Ice Age: Hockey

It doesn

By Seattle Mag November 16, 2010

Category: seattlepi.com teaser headlines

 

If hockey is in your blood, it doesn’t matter how old you are: The need must be satisfied. Roddy Scheer has been skating for 30 years, and nothing gets between him and his Monday-night games with a bunch of guys who represent a true cross section of Seattle.

I howled into the phone to my wife as I pulled out of the parking lot at Highland Ice Arena in Shoreline, fresh from a couple of well-deserved postgame beers. My team, the Yellow Stream, had just defeated the heavily favored Blue Balls to win our second consecutive ice hockey championship in our Monday-night “old man’s” league. “Drive safe, and don’t wake me up when you get home,” she said, hanging up the phone before I had the chance to tell her how I had gotten two assists and played one of the best games of a very amateur hockey career spanning more than three decades. Coming from a hockey family back east—her kid brother even played a few seasons in the pros—she couldn’t care less about her middle-aged husband’s recreational athletics. But at least she lets me break free for a couple of hours every Monday night so I can get my ya-yas out, championship or not.

The fact that no fans, not even our own wives or kids, would want to attend our games doesn’t deter the 2,500 or so of us Seattle-area adult recreational ice hockey players from manning up at rinks like Highland every week, year-round. Some do it for the camaraderie, others for the workout, but all agree that ice hockey is the greatest sport on the planet. Playing regularly not only keeps the body in shape but the mind sharp as well, given how many split-second decisions a player must make during every shift out on the ice. It gets in your blood from the moment you hit your first slap shot.

Seattle isn’t much of a hockey town, at least in terms of spectator appeal. The only “pro” hockey here is played by the Kent-based Seattle Thunderbirds and the Everett-based Silvertips, both 20-and-younger teams in the Western Hockey League. Against this backdrop of indifference, somehow a bunch of middle-aged duffers is keeping the great tradition of ice hockey alive by filling up various formal and informal leagues and pick-up games around town.

For the past 15 years, Smitty, a 40-something goalie and the self-appointed commissioner of our informal and totally unofficial “beer league” (goalies play free of charge, but they have to bring beer for everyone else), has secured three prime evening hours at the Highland rink on Monday nights for some four dozen of us—young and old, newbie and veteran—to tear it up out on the ice. The four teams compete for possession of the Miller Cup, a life-size replica of the National Hockey League’s championship Stanley Cup—except in our case the 4-foot-tall trophy is made from empty cans of Miller beer, long the postgame beverage of choice.

My teammates and opponents come from all walks—motorcycle mechanics and marketing executives, gourmand restaurateurs and greasy-spoon waiters, rock drummers and specialist surgeons, line workers and software programmers. But from the moment we lace up our skates, none of that seems to matter. Hockey is such a fast-paced, mentally intense and physically punishing game that everyone out there is focused on the task at hand: putting the puck in the other team’s net and keeping it out of our own. I know my teammates, most of whom hail from anywhere but Seattle originally (because kids here play soccer, not hockey), by nicknames like Gas Man, Flash, Crazy Legs and Powder, or by first names. And that’s the way everyone likes to keep it.

Even though our league is far from formal, some of us actually do care who wins (and our dues pay for referees). I am proud to say that the Miller Cup

 

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