Fred Atkins was truly a physical giant, not a grotesque, but an awesome chunk of humanity. He reminded me of the late Fred Gwynne, a television actor who played an amiable Frankenstein with platform shoes, a prosthesis head, and shoulder pads that made Gwynne lurch through scenes as a friendly grizzly bear.

Fred Atkins had it all for real. He stood about 6’6″ or so and was Hummer-wide. His leonine head was topped by jet black hair, the result of dye job after dye job from his days attempting to remain youthful in the fast-turnover world of professional wrestling.

Fred was an Australian who came to North America to pursue the bucks available to successful professional wrestlers in the days when Gorgeous George turned the sport from sport to exhibition.

Fred didn’t wrestle as a clown or a good guy or even a bad guy. He wrestled in the days when there were real matches. Even if the winner might be predetermined, the wrestlers really did put on a show of wrestling. In short, they beat the hell out of each other and had a beer afterward.

Atkins had been introduced to the yearling Sabres midway through their first season, after Punch Imlach had seen his roster crammed with drinkers, smokers, hasbeens, and never-will-bes drop too many games just on conditioning alone.

As late as 1970, pro hockey was a self-contained sport. The money was lousy, and most players worked summer jobs back home pumping gas in an Ontario outpost or (if they were lucky) shilling beer at Canadian taverns that still had separate men’s tap rooms and no doors on the bathroom entrance. The point was, one could surmise, that most who drank there didn’t care about privacy in the loo. Those who played hockey for a living stayed in reasonable shape in the off-season, which extended from May 1 (if you were lucky enough to play on a team that survived to late playoff rounds) until Labor Day. But the word is reasonable. A summer with heavy lifting confined to beer glasses meant that first part of training camp was devoted to dry-land training.

Camps were usually held in backwaters all over Ontario and Quebec, one-burger towns with the main drag boasting a Canadian Tire Store and a pub inevitably named the “Kings,” “Queens,” or “Princess” hotel.

The fight for jobs and league level took place on the town’s junior hockey arena ice, and thousands of Canadian boys caught their first glimpses of professional players in those freezing barns.

Training camp opened with a week or two of just conditioning and intersquad scrimmages. Camp usually included running over hill and dale (despised by all) with the idea being to develop lung strength and get in shape for the season ahead.

The coach and the trainer usually supervised the workouts. Since major league teams trained with all their contract players and amateur tryouts under the same rink roof, minor league coaches and staff helped oversee the training regimen. Naturally some players devised clever and creative ways to avoid running and other muscle exertion that didn’t happen on the ice with a puck and a stick. Players would disappear into the woods on a three-mile run, get picked up in a car by a friend, and show up minutes later sprinting across the finish line.

They did all these kinds of things in Buffalo’s camp until Fred Atkins showed up on the heels of a home loss in which the Sabres were so hung over and lackadaisical that Imlach couldn’t talk about his players without an every-other-word obscenity.

Atkins had already worked with many hockey players in his Crystal Beach, Ontario, home. Crystal Beach was home to an amusement park that served generations of tourists who crossed by excursion boat from Buffalo and rode the Comet Coaster or danced to the big bands in the park’s Starlight Ballroom. But a day at Fred’s house was more like a day on the rack for the unwilling.

Fred’s gym was in the basement of his modest bungalow near the Lake Erie shore, and some called it a torture chamber. Atkins offered a back-breaking workout for those with the right attitude, and it was understood you didn’t go there with the wrong attitude.

Two ex-players for the old American Hockey League Buffalo Bisons, Pat Hannigan and Bill Dea, who lived year-round near Fred, had worked out with him for years in the off-season and recommended Atkins. Hannigan, who later became a Sabres TV analyst and died in December of 2007, told the Toronto Star in 1983 that if he had discovered Fred earlier in his pro hockey career, the

Atkins method might have made him a 10-year big-leaguer, instead of the four seasons he had with the Rangers and Flyers.

What was the Atkins method? Fred told the Star that same year: “A hockey player is the same as any other athlete. The trouble with them is, they’ve never been in shape. They’ve concentrated on building muscles, you see, when in athletics you have to be quick-and you lose quickness by lifting weights. I turn them around, get ‘em stretching ligaments.”

That was not all Fred stretched in his tiny basement gym. He once told a friend that blood had flowed off the basement’s walls, “and it wasn’t mine.”

Now here’s where you have to get something straight. Fred didn’t just talk a conditioning game. He didn’t just look mean. He wasn’t just an old beat-up shell of a pro wrestler, scamming money-or truly earning it-off athletes and coaches with his glare and quaint Aussie accent.

Fred Atkins in his seventies was the toughest son of a bitch in the world.

Or if he wasn’t, consider this: One of the most famous wrestlers in the history of the sport-a champion before it became vaudeville-was Whipper Billy Watson. His take on Atkins when Fred was in his seventies and ready to work with the Toronto Maple Leafs at their training camp in 1983: “Even today I would say that Fred Atkins would defeat 90 percent of the wrestlers in the business. He was the toughest, best-conditioned wrestler I ever saw.”

