Welcome to Shinny Night in Canada
NHL100 Classic taps into the magic of playing the game outdoors, writes Randy Boswell.
I still remember the tuque stretched tight over the top of José Théodore’s mask, the billowing clouds of Ryan Smyth’s breath, the puck leaving tracks across the snowy ice.
When the National Hockey League held its first-ever regulation game outdoors — the 2003 Heritage Classic between the Montreal Canadiens and Edmonton Oilers — it was billed as the NHL returning to its roots.
But it wasn’t true. Before that landmark match 14 years ago at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, the first of 13 such spectacles to date, there had never been a real NHL game played in the open air since the league was founded in 1917.
Better to say the NHL was hearkening back to the roots of the game itself. What the league really did that day in Edmonton was discover something millions of Canadians already knew: hockey played against not only an opponent, but also the elements, adds a dash of magic to the sport.
It connects the participants to nature and to neighbourhood — whether the action unfolds under a clear blue sky or in a raging blizzard, even if the neighbourhood is nation. It links the players and spectators to simpler times, to a world beyond the stringent control of Hockey Inc., and to each other.
That’s why the goalie’s tassled hat, the puck tracks, the runny noses, the frosted eyelashes, the steam-engine exhales and the sight of million-dollar skaters wearing dickeys and balaclavas — it felt like minus 30 that day with the Alberta wind chill — are imprinted on my memory. It still brings a smile.
For a moment, the NHL got real. Millions of fans, young and old, could watch the titans of pro hockey trying to stickhandle with hands and fingers numb to the bone and snowbanks forming along the boards. These were some of the finest athletes on the planet becoming acquainted — or reacquainted — with the wonders of shinny.
The corporate logos on the boards, the blanket media coverage and the record revenues were all distractions from what was truly special about that event. It wasn’t a humbling of superstars, but their elevation to a higher plane of sporting purity.
Even before the world’s best hockey teams began battling for the Stanley Cup in 1893, elite games almost always took place inside covered rinks where players were sheltered from winter’s worst. In fact, Saturday’s Scotiabank NHL100 Classic between the Montreal Canadiens and Ottawa Senators, to be played on the TD Place football field, celebrates two games played in 4,000-seat arenas — not al fresco — on the NHL’s first night of competition in December 1917.
The cold would have crept into those old arenas — it was needed to keep the natural ice frozen in pre-refrigeration days — but not the blinding flurries and the howling winds and that truly bitter, biting chill that Canadian winters can be counted on to provide.
Football fans who celebrate historic championships with nicknames like The Fog Bowl, The Snow Bowl and The Mud Bowl understand how the whims of weather can transform an important game into a legendary one.
But so do run-of-the-mill shinny players, the humble hackers who never had a shot at the NHL but who have defied 40-below or shovelled two feet of powder to get a game in before dark — and to have a tale to tell at Christmas dinner.
Such intrepid folk, heirs of the survivalist culture that made Canada a country, are following in the skate-strides of countless forebears, who froze their toes in pursuit of a puck (or rum-barrel plug, or cold-hardened horse dung) ages before pro hockey even existed.
In fact, it was those outdoor games — played at least as early as a John Franklin-led overland expedition to Great Bear Lake in 1825, hockey historians tell us — that gave shape to the modern sport. To pursue their passion, hockey’s pioneers spent centuries in Canada and other northern nations risking frostbite, steering clear of deep ruts and open water, feeling the sting of sideways sleet and hearing the eerie, echoing sound of ice settling on a midwinter pond or river.
If you haven’t sat in snowbank to lace up your skates, or had your face framed by a garland of frozen beads of sweat, or joined a shovelling convoy to clear the rink for another hour’s fun, you’ve missed a quintessential Canadian experience.
Some who’ve been there and done that go on to greater things. Gordie Howe, famously, learned to play hockey on outdoor ice near King George Community School in Depression-era Saskatoon. Wayne Gretzky, even more famously, began chasing the NHL dream on the backyard rink so lovingly tended by his father, Walter, in Brantford, Ont.
At a neighbourhood Christmas gathering a few days ago, talk among two young fathers turned to outdoor ice. One is the maestro of a backyard masterpiece, a skating surface made with a tarp underlay (it helps the ice survive thaws) and water from a hired truck offering firehose volume and speed.
The backyard is a magnet for kids along the street, and Dad boasts that because of the rink his own children spend as much time outside in winter as they do in summer.
The neighbouring father — his son a regular at the rink next door — promises to keep things in good shape during his friend’s January trip to Florida for a kids’ hockey tournament. And there’s this amazing news: His own son’s peewee team has just learned that they’re scheduled to play a game at the temporary Parliament Hill rink during the upcoming Bell Capital Cup.
On our Ottawa street, the excitement of Christmas coming is rivalled by the approach of outdoor hockey season — this year’s thrills heightened by openair NHL game and the Canada 150 rink built in the shadow of the Peace Tower.
Hockey. Christmas Lights. Parliament Hill. Winter. Is there a word stronger than quintessential?
A few blocks from the party at the local park, what will soon become the community’s outdoor skating rink is filling up nicely with snow to form a perfect base.
The land, boards and change room are provided by the city, but a posse of neighbourhood volunteers is required to run a hose from the field house to build and maintain the main sheet of ice, as well as flooding an adjacent “puddle rink” for younger skaters, once temperatures plunge enough for the job to begin.
Like dozens of other moms and dads in the area, as well as students from the nearby university, I’ve taken my turn on the shovels and the hose, come home encrusted in ice from spraying into a frigid, blowback wind.
But the prospect of a solo skate on untouched ice in the morning light, or a nighttime scrimmage under the park’s amber lamps, brings a warmth even the harshest winter couldn’t quell. Randy Boswell is a veteran Ottawa journalist, a hockey and history lover, and a professor at Carleton University