Chill Magazine
March/April 2006
By Craig MacBride
As players came over the hill behind the main building of Muskoka’s Deerhurst Resort for the first time and saw 24 ice rinks spread out across a frozen lake, they knew why they had come.
They were there, with their skates hanging by laces from their shoulders, to recapture their youth, and to remember what it means to be Canadian.
110 men’s teams and 20 women’s teams showed up for the Source for Sports Canadian Pond Hockey Championships.
There were varsity teams, A-division teams, teams of guys who hadn’t played outdoors in decades, and others who had spent more decades playing outdoors than their opponents had been alive.
Teams were made up of four players aside, with one sub. No goalies.
Each rink was roughly three-quarters the size of an NHL rink, and at each end, a net, six feet wide and just 10 inches high.
Games were 30 minutes long, split into halves.
Each team had been promised five games, but the weather conspired against them Saturday afternoon, and that was dropped to four.
The Johnny Canucks came all the way from Vancouver to play.
It doesn’t get cold enough to play pond hockey in Vancouver, but Steve Szantveri, the captain of the Canucks, knew what all Canadians know, that hockey was born on the pond, and that the passion for it was cultivated on the pond.
“This is outstanding, the cold air, the sunshine, and you’re out there, you’re playing the game, and it’s hockey the way it’s supposed to be,” he said. “This is Canadian hockey.”
It was amazing how often that phrase was uttered over the course of three days.
Even though most Canadians are generally careful to stay away from ethnic generalizations, hockey’s a different bucket of pucks.
It’s not a protectionist statement. On the contrary, it’s inclusive.
By saying it’s a Canadian game, these players weren’t disqualifying others from playing, they were saying that once you play hockey out on the pond, your sweat freezing between plays, you become Canadian.
It’s a form of citizenship.
The following wouldn’t happen in any other country: After a bad breakup, one young woman rallied her friends around her, and together they decided to find an activity to focus on, something new and challenging. They formed a hockey team. That was two years ago, when none of them knew how to skate. Now the members of Looking 2 Score (“Our name is also our motto”) are addicted.
Saturday afternoon felt like spring, and the sun turned the rinks to mush, forcing officials to call off the afternoon and reschedule games for the following morning.
With the other rinks empty, the women of Looking 2 Score, who had two teams in the tournament, came together in their sneakers and played an entire game against each other.
At around the same time, down in front of the players’ tents, where chairs encircled gas heaters, a group of middle-aged men in long toques were playing rugby in the slush.
It’s not the sport they were expecting to play, but they couldn’t let a warm January day be wasted.
The team, Closs 2 Senility, was named in honour of team member Jim Closs, who was turning 40 that weekend.
His birthday was the trip’s impetus.
“It was a Caribbean golf junket or this,” said Gregg Abbott, admitting that many people would figure the Caribbean to be more appealing in January.
After playing four games on the Friday and Saturday, the team had an 0-4 record, but, Abbott insisted, laughing, “4-0 in fun.”
Off the ice, very few teams at the tournament were taking the competition seriously. On the ice, however, they were fighting hard to win, even when they were down, as teams were in some cases, by a dozen goals.
This is the kind of nationalism we’ve bred, not one of guns and flags but of sticks and pucks, with honest, albeit sometimes brutal, competition that always ends with a handshake, and, often, a good laugh.
As far as this reporter could tell, all the games did end with a handshake.
There were no fights. There were no cheap hits. There was no showboating.
When these players were talking about a Canadian game, one suspects that was part of what they meant: good guys playing a good game, both winning and losing well.
Even in the final rounds, whenever two players accidentally ran into each other going for the puck, they would both apologize as they skated away. It was that kind of hockey. When the nudges and shoves were intentional, on the other hand, there were no apologies. It was, after all, still hockey.
On Sunday morning, the wind blew through you, through your coat, your two sweaters, your three shirts, your skin, right into the marrow of your bones, yet there were men on the ice at 7 a.m., an hour before games were scheduled to start, shoveling away a night’s covering of snow, just so they could get one extra game in, just for fun.
Later in the day, Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy, who was playing in the tournament, saw plenty sense in it.
“It’s such a great game, you’ll do almost anything to play it.”
“It’s part of our culture. It’s our game and our spirit, and it’s something we’ve kind of given to the world,” said Bryan Trottier.
He should know, too.
Not only did he win six Stanley Cups with the New York Islanders and Pittsburgh Penguins, he grew up playing outside, in a frozen-over irrigation ditch 50 feet from his home in Saskatchewan.
“There is a purity about it,” he said, glancing at the tree-covered hills surrounding the lake he was standing on. “It’s almost natural. Nature surrounds you, nature creates it, you just use a little manpower to manicure it.”
To win at pond hockey, since there are no goalies, you need to play a tight game. You can’t give the other team room to maneuver, but you also need to be able, once your team gets control of the puck, to break free for a pass.
Speed wins these games.
Passing helps, but on Sunday, passing was difficult.
Modified ATVs cleared the ice between games and during the intermissions, but the snow was accumulating quickly, and all passes ended up as a flurry of white concealing six ounces of vulcanized rubber.
In the women’s championship game, it was the Concordia Rinkles, from Montreal, who had the speed, and they used it to slaughter the Canadore College Panthers, from Ottawa and North Bay, 21-5, and earning the right to skate the wooden championship trophy around the pond.
The men’s game, though closer, also came down to the faster team, with the Rink Rake Grey Beards, from Whitby, beating the Barrie Theta TTS Bruins 18-9.
It’s unimportant who won the tournament. For pretty much every team taking part, winning was never the goal. It was about hockey, and camaraderie, and reclaiming that feeling of joy, of being out there and alive, with red cheeks, numb toes, sweating in the freezing cold and never wanting to go inside no matter how cold or how late it got, no matter how tired and hungry you became.
It was about being Canada, and thinking that perhaps the world would be a better place if everyone could spend a day chasing after a black disk in a blizzard, earning their citizenship the fun way, in the way so many of us did when we were kids.