To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. The Building At The Aud you could see someone you hadn’t seen in years. From the opposite side of the rink. Players talk about the fans being so close and the acoustics being so clear that they could hear everything the fans yelled and could even pick out the hecklers in the crowd. René Robert, right winger of the legendary French Connection line, told WGRZ in its tribute to the Aud, Farewell Old Friend: “Game in, game out, it was the same faces you saw, regardless of where you were. If you happened to focus somewhere, they’d all be sitting there every game. They wouldn’t miss a game. It was like going to church on Sunday.” really f ly, and they should have had a bigger ice surface, not smaller,” explains Budd Bailey, former Director of Information for the Sabres. Size isn’t everything, however, and The Aud had certain characteristics that balanced its limitations. Like the door to the Sabres’ locker room, for example. BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE LIBRARY BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE LIBRARY There was a certain f lexibility to the boards at The Aud. Sabres Coach Lindy Ruff fondly recalls in Farewell Old Friend the noise they generated in his days as a Sabres defenseman. “Ah, the boards, the glass, the rattle. You know, you could barely hit a guy and it sounded like you put him through the end of the rink.” The rink itself was small, one of the last to be smaller than NHL regulation size. While the Sabres skated well on the small rink and had an edge over teams not used to the size, “they had players who could The rink door to the Sabres’ locker room was the Seventh Man. The Sabres shot on that goal during the second period when coincidentally, a certain Sabres employee would position himself at that door. If the puck curled around the boards in front of that door, a well-timed, imperceptible kick from assistant equipment manager Encil “Porky” Palmer could send the puck suddenly ricocheting up to the slot for a scoring opportunity. Clockwise from top: The installation of the final scoreboard, repair of the pipes in the rink, and the installation of the fiberglass boards. BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE LIBRARY 1 4