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A true fan, body and soul

Yvonne Abraham

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 05, 2012|By Yvonne Abraham

From a mock automobile accident in East Boston at Danilchuk Auto body shop,… (David L Ryan/Globe Staff )

Putting an Eli Manning replica on a flaming spit by the highway might strike some as a little excessive, and perhaps more than a little loopy. But for Eric Danilchuk, it is a solemn duty.

Well, not that solemn. But definitely a duty.

Danilchuk, 46, owns Danilchuk Auto Body, in East Boston. He is also a rabid New England sports fan. Which means that, like many of his generation, he spent decades enduring heartbreaking near-misses and dashed dreams.

So when the Patriots made the Super Bowl in 1997, Danilchuk wanted to do something special, “to get some spirit going.’’

He had his painters deck out an ’86 Bronco in Pats colors, and put the Packers’ green and yellow on a dumpy old Buick. Then he created a nice tableau of the Pats truck crushing the Packers’ Buick on the lawn outside his shop along Route 1A, just north of the airport.

People loved it, though the game didn’t work out so well. For a few years there, it seemed like Danilchuk would never make fan art again.

But then the playoff games and championships piled up, and so did his gussied-up junky cars: Pats-Rams in 2002; Sox-Yankees in 2003; the Pats and the Sox triumphs in 2004. There was more glory in 2005 and 2007.

By now, local sports fans have grown - dare we say it? - entitled. As soon as a team hits the playoffs, Danilchuk says, “people call here and say, ‘When you gonna get something out there?’ ’’

But art like this doesn’t happen overnight. With every victory, Danilchuk has had to get more creative, flipping an opposing team’s car on its roof, introducing extra vehicles and even an excavator. An artiste named “Stake’’ air-brushed the parquet from the Garden on the hood of the Celts car when they played the Lakers in the 2008 NBA finals.

When the Bruins made the Stanley Cup finals last year, Danilchuk, a hockey freak, went all out. “That was the first appearance of the mannequin,’’ he says. That would be the plastic man dressed in the Canucks uniform, lodged headfirst in a windshield.

This year, in search of a theme (there are themes now), Danilchuk let his cars speak to him. “I had this car that was burnt,’’ he says. “I thought, ‘Let’s go with a burn theme.’ But I didn’t want to offend anybody, so we changed it to a bit of a barbecue theme. We were going to strap [the Manning mannequin] to the roof, then I thought, ‘Geez, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could make it into a rotisserie?’’’