To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. When I returned home reeking of stale beer and cigar smoke, my Mom was angry at my Dad for taking me to such a crude event and declared that I couldn’t attend any more wrestling matches.” The very rhythm of life in Buffalo seemed to revolve around The Aud. “Saturday night, always basketball…” recalls Jerry Ruszala. “Canisius, St. Bonaventure, Niagara. Bonaventure played here all the time. That’s when the Little Three, as they called it, was in its prime. And then when the Braves came in, that really hurt, dissolving Little Three basketball. [Little Three] would always draw, five or six thousand people, and it was good entertainment.” Wrestling was to Friday nights what basketball was to Saturdays. Chuck Healy from Channel 4 would cover the matches, recording them on Friday for replay on Saturday. “I mean, Ilio DiPaolo, of course him,” says Ruszala. “Bobo Brazil, Gene Kaniski, the guy with the claw, the Sheik, who was from Iran, supposedly. You never thought it was fake.” Fans remember leaving the hockey games and being able to pick up the next morning’s edition of the CourierExpress, known as the Bulldog edition. You went to the Bills game in the afternoon, and then to the Sabres game. When you left the Sabres game that evening, you could read about the Bills game you just saw that afternoon. Yes, you still had to wait until morning to read about the Sabres game. And everyone seems to have at least one poignant, personal memory of The Aud. Elizabeth Savino remembers Clint Malarchuk’s horrible encounter with a skate blade, “when Jim Pizzutelli, the Sabres’ trainer, pinched Malarchuk’s severed carotid artery until doctors arrived. “I’ve heard that if the accident was at the other end of the ice he wouldn’t have made it. (Remember, the locker rooms at The Aud JOHN BOUTET COLLECTION were at one end of the ice.) I had seats with my husband and my Dad right above the goal. We’ll never forget that night.” “At one time I was a season ticket holder back in the American Hockey League days,” says Sabres’ Official Timekeeper Cliff Smith. “One night I got in a fight with [Bisons player] Freddy Glover. And then the following year I got in a fight with the coach. It got to the point they weren’t going to let me in the building anymore. Freddy Hunt said to me,’One more time and you’re “My first date was at The Aud. outta here.’ That was a fun time.” I was five. Little Pauly Schmitt Then there was the night the power went out at The Aud during a hockey game. “They were holding up signs with the score, at the score table,” recalls Carol Thielke. “You kind of had to know what the score was and how much time was left, because there was no power to the [score] board or the PA system.” came to pick me up (I believe one of his parents actually drove) wearing a coat and tie. I remember feeling like I’d gotten myself into something I didn’t understand. It turns out the coat and tie weren’t for me; Paul’s grandmother had died, and we had to swing by the funeral home on the way to the game. That was my first hockey game, my first time at The Aud, my first time in the Golds. I don’t know who we played or what the score was, just that the Schmitts put me at ease by changing clothes after the funeral home.” “When I was a trooper, we’d always go down to The Aud when the NBA was down there,” remembers an ex-trooper who wishes to remain anonymous. “There’d - Suzanne K. Taylor be maybe five of us working nights, state police detectives. The Dobbyn Game We’d all be in there, and we didn’t have cell The NHL All Stars played the Buffalo Bisons in phones at that time, all we had was radios in a game to benefit Buffalo Bison Bill Dobbyn, our cars. So we told the guys on the desk if who lost his left eye in a stick incident during they needed us to call The Aud. The code word was ‘Dr. Dean, call your office.’ So if a game. This was the first NHL charity game they needed one of us, that would come over against a minor league club, and it was initiated by the NHL teams. 4 2