The Canes’ first fan favorite, Bates Battaglia’s move to businessman complete

The 20-somethings who come to Lucky B’s for buckets of domestic beer and well drinks in plastic cups at one of the last places on Glenwood South to have a good time cheaply don’t necessarily realize the owner was once one of them.

Two of Bates Battaglia’s NHL jerseys are on the wall, but he’s more than 20 years removed from the days when he was the Carolina Hurricanes’ first pop star, bigger in some ways than Ron Francis or Jeff O’Neill. The hair that helped make him famous, wild and well below his shoulders, was shorn off long ago. In his day, when the Hurricanes moved to North Carolina, he was the late-night king of downtown Raleigh, what little there was still open after dark.

Even after his career took him away, he always returned. He only recently moved to North Raleigh from the Glenwood South condo he bought 25 years ago, and even so he’s not selling it. And on Saturday, he’ll celebrate his 20th anniversary as owner, proprietor and landlord of what is officially known to the liquor board as Around the Corner, to a generation of downtown fun-seekers as Lucky B’s, and now unofficially just B’s after Battaglia parted ways with his partner. The 1 and the 3 he wore with the Hurricanes still form the letter in the logo.

Even in the bar, Battaglia is not recognized instantly like he once was, even after winning the reality show The Amazing Race with his brother Anthony in 2013. Glory fades. Time passes. Hockey and hair and fame are fleeting. Brick and mortar and cheap beer endure.

“There’s still people coming in that were coming from Day 1,” Battaglia said. “They’ll have their bachelor party, their bridal shower, their baby shower here, although they can’t bring the babies in. It’s kind of crazy. People tell me all the time, ‘I met my wife here.’ Pretty cool. But it’s definitely the younger crowd now. I walk in, and nobody has any idea who I am.”

So now, a few months from 50 with one fake hip and maybe another on the way, the first-time coach of his 12-year-old-son Bates’ hockey team, Battaglia the hockey player has fully become Battaglia the businessman, with two bars in Glenwood South — Lucky B’s and Teets, which he owns with Anthony — and a bar and restaurant in Carolina Beach. He had no idea what he was going to do after hockey. This found him.

“He was one of my first clients and there wasn’t a lot of age difference between us,” said Paul Krepelka, Battaglia’s agent for his entire career, now a front-office executive with the Florida Panthers who previously worked for the Hurricanes. “We spent a lot of time hanging out. The bar scene was definitely something he had an interest in. If you told me he owned an insurance company or a mortgage company now, I’d say you’re out of your mind. But bars and restaurants, and being successful in it, doesn’t surprise me at all.”

The original bartop, with stickers embedded in clear resin, is still there. So is one of the original beer coolers behind it, still kicking after 20 years. So is the life-sized Captain Morgan statue by the door, now a collector’s item. At the 20-year party on Saturday night, the prices won’t be that much different than they were when it opened.

The unofficial NHL insider headquarters during the Stanley Cup finals in 2006 and the 2011 All-Star Game, Lucky B’s is the kind of place Battaglia might have sprinted to after a 1999 game in Greensboro, had such a place existed. There wasn’t much on the street back then. Sullivan’s. The Rockford. Havana Deluxe. The Hibernian opened in 2000. A million spots have come and gone since. Lucky B’s has stood the test of time.

The first home-grown star

It’s very difficult to understand what Battaglia meant to the early days of Hurricanes hockey without understanding how much things have changed. The team played two years of home games in Greensboro, often to crowds that strained to reach four digits. Battaglia spent half of that first season with the Hurricanes, straight off his junior year at Lake Superior State, a 21-year-old rookie and sixth-round draft pick who the Hartford Whalers had picked up as a prospect when they traded away a veteran’s salary.

By the time the Hurricanes moved into their new home at what was then called the Entertainment and Sports Arena, Battaglia was an NHL regular whose profile far exceeded the 16 goals he scored in 2000 or 12 he scored in 2001: Young, single, American and rich, 6-foot-2 with hair like a pro wrestler. Raleigh, so new to major-league sports, probably wasn’t ready for someone like him so soon.

Most players lived in North Raleigh or Cary or Apex, among other transplants from the north. Only a few — O’Neill, Craig Adams, broadcaster Tripp Tracy — lived downtown. Battaglia bought a condo on Glenwood Avenue in 2000 and never looked back.

Battaglia was a near-daily guest on 96 Rock’s morning show — Chopper Harrison, the long-dead host, was one of the very few in Raleigh’s pop-culture scene to even acknowledge the existence of the Hurricanes at that point — and the team’s first true fan favorite and crossover star. The vast majority of the players were completely anonymous in the Triangle. Battaglia was anything but.

The breakthrough came, for Battaglia and the team, in 2002. He teamed with Rod Brind’Amour and Erik Cole on what is still the most famous single line in Hurricanes’ history, the BBC Line, to help spark the run to the Stanley Cup finals that changed everything.

“That’s the most fun I ever had playing hockey, ever, with all those guys,” Battaglia said. “I obviously played on other teams, but I remember every one of those guys.”

Battaglia still holds a share of the franchise record for most points in a playoff series with the 10 he recorded in the second round against the Montreal Canadiens, scored the overtime winner in Game 2 of the first round against the New Jersey Devils, and had a goal and set up Cole’s late equalizer in the Miracle at Molson, the epic late three-goal comeback that turned the series around against the Canadiens. Battaglia scored a career-best 21 goals that regular season and another five in the playoffs, finally realizing his full potential as hockey put down its first real roots in the Triangle.

