Word for word: A hockey enforcer comes to town

The St. Pete Parrots will play their first season of minor-league hockey this fall. The new Atlantic Coast Hockey League team, which will play at the Times Bayfront Arena, doesn't have a full roster yet. But last week, the owners named Bruce Ramsay as coach.

Ramsay, 33, spent 11 years playing in the minors. More skilled with his fists than his stick, he holds the United Hockey League's all-time record for penalty minutes. About a year ago, he left the Wichita Thunder to play for the Muskegon Fury in Michigan. In 69 games he scored two goals and spent 214 minutes in the penalty box.

Here are excerpts from the announcement the Fury made when Ramsay joined them, as published on the Web site www.furyhockey.com/bramsay.html.

-- LANE DEGREGORY, Times staff writer

Aug. 30, 2001 -- FORMER FURY PHYSICAL, FORMIDABLE FOE SIGNS WITH MUSKEGON. BRUCE RAMSAY THE UHL PIM (penalties in minutes) KING.

The rugged, ruffian Ramsay has achieved some rather nefarious notoriety as one of the UHL's true, consummate gladiator warriors.

The 6-0, 185-pound left wing will muscle his way onto the Muskegon hockey scene as the UHL's most penalized player of all time, having been sentenced to serve a mammoth 2034 penalty minutes in regular-season competition along with another 337 penalty minutes in league playoff history.

(Editor's note: That means Ramsay sat in the box for the equivalent of 39 entire games.)

However, the Dryden, Ontario, native is best remembered by Fury fans as a contentious culprit who utterly wreaked unharnessed havoc on Muskegon during the many years of the acrimonious archrivalry between the Fury and Ramsay's Thunder Bay rowdies. . . . In the 2000-01 season, Ramsay plyed his punishing, pugnacious craft in the CHL with the Wichita Thunder. There, in 60 games, he registered 35 points on 11 goals, 24 assists while amassing an astronomical team-high 364 penalty minutes.

Ramsay came in for some high praise from former adversary and now employer and ally Tony Lisman (owner/president of the Muskegon Fury). "Bruce Ramsay was one of the most despised players. . . . Players that you dislike the most are the very same players that you also want on your team. Now 'The Ram-mer' is for us."

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