stadium. The Zamboni is parked beneath the seats on the west side of the building. The fans gather there before the game and between periods, the same times Ahearn maneuvers past them.

"It's not so bad when you're getting out; it's when you're coming off the ice to try and get back through the lobby," he said. "There are too many people there and you can't get 'em out of the way."

That's hard to figure. You would think most fans would rather take a hit from Stu Grimson than get bumped by a Zamboni. The ice-making machines have been around for more than 40 years, manufactured by the Frank J. Zamboni Co. in Paramount, Calif. A new one costs about $45,000 and an electric one runs about $70,000. That doesn't include a compact-disc player.

The tires have studs to keep the Zamboni from sliding helplessly around the ice. Until the early 1960s, Ahearn said, the machines had sand-coated tires to give them traction. Doing tricks with the machine these days isn't easy.

"Zamboni came out with a new tire," Ahearn said. "You can't make the machine slide. I tried. You'll miss a little spot coming out of the corner and you try and make it slide, and you can't."

Ahearn's path begins as he pulls through the gates and heads toward the benches.

"One time around the sides and up the middle, pick up the sides, pick up the middle again," he said. "At practice sometime I'll do it a different way. It helps keep the ice level."

It's about a 10-minute trip, but the puck-shooting contest between the second and third periods forces Ahearn to push the machine a little harder, taking six or seven minutes and getting up to blazing speeds of 10 to 12 m.p.h.

Ahearn has heard all the wisecracks, like, "Whadddaya got, a Zamboni license?" Some fans want a free ride.

"People ask if they can go for a ride all the time," he said. "Yeah, you can go for a ride if you get me a job. I wouldn't have one when I got done.

"Games are the easy part. People say, `You come here and do this. That's all you do.' Boy, I wish."

The Hawks have two Zambonis. The other machine was bought in 1968, and Ahearn still uses it. He overhauls both machines in the summer and is a source of advice for other teams.

"I know Bruce from Minnesota and Terry from Detroit," Ahearn says of fellow pro Zamboni drivers. "I get calls from other rinks. `What do you guys do? Our players come there. Your ice is so good and ours is so bad.' "

Hawks coaches have liked Ahearn's work-except for . . . you guessed it.

"Mike Keenan, all the time," he said. "Everybody else I never had any problems with. He was complaining about the ice all the time."

You won't hear fans complaining about a gaseous Zamboni making them cough. "There's so much air-handling equipment in this building, that thing could be belching black smoke and you wouldn't smell it," Ahearn said.

The Zamboni had to belch once before when it ate a puck. A player came out when the ice was still being resurfaced before practice. He shot a puck that bounced off the boards and went under the machine-$1,100 worth of parts later it was fixed.

Gas caps have been stolen from the Zamboni. People have tried to peel off the stickers. Maybe the Hawks need to invest in "The Club."

"Before I leave at night," Ahearn said, "I close the burglar gate around it."

And it rests for another run into the corners.