I was at Memorial University a couple of weeks ago for an event absolutely unrelated to that of which I write about today. I saw at Memorial at that time what is left of Burton’s Pond. That pond is one of the places where I learned to skate when I was about six years old. My dad brought me there. It was near my grandmother Furlong’s house, where Gonzaga and St. Patrick’s Mercy Home now stand. Nan’s well was right in the middle of what is now the Gonzaga lawn.

Burton’s Pond was way bigger then and you could even get a cup of cocoa in a little shack by the pond. It was really a spoonful of Fry’s Cocoa in a cup of boiling water. No sugar and no milk but it was wonderful on a cold day.

Hockey teams actually skated there on Burton’s. St. Bon’s senior team, or at least a part of it, even skated there on Sunday mornings. My dad took me to watch them. Dad was player/coach with Parker and Monroe Ltd. in the old Mercantile Hockey League. I was like dad in the sense that I loved hockey, but I never got beyond the “mercantile” level.

In school, I couldn’t make a St. Bon’s team in senior inter-collegiate. St. Bon’s were a powerhouse school of hockey at the time. I did play peewee hockey, though. Wilson Butler of Canadian Legion PeeWee hockey fame called me to the all-star team for a couple of practises, but I didn’t make it. There was no injustice in that. I just wasn’t good enough. I played house league with a team called Home and later with a team called Liberators. The Legion teams were all named for instruments of war. There were teams like Gunners, Sappers, etc. This was the early 1950s and the Second World War was very fresh in memory.
When I got to MUN I played inter-faculty hockey. I played for Arts. We had some decent players, but we could never beat people like Phys-Ed. They were athletes. Still, I loved it. I loved the rink and the smell and the sounds. A bonus is that the “rink” in which we played was Prince of Wales Arena. That is where I watched dad play for Parker and Monroe. (The Friendly Shoe Men)

When eventually I grew up and worked in broadcasting I played with NTV in a decent league known as the Finance League. We were still called CJON at the time. How a television station ended up in the Finance League I’ll never know. The Bank of Novas Scotia was one of the teams before they morphed into Scotia Bank. Household Finance was another team. I had a good time although the CJON team was just okay. We didn’t win any championships. That league eventually folded. The teams were having trouble getting a commitment from enough players. Hockey leagues are like that. The league was competitive, and I had a couple of scrapes there. No big deal. You have to play hockey hard and being in ill-humour doesn’t really hurt. I still have my old CJON uniform, but it doesn’t fit. I guess the material shrunk over 40 years. At least I tell myself that.

Time marches on. I moved to Conception Bay South, became an adult, and kept playing. Eventually I played in an “over 30” recreational league. I loved it. I played with Ron’s Texaco Wings. We called ourselves The Wings of Ron’s Texaco because of the touring Wings of the Soviet team from the USSR. Our league in C.B.S. had some talented players. One was Wally McDonald who had been the captain of the St. Francis Xavier hockey team in Antigonish, Nova Scotia and who went on to play with St. Bon’s. He came to play in our league. So did Barry Fraser who was a major star with Feildians in St. John’s senior hockey. Those two guys could still play.

The world of hockey is very small. In that league were two players named John Motty and Al Moakler, both of whom were from Pleasant St. where I grew up. I met John in a little skirmish that broke out in a game. I wasn’t in the fight itself. It was a minor incident but, in the way of hockey, I grabbed the nearest player with a different coloured jersey. That player grabbed me as well to neutralize me. Then he said,” Jim, is that you?” I replied “Motty?”. I hadn’t seen John Motty in 20 years. His next line was the brilliant; “What are you at?’’

I broke my nose badly in that league. I wasn’t wearing a cage and took a shot from the point right smack in the face. I bled like a stuck pig, but I finished the game and even set up a goal. It was two days later before I went to a doctor, and he said the nose had to be “rebroken”. That was a hospital operation, and I had to wear a cast on my face. Just talking about it makes me queasy. I played it as a “macho” thing and said with arrogance, “If you only play hockey when you are not injured you won’t be playing much.” My nose was nicer looking after the operation.

After that Conception Bay stint I went back to a beer league skate at Mount Pearl. The rink attendant of the time would fill up a large garbage bucket with ice shavings and we would put our beer in it for after the game. The deal was we would only bring bottles and the rink, and the attendants got those bottles. We never brought them home. That was a good deal. We got cold beer, and the attendants got “a tip” of the empties. One night in Mount Pearl I got the only “hat trick” of my entire hockey career. All the players from both teams threw their helmets on the ice. It was a spontaneous gesture. I was older then and it was touching.

My doctor told me to give hockey up eventually. I had broken an ankle in a non-hockey event, and I asked my doctor when I could get back on skates. The doctor told me to stop. I was over 60 in those last days, and he said a broken bone at 60 is much different than a broken bone at 30. That was enough for me.
I do have fond memories of driving home from rinks though after the late evening game. You play hard, you get off the ice at 11 p.m. and you have a dressing room beer. You are driving home in the rain, or the snow and the drive is quiet. It was nice. When you get home you are all cranked up and can’t sleep. The question begged was, What are you doing, Jim?”

So, I hung them up, as they say.

I miss it so much. I miss the play and the tension. I miss the dressing rooms and the guys I played with. Some are dead. Some are not. Maybe some are still playing. The world is like that. What is the attraction? Well, it is simple. It is escape. Once you open the gate and step on the ice in the rink you enter a different world with a whole new set of rules. There is no boss. There is no family. There are no bill collectors or demands on your time. There are no stories that need to be followed or phone calls that have to be made. There is just the rink and the almost spiritual sounds of skates on new ice or a puck ringing off the boards. There are just the players and the guys working at the rink. There is the sound of the Zamboni resurfacing the ice and the clean sharp click of a puck on a stick after a well received pass.
This week there was story in The Shoreline about two players still playing after 80. It gave me pause. I thought about making a couple of phone calls, but my wife gave me a look that said to me “grow up!”
I say reluctantly she was right. I am done but I miss hockey.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]