Montana Vintage Hockey Apparel
Four defunct Montana hockey teams from Billings and Butte, on shirts, hoodies, hats, and jerseys you will not find anywhere else.
Montana's pro and semi-pro hockey history is short, scattered, and stranger than most. Billings had a major junior team that sent players to the NHL and a pro team that lasted exactly one winter. Butte had a copper-town club run by a twenty-year-old center named Bob Knievel, years before anyone called him Evel. Every one of these teams is gone now. This is where they live on.
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Montana hockey history
Billings. The Billings Bighorns joined the Western Hockey League in 1977 and gave the city five seasons of major junior hockey at the Metra, with a roster pipeline that ran straight to the NHL, before the franchise moved to Nanaimo in 1982. Pro hockey followed almost immediately: the Montana Magic played the 1983–84 season in the Central Hockey League, which turned out to be the league's last, and the Magic folded with it. One season, one logo, and a name that still turns heads on a shirt.
Butte. Butte's hockey history runs through the Civic Center, which opened in 1952 and hosted a string of senior and semi-pro clubs through the decade. The Butte Bombers played two seasons, 1958–59 and 1959–60, as an independent team with no league to belong to and a schedule cobbled together from whoever would come to town: Great Falls, Trail, Calgary, Salt Lake City. Their player, coach, general manager, and eventually president was a Butte High graduate named Bob Knievel, then twenty years old, who a few years later would become famous for something other than hockey. The Bombers' best-remembered night was February 7, 1960, when they hosted the Czechoslovak national team on its way to the Squaw Valley Olympics in front of the largest crowd Butte hockey had ever drawn. They lost 22–3.
The Butte Irish carry the city's other hockey identity, a nod to the copper camp's deep Irish roots and the teams that wore the name on the same ice.
Four teams, two cities, and one future daredevil at center.
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