Each NHL team’s most famous superfan
By Cody Rivera
Carolina Hurricanes: Stephen Colbert
Not all hockey fans are diehards. A good portion of the NHL fan base in America is made up of casual fans and fair weather fans, but it’s like that with any sport.
Stephen Colbert might not be the biggest hockey fanatic you’ll ever meet in your life, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t be considered a fan. And even though he might fall more under the “fair weather” category, he still supports his favorite team, the Carolina Hurricanes.
You may have seen Colbert on TV at one point or another. The actor/comedian/television host is a pretty big deal, as he hosted The Colbert Report on Comedy Central from 2005 to 2014. More recently, he has been the host of the talk show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS since 2015.
Colbert’s world revolves more around entertainment than sports, but he still has his connections to the Hurricanes. He grew up on James Island, South Carolina, which is literally an island. James Island is about four hours away from Raleigh, North Carolina, which is where the Hurricanes play their home games. But the interesting part is that when Colbert was growing up in the Carolinas, the Hurricanes didn’t exist. At the time, they were the New England Whalers, and later the Hartford Whalers.
It wasn’t until 1997 when the team relocated to Raleigh and became the Hurricanes, which was long after Colbert had departed from the Carolinas to attend Northwestern University. But he maintained his Carolina roots, and when the Hurricanes won their first Stanley Cup back in 2006, Colbert congratulated them on his television show.