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Soap star's passion is for Wings
By Neal Rubin

It's a typical seduction scene in a soap opera. OK, maybe it's not quite typical, because the characters are actually married to one another.

But there's actress Alicia Minshew a few weeks ago, playing Kendall Hart on "All My Children," and from behind, you see that she's dropped her robe. "What do you think?" she purrs, and the camera turns to her husband, casino baron Zach Slater, as played by Thorsten Kaye.

"Oh, that's beautiful," he says, clearly awestruck. Then the focus returns to Minshew, and the audience on ABC sees what made Kaye swoon:

A Detroit Red Wings jersey.

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Kaye, 42, has made Slater's passion for the Red Wings a defining part of the character. Thanks to him, viewers who don't know a hockey puck from a rubber duck recognize the winged wheel.

As a student of acting, the holder of a master's degree in theater from Wayne State, Kaye can explain the rationale for working a Midwestern hockey team into the program. "It's a way to make a character accessible for the audience," he says. "You have to give him human traits."

But there's another, more fundamental reason Slater talks so much about the Red Wings and wears their gear. Kaye flat-out loves them.

During the NFL playoffs, he's blogging about the team at nhl.com. His home in Connecticut looks like the warehouse for the official Red Wings store. While "All My Children" fans are surfing the Internet for more

information on a certain actor with long dark hair and a dimpled chin, he's online looking for more red-and-white collectibles.

The Wings are planning to fly him in for Saturday's 1 p.m. game against the Colorado Avalanche -- a free trip to a city he likes so much that he bought one of the new condos in the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel. And he's so devoted to the team that he hopes to skip the trip.

A humble guy
If the Wings play Saturday, it'll mean they lost Thursday night in Denver. They'll still have a 3-1 lead in their second-round playoff series, but Kaye knows better than to tempt fate. Get rid of the Avs, he says, and he'll see us sometime the next round.

At Joe Louis Arena -- whenever he gets here -- he'll spend the hour before face-off in a team office, answering questions from soap opera fans on a Cisco teleconferencing rig set up near Section 114. "I told him I'd put him in the suite with me for the game," says Red Wings vice-president Steve Violetta. "He said, 'I'll be glad to come up to the suite to say hello to your guests, but I really want seats down low so I can watch the game.'"

Kaye doesn't exactly expect to be besieged with questions. "I don't know if I want to go to a hockey game and have some aging soap actor tell me what he did today."

But he's refreshingly low on ego -- much like hockey players, whom he compares to the people in his line of work.

"Baseball and football players are more like movie stars," he says. Hockey players and soap-opera actors are lunch-bucket types, going to work every day. "You always know hockey players will have a chat with you, because they're just kids."

Born in Germany, Kaye picked up the game when he was a kid, drifted away from it when his family moved to England, and fell in love again when he came to the United States for college.

"It's an amazing set of skills," he says. He'll grant you that squarely striking a round baseball with a rounded bat is difficult, "but going 35 mph on ice with 230 pounds of angry Canadian coming at you isn't so easy, either."

That's not something he's ever faced. He does know first-hand the dangers of competing in the decathlon, and of performing Shakespeare for candy-eating schoolchildren in Detroit, but for those stories and the typically self-effacing account of his audition for "Lost," you'll have to visit www.detnews.com/blogs.

For more Red Wings shout-outs on ABC, just tune in for a few days. As a bonus, you'll get to spend time with a handsome casino owner with an English lilt.

"Love your Red Wings shirt hanging over the headboard today," wrote a woman responding to one of Kaye's blog entries on the NHL Web site.

"Zach loves him some Red Wings. And I love me some Zach!"

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