By Jim Hagarty
2005
I was in a sports store the other day, getting my quarter-century-old ice skates sharpened (they are 10 years older than the lad who ran the sharpener) when I took a stroll around to check out the merchandise. On a wall filled with various types of modern hockey skates with zippy names all designed to make you think of rockets taking off, sat what had to be the Royal Family of Skates. Top shelf was a pair priced at $645. Just below, another tagged at $595. Then various others in the S200 to $500 range. Finally, at the barrel’s bottom, where I am always most comfortable, sat a pair that would set back the buyer only $85. Now, had that last pair been the only ones for sale when I entered the store, I would have been shocked to breathlessness at the price of skates these days. Imagine my reaction to the $645 Crown Jewels.
I’m thinking when the National Hockey League got started early in the last century $645 would have bought all the skates for all the players on all the teams. With some left for laces. It might have even bought you an entire team of your own. A similar story with hockey sticks. lf I had to pay more than $10 for a stick, even today, I’d lodge a complaint with the Supreme Court of Canada. Yet, I see boys under 10 racing around hockey rinks with space-age sticks that cost 15 to 20 times my upper stick-spending limit. The second car I ever bought cost me only twice the price of one of those puck bangers.
Young goaltenders now, when they step out on the ice, look like they’re descending from the Eagle lander onto the moon, so encased in protective gear are they. Rewind more than 40 years and there I stood, tending goal with the benefit of the protection of only a pair of flimsy shinpads, held on with elastic bands, while standing on skates that had soft sides and very soft toes. No helmet, no mask, no groinal area armour, no chest protector, no mouth guard, with only my strong will and my Buddy Holly glasses to defend me.
A puck on the end of a soft-toe skate can teach a young boy bad words mighty quickly. I might have survived this little test of endurance were it not for the fact that the sharpshooters using me for target practice were all five years older than me. My downfall was my determination to stop everything that came my way.
Still, I somehow lived to tell the tale, with only slight memory loss and a tendency to scream in the presence of black rubber. (It is ironic, I suppose, that, years later, I went to work in a factory that made hockey pucks.)
What brought this to mind was a radio report that 96 teams are gathering in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, next month, for the World Pond Hockey Championships. This is where 90 per cent of my hockey was played (on ponds, that is, not in New Brunswick). I have scant association with arena hockey and I’m sure I haven’t played more than a dozen games indoors. Not one game have I played where an actual referee dropped a puck.
And yet, my fondest childhood memories are associated with hockey, both on the pond and on the TV. A dozen boys on pond ice so slick you could hardly stand up on it. Hour after hour of chasing that little black disc in somebody’s back yard or back forty. I remember my dad driving a tractor out on the gravel pit ice, cutting a hole and dropping in a pump that ran off the power takeoff, he flooded the ice for us, in true, if unconventional, Zamboni style.
And I will be 110 before I forget skating alone, after the boys had gone home, on a frozen flooded area in a field behind our farmhouse well after dark on a moonlit night in my Detroit Red Wings sweater, watching smoke rise from the chimney and the glow from the lights through the windows where the eight other members of my family waited supper on the tardy ninth.
Yes, hockey has come a long way in 40 years. My Red Wings hockey sweater is gone. And come to think of it, these days, so are the Red Wings. Maybe they need to spend some of the money they spend on skates on salaries instead.
