There's a magic to playing pond hockey that's really difficult to capture in words. But we keep trying. Here's one of my favorite stories from this year. You can see the printed version here. My thanks to the great work by my editor, Tom Connelly, at the New York Times.On Frozen Pond: Playing up a Hockey Legacy
CONCORD, N.H. — When Chris Brown, 40, laces up his skates and pulls on his Concord Budmen jersey on Jan. 28, he will be reconnecting with the hockey gods who have smiled on New Hampshire’s capital for almost 130 years. The Budmen are among 52 teams, at least 40 of them from this city of 42,000, that will participate in the first 1883 Black Ice Pond Hockey Championship, a celebration of Concord’s singular ties to hockey played in the elements.
“When I was growing up in Concord, there used to be areas flooded in most of the parks,” Brown, a tournament organizer, said. “Then, over the years, those just slowly went away, whether it was lack of interest or the city not having the funds to do it.”
The tournament at White Park, just up the road from the capitol, is a fund-raiser to help restore outdoor skating opportunities in the city. For players and spectators, it promises a tableau resembling what many hockey historians believe was the first organized game played in the United States, on Nov. 17, 1883.
It took place two miles away, on Lower School Pond (pictured above) on the campus of St. Paul’s, a boarding school whose students have included Astors and Vanderbilts, future United States senators and at least one N.H.L. player, Don Sweeney, the former Boston Bruin and now the team’s assistant general manager.
The term black ice was coined at St. Paul’s, a reference to the smooth-as-glass surface that set when temperatures first plummeted, leading to “black ice holidays,” when classes would be canceled so that the students could skate. According to the school’s archives, hockey was played on campus as early as the 1860s, but the modern game took hold with the arrival of two students, George Perley from Ottawa and Arthur Whitney from Montreal, in the early 1880s.
“At one point, when I was a student here, there were eight rinks on that pond,” said the current St. Paul’s rector, Bill Matthews, a former player and coach at the school. “Every afternoon you’d hear the pucks banging against the boards.”
St. Paul’s is also where Hobey Baker began his ascent in the early 1900s. Baker, whose name is on the award given annually to college hockey’s best player, took his skills to Princeton, but St. Paul’s continued to make headlines. On Dec. 15, 1913, The New York Times trumpeted a game between Baker’s Princeton squad and the “famous St. Paul’s School team” at St. Nicholas Rink in Manhattan. The article refers to St. Paul’s as a “little preparatory school, tucked away in the New Hampshire hills.”
“Unless they really know hockey, most people don’t even know where Hobey Baker came from,” said Jim Hayes, 57, a Concord native and director of the New Hampshire Legends of Hockey, the state’s Hall of Fame.
The City’s Sport
Pond hockey at traditionally blueblood St. Paul’s is only part of the Concord story. The sport here has strong blue-collar roots, too, and has produced Olympians as well as numerous college stars and pros, including one N.H.L. veteran, Kent Carlson, an enforcer who played mainly with the Canadiens in the mid-1980s.
“The competitiveness and the drive to succeed in Concord was just amazing,” said Lee Blossom, 51, who attended St. Paul’s before leading Concord High to the state title in 1977, scoring every goal in the semifinal, a 5-2 victory against Manchester Memorial. “Our era had a tremendous group of athletes and hockey was the sport of choice for many of them. That equation created a real hockey hotbed.”
Blossom went on to captain Boston College and play in the International Hockey League. He said the season in Concord ran six months, from November to April.
“When you grow up in a culture like that, it’s easy to hone your skills,” he said. “Hockey was a way of life.”
In many ways, the hockey culture reflects a strong appetite here for sports in general. For a small city with a sometimes inhospitable climate, Concord has left an unusually well-defined footprint in arenas and stadiums around the world.
In addition to its hockey stars, who include the 1998 Olympic gold medalist Tara Mounsey, Concord has produced Matt Bonner of the San Antonio Spurs; Red Rolfe, an All-Star third baseman and table setter for Lou Gehrig on Yankee teams of the 1930s; Bob Tewksbury, whose pinpoint control earned him a 13-year major league career; Joe Lefebvre, who homered in his first two games as a Yankees rookie in 1980; and Brian Sabean, the general manager and architect of the World Series-champion San Francisco Giants.
And yet no sport has captured the city’s imagination quite like hockey.
