On Tue, 10 Dec 1991 13:30:49 LCL Tom Tseng said:
>
>I don't think throwing hats for hat tricks is a Lynah Rink tradition per se but
>I seem to remember people doing it.
 
Throwing hats isn't a particular Lynah Rink tradition, but it's been
going on at rinks all over for decades. I think the reason you don't
see as many hats as you see sieves, tennis balls, fish, etc. is
simply a matter of personal economics; i.e., when someone brings a
sieve or a tennis ball or an inflatable love doll to a hockey game,
they intend to throw it on the ice, leave it there and that's that,
but when somebody brings a hat to a hockey game, they expect to
wear it home. Most of the time, when somebody throws a hat on the
ice at Lynah (or more usually, when somebody's friend throws his
friend's hat on the ice), the owner comes around after the game to
retrieve the hat from the penalty box.
>
>
>A really fun sight to watch at Lynah is the newspaper routine.  As Arthur Mintz
>opened the game by introducing the opposing team's starting lineup, the
>students (and some die-hard old timers) would hold up the Cornell Daily Sun in
>front of their faces, yelling "Boring, boring, boring....."  At the conclusion
>of the intro, we would all crumple the paper and throw balls of newspaper onto
>the ice.
>     Here is a bit of a history question:  Can someone tell me how does the
>newspaper routine become a routine?  I thought it was part of the
>Harvard-Cornell tradition, but now we do it at all the games.
 
This tradition is more than a few years old, but less than 25 (by
that I mean that it wasn't done when I was a student [1967-71] but
was started some time in the interim. It's meant, of course, to show
how little the fans are interested in the opposing team, that they
would rather read the newspaper than watch the introduction. As the
sports writer for the Ithaca Times, however, I would much prefer it
it the fans would hold up the Ithaca Times rather than the Cornell
Sun!