To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. Most of all, and right to the end, there was hockey. The Aud drew hockey fans right away to watch the American Hockey League’s Buffalo Bisons. Fans were treated to thirty seasons of National Hockey League hopefuls with Calder Cup Finals action during ten of them. The Bisons won the Cup three times in the 1940s, once again in 1963, and as their finale before they folded in 1970 to make room for the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. Jerry Ruszala, now an usher at HSBC Arena, remembers the Bisons games. “I grew up in Kaisertown and I was the only one in the neighborhood who ever played hockey. I mean, we would go to the pond shovel it off, and play, but then I got into the Buffalo Muni League. We played games in Fort Erie at the old barn and at the Auditorium. At the time [in the AHL], along the boards, you had glass which was probably only about three feet high, up to [the corner] and at the back you had fencing around. The penalty box was very unique–it had four seats. Actually five–a policeman sat in the middle. So if teams had a fight, they had a Buffalo cop in the center. If there were four guys in, they could literally reach right over.” Ruszala also remembers life before the Zamboni™, when the ice was resurfaced with 50-gallon drums with spigots on the back. “First the crew would even out the ice with shovels, and then they would walk around with these containers, which had a trough for the hot water and a rag dragging along to spread the water out. It took a little bit longer, but it worked out really nice.” When asked for a memorable Bisons moment, Ruszala pulls out a classic: “When the Bisons won the Calder Cup [in 1970] and Johnny ‘Pie Face’ MacKenzie was drinking champagne in the penalty box.” Buffalo’s proximity to Canada and friendliness with her neighbor has a lot to do with the success of hockey here. The Nichols School was the first secondary school in the United States to have its own indoor hockey rink, and two Nichols alumni, Seymour H. Knox III and his brother Northrup, spent the latter half of the 1960s upping the hockey ante in Buffalo by bringing the NHL to The Aud. In 1970 the Bisons’ run was over, and the Buffalo Sabres were born. The Sabres transformed The Aud in more ways than one. Fans remember how bright the first game was. AHL games didn’t require television lights, and suddenly the old grey Aud was under new scrutiny. The summer following the first season the roof of The Aud was raised 24 feet in a remarkable feat of engineering, and a new balcony level–the Oranges–was added to increase the rink’s capacity by nearly 5,000 seats to 15,858, a more respectable number for an NHL team and the Sabres’ National Basketball Association counterpart, the Buffalo Braves. The Aud likewise influenced the Sabres. She was like a member of the team to Buffalo’s hockey fans. Sabres’ history permeates memories of The Aud, and is told in their telling. After 1970, the Sabres ruled The Aud, and their fortunes seemed to fall with hers. 3 5 Fan enthusiasm for the tradition and excitement of the Bisons spilled over to the Sabres when they took over The Aud’s ice. JOHN BOUTET COLLECTION