Thanks, Cottonmouths, for slithering into our hearts

On days like today, you reflect because it is about all you can do.

The Columbus Cottonmouths, one of the city’s two professional sports franchises, announced they are suspending operations and will not play next year.

It feels like someone from Huntsville slammed you into the boards.

For more than two decades, the Cottonmouths have been here through the good times and the bad. Three professional baseball teams have come and gone while the Cottonmouths just skated along.

Back in 1996, Columbus was on an Olympic high as the world came to Georgia and we got a little piece of it with the softball competition. That was when Charlie Morrow, who owned the minor league baseball team, floated the idea of bringing hockey to the new Civic Center.

It was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. It will never work, I told him. He didn’t listen to me. He did it anyway. It turned out to be a pretty good idea.

Hockey caught on in Columbus, just as it did in other Southern cities.

It was pure, fast-paced entertainment, and it didn’t matter that most of us didn’t know center ice from iced tea. It was something to do in January, February and March when there was no football.

As a sports editor, it was also an adventure.

Trying to find a hockey reporter wasn’t hard. I took one look around the Ledger-Enquirer sports department and saw a bunch of Southern-fried guys like myself — but also Mark Rice, who was from the suburbs of Philadelphia.

I asked him if he was a Flyers fan. He was.

By process of elimination, we had a hockey beat writer. And Mark was outstanding. We made a decision to have fun with it. It was something new, so why not?

Mark started making up nicknames for the players and putting them in his stories. Morrow had already nicknamed his star player, Jerome Bechard, “Boom Boom.” Mark decided to name the team’s top line. Who was I to stop him? I was still trying to understand the concept of off-sides.

When the line of Bechard, Randy Murphy and Marcel Richard started clicking, it made sense to give Murphy and Richard nicknames, too.

As Rice put it, Murphy brought the speed, so he was “Rocket Randy.” Richard brought the dexterity, so he became “Magic Marcel.” It is not the way we would have covered Auburn or Georgia football in 1996, but it was fun.

And soon the Civic Center announcer was using the nicknames in introductions and during the game.

I even took editorial license when Morrow revealed the name of his new team. He was about to announce the formation of the Columbus Cottonmouths. I loved the name, but told him it wouldn’t work and he needed to change it.

He laughed and said that wasn’t happening.

Cottonmouths won’t fit in a one-column headline, I told him. His answer was something to the tune of “Tough luck.”

I got the last word because in the Ledger-Enquirer, the Cottonmouths became the Snakes because Snakes did fit in a one-column headline in 36-point type.

Hockey was fun, a cross between football and wrestling in these parts of the South. And the Snake Pit reflected that in a big way.

But the fighting and physical play — guys slamming each other into the boards with great force — were also a main attraction, even for the youngest fans.

When my daughters were in elementary school — maybe 8 and 6 — I took the girls to a Cottonmouths game. We went to minor league baseball games all the time, so it wasn’t a big deal — or so I thought.

Well, they found out quickly hockey was not like baseball.

The game was intense and in the third period it erupted when one of the bad guys skated into the Cottonmouths goalie. It was one of those hockey fights where Bechard just beat the hell out of some kid who bit off way more than he could chew.

When we got home, the girls were as jacked as Jerome had been an hour earlier and described the fight, blow by blow, to their mother: Jerome punched him in the face, pulled his jersey over his head and kept beating him up before knocking the other guy to the ice.

Oh, and there was blood — plenty of blood, and it wasn’t Jerome’s.

As they talked, I figured it would be the last hockey game I got to take them to.

Carmen, the oldest, could sense there was an issue and that her mother was not happy about the violence they had just witnessed.

“It’s all right,” Carmen told her mother. “When it was over, they put Boom Boom in timeout.”

That has been part of the beauty of the last 21 years. At the end of the day, you are responsible for your own actions; you fight when you have to; you protect your teammates; and there are consequences to everything.

Even an 8-year-old could figure that out.

Jerome epitomized that attitude and philosophy for me and many others. He has probably been to more events in the Civic Center than any other person. He has played and coached in the place for more than two decades.

He has given much of his adult life to Columbus hockey. He has won championships as a player and coach. And he has won the respect of his adopted hometown.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Bechard.

They brought Jerome over from Birmingham in 1996, where he had been the enforcer for the Birmingham Bulls, and management made him the main attraction. Morrow changed his star player’s nickname. In Birmingham, he was Jerome “Stay Out of my Yard” Bechard. Here he was simply “Boom Boom,” the guy who would make time for kids in the grocery store, the baseball game or at the arena. He would take out his false teeth and show that toothless smile.

The kids — and the adults — ate it up because he was a tough guy who was really a teddy bear. What we have also learned over the seasons is his loyalty is unmatched.

He’s the guy who would go home to Saskatchewan just before the season started every year and help his father harvest the alfalfa crop, then come back to the States and go to work.

The truth is, after Charlie died of cancer in March of 1998, we would not have had “Boom Boom” or the Snakes around this long without the commitment of owners Wanda and Shelby Amos.

Wanda was one of those fans who fell in love with the sport — and the players who brought their talents and personalities South. She had the financial wherewithal to support it for 17 years when others couldn’t or wouldn’t. She lost money owning that team, but she kept the dream alive.

But everybody reaches a breaking point. When the Cottonmouths team bus crashed just outside Peoria on Jan. 19 and players were seriously injured, Wanda Amos found her breaking point.

Who can blame her? I certainly don’t.

When people start pointing fingers about why the Snakes won’t be skating in Columbus next season, many of us should probably point the finger in the mirror. We didn’t buy season tickets or we didn’t go to three, four or five games a year when we could have.

I have been in the Civic Center when it was full and the Snakes were skating for a championship. And I have been in there when it was empty and the Snakes were skating for personal pride and little else.

Today is a sad day. And it illustrates that sometimes we don’t support things as we should. As a friend of mine often says, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

But it is also a good day, and one in which we should reflect on 21 great years of Columbus hockey.

This story was originally published May 3, 2017 at 1:47 PM with the headline "Thanks, Cottonmouths, for slithering into our hearts."