In the 1977 cult hit movie "Slap Shot," when player/coach Reggie Dunlop learns his minor-league hockey team will fold, he boosts player morale by planting a phony story in the local paper: The Charlestown Chiefs are moving south.
And now, 22 years after they were founded in a moment of inspiration from the film, the real-life Johnstown Chiefs really are moving to Greenville, S.C.
But the move is doing anything but boosting the morale of this gritty town, where the economy and its people never recovered from the steel industry meltdown of the 1970s and the last of three titanic floods.
The movie, starring Paul Newman, was shot in Johnstown as a barely disguised homage to the beloved Johnstown Jets. The team folded the year the movie was released, after floodwaters damaged ice-making equipment at the team's riverside arena.
The Johnstown Chiefs were founded in 1988, and a succession of owners has labored to keep the team alive, largely because "Slap Shot" stoked interest in the city's tragicomic love affair with what the movie called "old-time hockey."
http://sports.espn.go.com/extra/minorlh/news/story?id=5037018
