The oldest player at this year’s Estevan Strippers Molson’s Spring Bust recreation hockey tournament is a 75-year-old goaltender who still loves the game.
John Garbutt plays goal for the Yorkton Old Relics team. This year marked the first time in about a decade he has played in the tournament. His previous experience came while playing for the Estevan Tower Wolves, after he was recruited by Tower Café owner Peter Sereggela.
“I was working in Weyburn at the time,” said Garbutt.
A player can win the oldest player award just once, but it’s unlikely there were many players this year older than Garbutt.
When he played in the tournament 10 years ago, it was a smaller, 28-team competition played in two arenas. He’s pleased to see it has grown to 40 teams, and he was raving about the six-year-old Affinity Place and the overall organization of the tournament.
“The guys I’m playing with are fantastic guys, and we played the Brandon North 40 this morning, and they’re a great bunch of guys,” he said. “It was a pretty even game. I got left alone a couple of times, so they got a couple there, but outside of that, it was pretty good.”
Garbutt has been playing hockey since the early 1950s. He says he has always loved the game.
“When I first started playing, I was playing forward,” said Garbutt. “I was always a great skater, but I was never that accomplished with the puck.”
He remained a forward for over a decade. But one night, the team he was playing for lost their goalie to injury in the first period. They didn’t have a backup netminder, and so Garbutt volunteered to play between the pipes.
“I discovered I wasn’t too bad at it,” said Garbutt. “I probably didn’t realize that I had a real natural ability for the position until later on. By that time, it was really too late to play at any high level.”
He was still good enough to play at the senior A level.
Garbutt says he has always been very athletic, and never found the position overly strenuous, although it is getting harder for him to play now that he is in his mid-70s. But he expects he will continue to play as long as he can.
He has even had the chance to face one of the best shooters in hockey history. When he was living in Calgary in the mid-1980s, Garbutt was self-employed and could play hockey during the day. He found himself on the same ice surface as Hockey Hall of Fame defenceman Al MacInnis, who starred for the Calgary Flames for over a decade.
“It was scary and exhilarating at the same time,” said Garbutt. “He had nine shots and I stopped five of them.”
