LOCKER ROOM:When the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup last week I was almost as as happy as if the Dubs had won the Liam MacCarthy, writes Tom Humphries

NOTHING GETS a column up and running like a little name dropping. As Damon Runyon used to tell me when we'd be carousing with Hemingway, a well dropped name is the isotonic drink of the columnising business.

So here's one. Chris Chelios. Once upon a time I was on a flight from Chicago to San Diego and I was in the aisle seat because I am quick and nimble of body and mind and airlines like to have me in the aisle in case the plane needs pulling out of a nosedive or an ailing passenger needs somebody to fashion a defibrillator out of a ballpoint pen. Or vice versa.

Anyway I'm not one for striking up conversations with the persons next to me partly because generally they haven't paid extra for the privilege and also I have very little of interest to say for myself. I also find that when I start talking to strangers my dread of a lull in conversation is such that I tend to turn conversations into newspaper interviews. I just ask long strings of questions while on autopilot. I could question a person long haul all the way to Australia if Amnesty would allow such things. All questions, mind you, the answers to which I have no interest in hearing but which make me look like an attentive and sincere sort of chap. Which of course I am.

Anyway, on the way to San Diego the slim, tanned man beside me foolishly engaged me in conversation and then surprised me by using my patented technique of asking lots of questions he cannot really have cared about hearing the answers to.

Having established what I did for a living (the sportswriting not the male-model sideline), he went on to cross-examine me about my knowledge of US sports. I assured him this was so encyclopaedic that readers at home complained constantly about how they felt intellectually dwarfed by my grasp of such a huge subject in which they had no interest.

Anyway, when we landed, a small queue formed at our seat to ask the guy beside me for his autograph. He obliged with grace and nice handwriting and as we prepared to get off, or deplane as the Americans say so vividly, he shook my hand and asked my name. He introduced himself as Chris Chelios. I have been a fan of his ever since, though he never writes and he never calls.

Last week at the age of 46 Chris Chelios (certainly my closest friend in ice hockey) won his third Stanley Cup medal. He was playing for the Detroit Red Wings, and reading news of it all made me happy.

There is no presentation ceremony of a major trophy in sport quite like that for the Stanley Cup. The trophy is immense and beautiful and gets handed over to the winning captain (this year Niklas Lidstrom of Sweden, the first European captain of a winning side), who skates around with it on the near-empty rink before heading back to his teammates and handing it to a player of his choosing, who then performs the same ritual before handing it to another player, and so on.

(When the Dubs win the Liam MacCarthy in a few years' time it is the way to go with the presentation ceremony; Ro Fallon lifting the Cup, doing half a lap and handing it to David Treacy, scorer of the winning point, and so on)

Usually, because of a widespread superstition dating back to the early 1980s when the New York Islanders won the cup having decided not to shave during the endless weeks of play-off activity, the winning team will look like the cast of Vagrants on Ice.

For somebody older than me to be at the top of his sport (a tough pro sport at that and one that isn't golf) is a rare and fine achievement in which I take as much pride as does my buddy Chris Chelios himself.

As for Detroit, it's a burnt-out shell of a town in many ways but a place that retains a sharp character all of its own, and the win was a tonic, greeted on the streets of downtown by 1.3 million people.

Ice hockey is a great game. Not for television maybe but a rip-roaring, culturally engaging sports with loads of historical resonances and, in Canada especially, a sense of being rooted in the communal soul in much the same way the GAA is here.

I first fell for hockey after reading The Game by Ken Dryden, a book I believe to be the best sports book ever written and the one I would wager gets ripped off the most thoroughly and frequently in terms of structure and tone by sportswriters wishing to affect a little gravitas in their ghosting tasks. I see echoes of it everywhere.

Dryden was a lawyer but also goaltender to the Montreal Canadiens dynasty team in the 1970. His book, being a riveting account of life inside a dressingroom, is also learned enough to consider the cultural importance of hockey to Canada, a subject he returned to in Home Game, a collaborative effort with Roy McGregor and again a much used template for sports books.

The other night in Pittsburgh, Chelios was the fourth Wings player to be handed the Cup for a skate-around. It was handed to him by Dan Cleary, who, astonishingly, is the first player from Newfoundland to have won a Stanley Cup. I don't know Dan in quite the same was I know Chris but . . .

A feature of Newfoundland's celebrated Irishness (apparently it's the only place outside Europe to have its own version of its name in Irish, Talamh an Éisc) is that for 60 years from 1790 onward 85 per cent of the Irish who landed there were from Wexford, Kilkenny, Waterford or Southeast Tipperary.

One of the hoary myths surrounding the origins of ice hockey is that a frustrated hurler dropped a ball on the ice in Newfoundland one day and followed up, pulling hard on the ice.

What is certain is with such a large proportion of the population coming from hurling country (another wedge came from east Cork but spent the period on strike) the game of hurling thrived for quite some time in Newfoundland and records show an 18th-century bishop complaining about the riotous scenes that would follow hurling games there.

As well as speaking with Irish accents, Newfies - as they are called in jokes based on their suppose dumbness - widely spoke a form of Irish until the middle of the last century. In the town of St John there is a place on Water Street known as Yellowbelly Corner, it being the spot where General Finn of Waterford fought General Muldowney of Wexford (Finn won but lost his job through player power).

Through all those generations of Irishness and down the years of Newfoundland's proud tradition of both hurling and ice hockey it is odd that Dan Cleary of Riverhead should be the first Newfie to skate with the Stanley Cup.

There can be little doubt though that when Dan skated back across the ice and chose Chris Chelios to hand the Cup to for the next skate-around they were both keenly conscious of the Irish connection, Cleary being the son of Kevin Cleary with a lineage stretching right back to the ould sod and Chelios being such close buddies with, well, that guy off da plane.