That would prove to be a long and arduous process, and while they would win the Stanley Cup four years later, they plummeted to dead last in 2002-03. As part of the trade-deadline purge, the Hurricanes sent Battaglia to the Colorado Avalanche for Radim Vrbata. He’d never play for the Hurricanes again in a career that took him to Denver and Washington, D.C., and Biloxi, Miss., and Toronto and Finland and Syracuse, N.Y., and Rochester, N.Y., and Germany and Tulsa, Okla., before he retired in 2011 at age 35.

Battaglia grew up outside Chicago but this had long ago become home. Even as he went farther afield for hockey, he always came back to Raleigh. At the same time, he felt disconnected from the Hurricanes. Their biggest success came after he left, when so many of his former teammates lifted the Stanley Cup. The bar had season tickets for giveaways and the like, and his brother would use them, but not him. The bar became a hub in Hurricanes World, but his rapprochement with the team was a longer time in coming.

An accidental businesman

Battaglia was headed to training camp with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2005 when the group that was going to open Around the Corner as a laid-back pool hall with no TVs had to sell on the eve of opening. His father had been begging him for years to buy some property, so Battaglia bought the bar, the building and the building next door where Teets is now.

He was an absentee owner, but Lucky B’s filled an immediate niche that it still fills today — in part because Battaglia owns the building and hasn’t had to change a thing to meet rising rent. Battaglia took sole ownership of Lucky B’s and opened Teets in 2021, then found himself spending so much time in Carolina Beach that he bought a bar and restaurant there.

“I could tell when I represented him, when he first played for the Canes, he had a genuine love for Raleigh,” Krepelka, Battaglia’s agent, said. “The fact that he’s stayed there his whole life doesn’t surprise me in the least. Then when his dad moved there, his dad always talked to him about owning property. That was always front and center. And his dad had some experience in bars, so it made sense.”

It’s not necessarily what he expected to be doing at this point in his life, but he also knew he couldn’t play hockey forever. He had his father to oversee things until he died in 2020, and Battaglia took over then. Which is how he found himself sitting at the otherwise empty bar one afternoon this week writing checks and getting things ready for a Wednesday night ($7 vodka Red Bulls, $3 hard seltzers, $2 PBRs).

“Other than my dad putting a bug in my ear, I hadn’t thought about it, really,” Battaglia said. “When I bought this building I was playing in Toronto. And I bought the other building too, but we rented it out. But I was like, I’m playing, so if we open something, my dad’s going to be the one running it. So I didn’t have any real interest, although I thought it would be cool to have a bar. But that’s how it turned out, and now it’s all I do.”

There are framed Battaglia jerseys on the wall — Carolina and Toronto — and his college pal John Grahame’s Hurricanes jersey and a Francis jersey. Brind’Amour signed the 2006 Stanley Cup banner that hangs from the ceiling. Battaglia hired a guy to embed a bunch of his old hockey cards, his own and his Carolina teammates in other uniforms, in one of the bartops outside.

But it’s not a hockey bar, by a long shot. The sports fans tend to go to Teets, which opened in 2021, and is, in a judgment-free word, classier. That’s where the Spitting Chiclets podcast crew hung out when they were in town. There’s Pop-A-Shot and the punching-power game and bubble hockey and two pool tables and a beer-pong table and daily specials written on the wall and a thousand liquor and beer ads. This is a place to hang out, as college kids and young professionals and visiting hockey writers and hockey players and the post-shift service industry folks have for 20 years.

“It was meant to be a casual hangout bar,” said former employee Chris Paoloni, the first manager of Lucky B’s when it opened in 2005. “Pool tables. Relaxed. We started playing fun music and in two months the weekends morphed into what it turned into. We realized we had something fun on our hands.”

That hasn’t changed. The bar still bills itself as having the “cheapest beer and drinks in Raleigh” and as “Glenwood South’s official dive bar.” Saturday from 4-8 p.m., Battaglia will host an anniversary party with live music and free food and Lucky B’s swag. The prices are already throwbacks. It might as well be 2005 in there, some nights, still.

“I look up and down the street, and just bars, I’m about 99 percent sure we’re the only place that’s been around that long,” Battaglia said. “Havana’s been around that long, but it’s a cigar bar, and with different owners. Hibernian, but it’s a restaurant. We’re the only ones. We’ve hung in there pretty good. Everybody knows it’s the local dive bar with the cheapest drinks and we’re still doing what we do. We haven’t changed.”

An orginial Hurricane who never left

So much has changed for Battaglia. He made the occasional Lenovo Center appearance over the years, but as his son has gotten older, they’ve gone to more Hurricanes games. He enjoys it now. As time buffs the rough edges off his Hurricanes career, his place in franchise history is now appropriately acknowledged and respected.

He still plays on two Lucky B’s-sponsored adult teams when he can, and when more of his former teammates started playing in alumni events, Battaglia eventually joined them in practices and games. He played for the Hurricanes Alumni in a fund-raiser for UNC’s hockey team less than two months after his hip surgery last spring, and his bar in Carolina Beach was the headquarters for a king-mackerel fishing tournament the alumni hosted as a fundraiser last month.

“Bates has been fantastic,” said former teammate Aaron Ward, one of the principals in the alumni association. “When we had the viewing parties during the playoffs, he was one of the most consistent guys to show up and be there.”

There’s some closure there, for a guy who made a huge splash with the Hurricanes and never really left. Sometimes, older fans tell him they miss the hair flowing out from under his helmet, as much a signature as anything he did on the ice. Battaglia does too, but that’s part of his past. He’s no longer instantly recognizable, even when his name is on the door. That was then. This is who he is now.

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This story was originally published September 11, 2025 at 11:27 AM with the headline "The Canes’ first fan favorite, Bates Battaglia’s move to businessman complete."

Luke DeCock

The News & Observer

Luke DeCock is a former journalist for the News & Observer.