Inside UBS Arena on Sunday afternoon, Alex Ovechkin broke Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL goals record with the 895th tally of this career. Outside the arena, the moment had already been commemorated on a car roof with a mannequin and a goat in a hockey sweater.
“What is that?” asked one Islanders fan as they walked past Eddie Twomey’s white Jeep.
It was adorned with Washington Capitals flags and stickers, car magnets in honor of Ovechkin’s “GR8 CHASE” of Gretzky’s goal record and an elaborate scene atop the automobile involving an Ovechkin mannequin and that aforementioned goat. Ovechkin entered Sunday’s matchup against the New York Islanders needing one goal to break Gretzky’s record.
“This has been in my head for, I don’t know, five years trying to figure out how to make this work,” Twomey told ESPN.
For years, the jeep had an eight-foot replica Stanley Cup on the roof to celebrate the Capitals’ 2018 championship. Twomey took that to places like the Stadium Series game in 2023 at North Carolina State University, drawing crowds of fans.
As Ovechkin neared Gretzky’s career goals record of 894 — which he tied with a two-goal effort on Friday night against the Chicago Blackhawks — Twomey started to brainstorm how to best represent that historic pursuit on his car.
“The Cup is easy because you can understand that. But this is understanding Gretzky,” he said.
So Twomey decided to tell a story, and it’s sort of a personal one. He grew up in New York but moved to Los Angeles in 1988. Gretzky was traded by the Edmonton Oilers to the Kings two months later. He was at the Great Western Forum when Gretzky scored his 802nd career goal to pass Gordie Howe for career NHL goals in 1994. Twomey has his two ticket stubs from that game.
Twomey saw Gretzky become the Greatest of All-Time (a.k.a. the G.O.A.T.) and incorporated that into the motif, as it was wearing a Gretzky Los Angeles Kings jersey. Ovechkin is trying to “wrangle” the goat with his stick, chasing him down. On either side of the display is a photo of Gretzky looking upwards. It’s a screengrab from 2006 when Gretzky was the head coach of the Phoenix Coyotes and Ovechkin scored “The Goal,” an iconic tally that saw him find the net while tumbling to the ice during his rookie season.
While Twomey had this planned out, he also thought he had a little more time to actually build it. Ovechkin went on a goal-scoring tear this season with 17 goals in his first 20 games, the hottest goal-scoring start of his career. He then missed five weeks from Nov. 18 to Dec. 28 after breaking his fibula. Ovechkin has scored 15 goals since the 4 Nations Face-Off in February.
He went to Hercules Fence in Maryland to build out the aluminum rig on top of the jeep. He found neon lights that could be swapped out every time Ovechkin scores — in fact, Twomey plans on running out of UBS to swap out the total and the goals from breaking the record if Ovechkin shattered it on Sunday.
Twomey took the Ovechkin goal countdown car down to Raleigh for the Capitals’ game against Carolina on April 2, and then D.C. for the game against Chicago, where Ovechkin tied the record. Then it was on to New York, which had its complications.
“The funny part is, I forgot about New York and the parkways. We had to stop on the parkway and back up because the bridges are so low. It took us an extra hour to get here. And right when we get in the parking lot, there’s a bridge that’s 9-foot-1 and this is nine foot, exactly. It made underneath by an inch. Otherwise we wouldn’t even have been able to pull in the parking lot,” he said.
But the car made it to the game, setting the scene for what hundreds of Capitals fans inside the arena hoped would be an historic day in hockey.
The car was parked steps away from the arena. Ovechkin shattered the Gretzky record at 12:34 of the second period. Twomey hustled back to the parking lot to make two critical enhancements to his vehicle: Changing the career goals to “895” and the goals needed to break the record to “Zero.”
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