STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. - Muggs is a greenskeeper now. And the Luzenski boys - three goalies and a defenseman - are engineers, all but the one still at home. He spends his days around Fairview Drive, visiting old friends and telling kids on bicycles about the hockey they used to play in the neighborhood.

And the kids listen. They listen because of the people he played with in this Detroit suburb: the Stars' Derian Hatcher and Shawn Chambers and the Pittsburgh Penguins' Kevin Hatcher.

Several Stars have Detroit roots. Mike Modano grew up in the suburbs, and his mother decorated the house with Stars flags last week. Defenseman Dan Keczmer also is a product of the area, and team president Jim Lites was an executive with the Red Wings before coming to Dallas.

The Hatchers and Chamberses grew up on winding Fairview Drive. They lived five houses from each other in this 30-year-old working class neighborhood, where the boxy little homes are as repetitive as a row on a Monopoly board.

But, these days anyway, there's no mistaking the family homes of the Hatchers or Chamberses.

Since the Western Conference finals began between the Stars and Red Wings, the Hatchers fly a Stars flag from the eave of their house. And John Chambers painted a 20-foot Stars logo on his front lawn in support of his son.

The green-and-gold symbols stand out here like pickle relish on a red dress.

Some people even question their loyalty. "People ask who you're gonna root for," John Chambers said. "I can't believe they're asking."

But no one from the neighborhood asks. They know. The roots of the Chamberses and Hatchers and their boys run too deep.

Both families moved onto Fairview when the 1,300-square foot homes were new. They stayed even after their families might have outgrown the simple three-bedroom homes, stayed through the times they made backyard rinks and forays into Canada in search of cheap ice where their sons could play.

The Hatchers, at least, didn't plan on staying so long. Eric Hatcher would have figured to leave after having four children.

"But hockey was expensive," he said. "It took everything we had and more to keep them going."

It wasn't always so. Back when Kevin and Shawn were only 4, before Derian was born, all it took was flooding the back yard at Christmas.

The Chamberses did it first. John would cover the back yard in a couple rolls of plastic. He'd flood it, let it freeze, then go back at 10 p.m. and do it again.

After the Chamberses had a couple of layers of ice, they'd set the alarm to go off every two hours the first couple of nights. Either John or Jayann would get up, run the hose out of the basement and spray hot water over the ice to cure it.

"That's the way to have fun," John said, smiling. "You get it ready and yell, "Who wants to play hockey?' "

Everyone did. Some days, they might get 10, 15, 20 boys in the back yard, and only one of them was the Chambers'.

"We didn't even know where they came from," John said.

Soon, the Hatchers got in the rink business, too. Eric, who was a carpenter before surgery to replace both hips in the last year, built boards and posts for his home-made ice.

Mark, the oldest of the Hatcher boys, was too big to play on the backyard rink for long. But Derian grew up on it. Only 3 when he started skating, he'd take 100 shots a day in one-on-one sessions with his father.

"Derian may have worked harder at it than the other boys did," Eric said.

He didn't have much choice. Kevin and Shawn, who were best friends, didn't much care for a kid six years younger than them tagging along.

"As we got older," Shawn said, "Derian played more and more with us."

Said Derian: "I played street hockey with them all the time."

Derian hung out with Mark "Muggs" Zurew, who still lives down the street.

The backyard games and street hockey in the driveway are as vivid to him as any games he watches his best friend play now.

Half a foot shorter than the Hatchers, who run all the way up to Mark's 6-7 and 300 pounds,

Muggs said it never was intimidating.

"But all my sets of stitches come from those games," he said.

Any time a new kid moved into the neighborhood, the strategy was the same. They'd invite him over for some street hockey and put him in goal.

Then the Hatchers and Shawn would fire tennis balls at the hapless goalie. The keepers endured it, and the rest ran home.

"They'd scare away many a kid," Eric said.

Not that they were brutal. Because of their size, Mark and Derian were careful not to press their advantage, Eric said.

"Mark didn't want to get in any altercations," he said. "He kinda had a bad temper, so he didn't want to lose it. Him and Derian were a lot alike, but Derian didn't have as much temper."

Mark went on to play professional hockey, too. Shawn said he had the best slap shot he ever saw.

Mark gave it up at 26, tired of the tough-guy role he was asked to play. But he said playing on one best midget teams, traveling all over the United States and Canada, prepared the Hatchers for what would come for Kevin and Derian.

"Kevin and Derian got noticed more after that," said Mark, in the construction business in the Detroit area.

Until Mark's ventures the Hatchers and Chamberses had no idea how good their sons might be. Eric found out when a Montreal scout wandered over to Eric at a game and pointed at Derian, barely a teenager.

"He's gonna be the next Serge Savard," the old scout said, referring to the Canadiens' Hall of Famer.

The Hatchers were shocked. But they were no more surprised than the Chamberses when their son made it to professional hockey.

"Derian and Kevin are huge people," said Shawn's older sister, Terri. "Shawn just made it because he worked hard at it. He deserved it."

The funny thing is, it didn't seem like work back then. They played hockey all day on the weekends, so long that Eric built a fire pit next to the ice so the boys could warm themselves.

They haven't flooded a back yard in a long time. These days, John Chambers, a design checker for a tool company, just works on his front yard. He painted the Stars' logo from a scale drawing. Using nails and yards of string as guides, he meticulously duplicated the club' s signature decal. No one has bothered it or the Stars flags that fly from his daughters' cars. John said they wouldn't expect any problems here, where their son and three daughters grew up.

They're comfortable here. "I don't ever want to move," said John, 58. "It's nice and quiet."

It didn't used to be.

"I go out in the yard," Carol Hatcher said, smiling, "and I still find pucks."

© 1998 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved

Kevin Sherrington / Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News, Cheering on the home team: blood’s thicker than water - and ice - for parents of 2 Stars in enemy territory., The Dallas Morning News, 05-31-1998, pp. 1A. Staff writer Dave Caldwell contributed to this report.