El Diablo on Ice

Do you have a shirt I can borrow?” It’s Scott Gomez’s first year living on his own, and he forgot to pack a T shirt. He is sequestered at a hotel in northern New Jersey with his Devils teammates during the Stanley Cup finals, and even though the team is in a good mood after beating the Dallas Stars, 7-3, in Game 1 the night before, no one is helping him out. “Come on,” he says to roommate Jason Arnott, “you don’t have an extra shirt? You’ve got a better body than me. Let me wear yours.”

Other than the shirt thing, which no one, not even nice-guy goalie Martin Brodeur, will help him out with, Gomez, 20, has had a pretty good rookie year in the NHL. The All-Star forward, 27th in the league, scored 70 points, 19 more than any other rookie.

And 70 more than any other Latino ever to play in the NHL. You see a lot of unusual names on the back of hockey sweaters (Balmochnykh, Selanne, Satan), but Gomez still sticks out. He’s the first Latino to make the NHL, and perhaps the first to try. Even though the Anchorage, Alaska, native needs an interpreter for Telemundo interviews, he’s become a Latino hero. “Just because he doesn’t speak the language doesn’t mean he isn’t proud. He’s just lazy,” says his father, Carlos, whose parents were illegal Mexican immigrants. “It’s become such an issue that he’s just burned out on it. It was never an issue in Alaska. If you live in Alaska, it doesn’t matter what color you are; you’re unique. You’re half crazy for living in Alaska.”

Even more strange than his name is his game. If Wayne Gretzky had a mystique based on talent that belied his pedestrian skating and weak shot, Gomez has star quality. Knock-kneed and pigeon-toed, he skates like Pam Anderson in stilettos–slow and hunched over. But his passes are perfect, and his ability to see plays develop is amazing–particularly for a rookie.

And now he’s in a position to win the Stanley Cup. The Devils are a big, mobile team, yet so unsure of themselves that despite being in first place in the Eastern Conference, they fired their head coach with eight games left in the season. The job went to assistant coach Larry Robinson, who had been canned last year by the lame Los Angeles Kings.

The Devils surprised the sleeker, Cup-defending Dallas Stars in the first game before falling, 2-1, in the second, both games played on the Devils’ home ice, hard by the New Jersey Turnpike. An underdog New Jersey getting into fistfights with a cocky Texas may be the best conceptual state rivalry ever.

Though Gomez was often homesick this year, he likes his new state. “It gets a bad rap,” he says. “I’ve been to some great malls. The Garden State Plaza and the Short Hills Mall. That one was nice.” Among other highlights of the year, he lists “sitting courtside at a Knicks game and seeing all the movie stars.” Hockey players don’t get a lot of perks.

Especially if you’re a Devil. The team is called “the firm” because the owner, Lou Lamoriello, runs it like IBM in 1955. Gomez’s teammates, only two of whom are single, are more serious than he. Once, in his mom’s office–she counsels women on infant nutrition–he autographed a picture with “Breast feeding got me here, Scott Gomez.”

“Our concern was that he’s young; he’s got money; he’s going to be partying,” says father Carlos. “But the Devils are such a strict organization that they don’t allow for any of that b.s. Scotty played half the season scared that if he screwed up, he’d be sent back to the minors just to make a point.”

Gomez will get a chance to act like a celebrity when he goes back to Anchorage this summer, which is, after all, attached to Canada. It may come from a biased source, but his mother Dalia seems pretty sure her son is the most popular person in Alaska. “Jewel might be big, but I’ve heard she’s canceled two concerts on people here,” Dalia says. “Right now Scott is the big thing. Jewel is out of the picture.” Especially if she can’t show off the Stanley Cup.