That was a decade after we met with Fred. He came to Buffalo. He saw…and wow, did he conquer.

“This excerpt from Then Perreault Said to Rico: The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told is printed with the permission of Triumph Books,  www.triumphbooks.com.”

But after about 20 minutes in, Ryan Miller probably thought he was partaking in ‘Duck And Cover’ drills instead of playing in an NHL game. Or like one of the people in the picture above.

Miller was peppered for 18 shots in the 1st period alone, and the Hurricanes continued the assault on my favorite backup and yours, Patrick Lalime, for a grand total of 47 shots, as the Hurricanes cruised to a 3-0 victory against the Sabres at HSBC Arena.

Right from the opening face-off, you can tell the Hurricanes needed this game just a bit more, as they came out flying, and pulled to within 3 points of the Buffalo Sabres in the Eastern Conference standings. The Sabres had their chances, but Cam Ward was up to the task, stopping all 36 shots he faced.

One of Ward’s saves was highlight material, a scintillating glove save on Tim Connolly.

Before Sabres fans panic, I think this game was just a case of a team coming out with a purpose, and setting the tone right from the get-go.  For the Hurricanes, this was a must of a win as you can imagine, as falling 7 points behind the Sabres would have been a critical blow to the team’s playoff aspirations.

And as another resident blogger here at BONY knows, I do not like to use effort as an excuse like some other fans do on an almost nightly basis, but the Canes wanted this one more.  I do not completely question the Sabres effort, I really just believed Carolina was embarrassed the night before when they were beat down by the Columbus Blue Jackets at home 5-1.

And with all due respect to the solid turnaround by Columbus this year, if I was on a team and the Blue Jackets came into my building and won by four goals, I would be pretty embarrassed myself!

The Sabres now hit the road for two games, staring Tuesday night against the Toronto Maple Leafs,  and then finish the mini road trip with a visit to the Wachovia Center to play the Philadelphia Flyers.

NOTES:

Can the Sabres please find a place for Jochen Hecht? He is getting bounced around on different lines by coach Lindy Ruff like a ball in a pinball machine, and from my vantage point, this is clearly effecting his performance of late.

And against the Buffalo Sabres at the Garden, the stench exploded.

“We were flat tonight,” said left wing Aaron Voros. “We were not prepared I guess. We have to get back to the drawing board to what made us successful.”

After playing a well round brand of hockey the first five games of the season, the Blueshirts just couldn’t get anything started against the Sabres, who cruised to a 3-1 win.

Now, no team will go 82-0, but it just looked like a different Ranger squad out there on the ice. They didn’t complete the checks; didn’t clear the puck from their own zone; and didn’t drive to the net against Ryan Miller, who stopped 19 shots.

Maybe, like the Giants on Monday, this team was beginning to believe its own hype.

“It’s a possibility sure,” coach Tom Renney said. “The choice to engage, the choice to be passionate about the game, to have an emotional attachment to the game, that’s one thing we’ve been able to do up to this point in time. Maybe they started thinking, ‘We’re for real and this is all wonderful,’ but you really have to invest time and effort to be a winner.”

Even with the poor effort throughout the game, the Rangers were able to stay with the Sabres throughout the match, and even led 1-0 after one when Scott Gomez tipped Michal Rozsival’s shot past Miller at 6:32. Yet, the Rangers only had three shots on goals during the first 20, which is unacceptable for any of the Blueshirts.

“We didn’t put the puck on the net,” Renney said. “We didn’t share the puck near the net. Maybe it was that type of game.”

During the match, the special teams, which was so good during the first five games, also broke down, allowing two power play goals in the second and a short hander in the third.

With Rozsival in the box, Ales Kotalik was able to knock one by Henrik Lundqvist at 5:03 of the second which tied the game.

Then the game took a turn for the worse. Paul Mara was run by Patrick Kaleta at 10:03, which prompted the Rangers’ defenseman to pound the Sabres’ wing, who didn’t fight back. Mara got a five minute major for fighting and a game misconduct, putting Buffalo in position to take the lead.

And when Thomas Vanek tip in the rebound of Derek Roy’s shot, which went off Lundqvist’s glove, a little less than three minutes later, the Sabres went ahead for good.

“I thought we got away from some of the good things we were doing,” said left wing Markus Naslund. “We know we can play a lot better even though we won the first five games. You can’t give teams chances like that. It was a tight game out there.”

The close match was good for the Rangers and they had their chance to tie it in the third when Craig Rivet went to the box on a double minor for high sticking Ryan Callahan. The Blueshirts did nothing on the power play, while Vanek scored a short hander at 1:10.

Although Renney tried to shift around the left wings for the rest of the game, it did nothing for the Rangers attack.

“It was a tough game,” said Lundqvist who stopped only 15 shots on the night and allowed more than two goals for the first time this season. “They are a good team. The difference [between winning and losing] is not big. We could have had a couple of goals in the first half of the game. I don’t know. They were just a little bit better than us, especially on the power play.”

Notes: Mara’s fight was apparently payback for a hit Kaleta put on him last season. Although he got tossed from the game, Renney seemed ok with him making a decision, which was a critique of the rest of the Rangers.