Should you be lax in the area of Pittsburgh Penguins trivia, now a Level 3 felony in at least three states, you might still know that Andy Bathgate scored the first goal in Penguins history and the first Penguins goal at the Civic Arena, which are one and the same.

But what are the chances, I was wondering the other day, that Andy Bathgate could score the first Penguins goal in their new arena as well, now just two Octobers in the distance.

Considering that Andy Bathgate will be 77 years old next month, and even considering that he's still cutting the grass up there in Ontario, the chances wouldn't seem terribly good, except that Andy Bathgate is also the name of a promising two-way center and a fifth-round choice of the Penguins in the recent June draft.

The latter Bathgate is 18, and his grandfather sounded pretty proud of him on the phone the other day once the grass was cut.

"He comes to play," gramps said. "He gives an effort every night. He doesn't go out of his way to fill up the net against weaker teams. He's not selfish that way. Got a good head on his shoulders, not one of these guys saying, 'I did this and I did that.' He's very coachable, so, yes, I'm very proud of him."

Bathgate the Younger actually has been coached by two generations of highly knowledgeable hockey lineage, his father Bill, and his grandfather, a Hockey Hall of Famer.

"I've seen a few tapes of him in Stanley Cup-winning games," the draft pick was telling me this week. "Growing up, I've picked up a lot of knowledge about him, being a Hall of Famer, what kind of career he had. He's been a huge part of my life.

"But I've had a few hard times with it, too, because people will sometimes say, 'You'll never be as good as your grandfather,' but I took it in stride because it means people are at least paying attention to you. So, it's really been a blessing."

There aren't many people in this or any draft who are going to be Bathgate the Elder, and the very notion of blessings could find far more inadequate illustrations than what Bathgate brought to the National Hockey League in the '50s and '60s.

It was Bathgate who buried a slapshot in one of the nostrils of legendary Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante 50 years ago this fall, leaving most of Plante's nose closer to his left ear, a stroke of primitive cosmetic surgery that almost immediately brought the goalie mask to the NHL to stay. Bathgate is further credited with helping with the development of the slapshot itself, his version being a thunderously heavy projectile in the style of Al Iafrate and Alexander Ovechkin, which helped him score 348 goals apart from the first in Penguins' history.

But perhaps nothing accelerated the league toward its current image as principally the domain of elegant skaters rather than of Medieval warriors more dramatically than an article for Sport Magazine that Bathgate wrote with the New York Times' Dave Anderson on spearing, a prevailing tactic that Bathgate figured without exaggeration was going to get someone killed.

"I remember the night Red Sullivan was speared by [Montreal's] Doug Harvey," Bathgate said. "We went to the hospital with his wife. In the operating room, the doctor actually thought he had lost him. He had a ruptured spleen. Spearing -- putting the blade of yours into someone's belly like a dagger, was becoming too prevalent.

"I named some players in the article and I remember Dave telling me we could get in trouble for it. I got fined $1,000, which is what I got paid for the article. But it was getting really dangerous in the league. I'd have felt really guilty if I hadn't spoken up and someone had been really hurt, or worse."

In that era, while Mickey Mantle and Frank Gifford and Brooklyn's Boys of Summer were making New York the gravitational center of sports glamour, the NHL still needed every image upgrade that could be shoved down its throat.

"We might have seen those guys at banquets and things," Bathgate said, "but in that era there was baseball and football that that was pretty much it. The NHL wasn't baseball or football. When I got my first goal as a Ranger, the attendance was 6,100. And when we made the playoffs, we had to play on the road because the circus was in town."

By the time the Penguins selected Bathgate in the 1967 expansion draft, he'd won two Stanley Cups in Toronto and played with the Detroit Red Wings as well. For all that, it sounds as though nothing will make him prouder than to see his grandson in a Penguins uniform.

"Oh it was just amazing to be drafted by the Stanley Cup champions," the grandson said. "My grandfather said he can remember only great times in Pittsburgh. He loves the city and loves the organization. It's a privilege to be drafted by the Penguins, but now is when the real work just begins for me."