I always told the wife, curling is for old people.
— John Garbutt
It is a Wednesday morning in February, although it feels more like April. Inside the Farrell Agencies Arena at Gallagher Centre, in the dim hallway beneath the bleachers, I can hear a clatter of sticks, the scrape of metal on ice, the rise and fall of friendly banter and smell the musty scent of stale sweat mingled with industrial cleaner.
The sounds and smells are unmistakably those of rec hockey, but this Wednesday morning group is not exactly what one might expect.
This is Grinders hockey, a pickup shinny league of guys the vast majority of whom are in their sixties.
In the realm of sports for the retired crowd what usually comes to mind is curling or golf, maybe softball or horseshoes. Not for these guys. Hockey, you might say, is in their blood.
“When I was a kid, the skating rink was in the back alley,” said Gordon Halyk, who started playing hockey in 1939 and only hung up his skates last year at the age of 81. “We were on the ice from sun up ‘til sundown and when the lights come on, you’re still back on the ice ‘cause there was nothing else to do in a small town. So it was [base]ball in the summer and hockey in the winter.”
Teams are picked by the traditional stick method then one side dons dark jerseys while the other puts on whites. On this Wednesday, February 15, 2017, the turnout is just one player shy of two full lines apiece. They range in age from mid-fifties to mid-seventies and have come from as far away as Moosomin.
The shifts are short. Guys drift to one end of the bench as they tire and the guy at the other end takes his place. The pace of the game is slow, but the conviviality is palpable.
“I love it and the camaraderie with my buddies is just a lot of fun,” said goalie and Grinders president John Garbutt, who, at 75, is the elder statesman among the guys, who still lace ‘em up. “They beat up on me pretty good, but it’s still a lot of fun.”
Garbutt has been playing hockey since the 1950s, but did not take up net-minding until later.
“I started playing forward,” he explained. “I was a very good skater, but I wasn’t too good with the puck. I was playing a game and the goalie got hurt and they wanted somebody to put on the pads and I discovered I was pretty good at it, but by the time I realized I had a natural talent for the position, I was a little too old to really go anywhere.”
He kept at it, though, and did have at least one brush with greatness.
“In the mid-eighties I did a shinny session with the hardest shot in hockey Al MacInnis, in Calgary,” he recalled. “Some of the Flames used to come to a noon session, shinny hockey, and that’s how that happened. He had nine shots. I stopped five of them so it wasn’t too bad.”
And Garbutt plans to keep at it as long as he can.
“I always told the wife, curling is for old people.”
Grinders Hockey was an offshoot of the Old Relics, an over-45 club founded in 1977 that still plays in competitive oldtimer tournaments around Saskatchewan and sometimes beyond.
“As they got older, some of the guys were dropping out, so we decided we would start a 60 and over,” explained Halyk. “That was 22 years ago, at the Kinsmen [Arena}.”
Halyk, now 82, still comes out for the fellowship. He said last week’s turnout was about average.
“We’re doing pretty good,” he said. “We’ve got five guys coming out from Esterhazy, five guys coming out from Melville, a couple of guys from Springside, we’ve got guys coming out from all over the place and the main thing is it’s camaraderie.
“The main thing is we have fun, the guys have a beer and then at Christmas time we usually rent the [Kinsmen] Blue Room. The guys that hunt bring their homemade Kielbasa, I bring pickled eggs, another guy brings a pot of peirogies. We have pot luck. At the end of the year, the last couple of years now, we booked the upstairs [Gallagher Centre meeting room] and we have a steak supper.”
Grinders Hockey runs from the last Wednesday in October to the last week in March or first week of April. It costs $100 for the season, but they also accept casual players, who pay $10 on the day.
The only qualifications are a desire to play hockey and a birthday prior to 1957, although they have been known to make the occasional exception.
Collin Liebrecht, one of this year’s executives, said for the younger guys it’s just a matter of being aware of the potential for injuries.
“The numbers have gone down slightly, so now a lot of the younger guys are coming in, but there too, they respect the older guys and give them some space,” he said.
“There’s some pretty good hockey players out there, but you know, the respect for the older guys, it’s evident. It’s good fun. The objective is go home and don’t get hurt.”
And, of course, it wouldn’t be recreational hockey without the post-game beer and yarns.
“You hear all the stories and the lies in the dressing room after the game,” Liebrecht said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
