Philadelphia is where he heard it. Philly, after all, is where they booed Santa Claus on a sleigh and cheered Michael Irvin on a stretcher. Philadelphia is where a couple gets married at halftime of an Eagles game -- and fans razz the bride. It is where the best and worst sick jokes originate whenever there's a natural disaster or a particularly heinous crime. So it was in Philadelphia's First Union Center that Scott Gomez, skating into the corner, heard a loudmouth loge fan yell, "Hey, Gomez, drop the chalupa!"
Scott Gomez. It may be one of the more incongruous names in professional hockey. The NHL is the league of Maurice Richard, Yvan Cournoyer and Mario Lemieux. Imagine Bjorn Floden on the Jamaican bobsled team and you have Scott Gomez in the NHL. For decades, the North American professional hockey league was a private fraternity of polite, Tim Horton's-fed Canadian farmboys named Henri and Gord. Then came the Americans, Scandanavians and Eastern Europeans. As the league globalized, American- and Canadian-born blacks joined the mix. And now there is Scott Gomez, whose Spanish-
speaking parents raised money for hockey travel by operating a taco stand at the annual state fair in Palmer, Alaska.
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