“It’s one of those places where you go to the park and the pond will be plowed and people will be playing hockey on it,” said Bonner, who stands 6 feet 10 inches and said he stopped playing hockey when he was 12 and could no longer find size 13 skates to rent at the skate shack.
Shinny Town
Teams playing pond hockey, or shinny, began appearing in Concord 100 years ago. The famed Sacred Heart squad, formed in 1929, played on an outdoor rink alongside the church. The Sacre Coeur, as the team from the then largely French-Canadian parish was known, was made up of local players and St. Paul’s teachers, said Tom Champagne, 81, who played at Concord High and worked at St. Paul’s for 35 years.
So formidable was Sacred Heart that the United States Olympic team, on its way to the 1952 Games in Olso, stopped by in Concord for a game.
“The Sacred Heart group was up, 5-3, after two periods but ended up losing, 8-6,” said Hayes, who still skates weekly and will play for the White Park Hockey Club in the tournament. Champagne, one of five surviving members of that Sacred Heart team, said, “As far as I’m concerned, when I was still playing for Sacred Heart, Concord had the top team for hockey next to the Berlin Maroons,” a reference to a traditional power from the state’s northern reaches. He added, “Concord was a real good hockey town.”
Ensuring that Concord remains just that is one of the goals of the 1883 Black Ice tournament, in which seven-person teams, in three divisions for men and one for women, will play four against four on six rinks.
“It’s shinny hockey,” said Tom Painchaud, 55, a Concord native and St. Paul’s graduate, “like we used to play when we had nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon.”
The tournament was the result of a brainstorming session between Brown and David Gill, the city’s recreation director. The City Council directed Gill to find ways to help offset budget shortfalls, and he reached out to Brown, a board member of the Concord Boys & Girls Club
“This is not necessarily about hockey; it’s about a community,” Brown said. “It’s a great way to showcase a great facility. Not every town has a park like White Park."
Gill said the tournament, through its business partnerships, has already raised enough money to revive a skating area at Rollins Park in the city’s South End. “We haven’t had skating there in two or three decades,” he said.
Moving Indoors
Hockey in Concord moved indoors with the dedication of the Everett Arena on Dec. 7, 1965. The arena was named for Douglas N. Everett, a member of two Olympic teams who was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1974.
“The interest in hockey, when they built the Everett Arena, just exploded,” said Blossom.
The arena ushered a new era in Concord hockey lore. Champagne’s son, also named Tom, recalls the visceral thrill of attending amateur games there, starting with the Concord Shamrocks, alongside his father.
“In the days before Plexiglas, it was wire mesh, and you could smell these guys,” said Champagne, a Concord High player and current Legends president. “You’d get sprayed with the shavings. You could see the blood. You’d be right there. That was before we were watching the Bruins. That was the place to be for a game on Saturday night.”
Sabean, 54, who never played hockey but whose brothers did, said the opening of Everett and the availability of Bruins games on television for the first time revived the sport from a down period.
“That place was going 24 hours a day almost, to accommodate all the teams,” he said of the arena. “They had youth teams, the high schools, travel teams, games, practices, what have you.”
Over the years, the city was also home to the Coachmen (1966-68), the Eastern Olympics (1967-74), the Tri-City Coachmen (1974-75) and the Budmen (1975-92). Leagues came and went, among them the Granite State League, the Can-Am League and the New England Hockey League.
“I watched them all,” the elder Champagne said. “That was good hockey. It was a different era, but a great era.”
For the younger Champagne, 52 and with three sons, the 1883 Black Ice tournament is a reminder of how things used to be and an example of how different the game is for today’s generation.
“What’s unique for guys my age is that I spent just as much if not more time outside playing hockey,” said Champagne, who will suit up for the Turkey Pond Flyers. “Nowadays, even my kids, it’s pretty limited how much time they go out. They don’t know what the nuances of the ice are like. You’ve got to learn to skate around the cracks, and how the puck’s going to bounce. You have to shovel the ice off. If you miss the net, someone has to go get the puck.
“It was just shinny pick-up. But that’s where you learned to be creative, where you learned the etiquette of the game, keeping your stick down, being a competitor. I think the kids miss that today, because it’s all about systems, and it’s all about drills at practices.”
Which, ultimately, may be the best reason for a pond hockey tournament, though certainly not the only one.
“There’s nothing quite like skating outdoors,” Matthews of St. Paul’s said, “no matter what the weather: whether it’s freezing cold or one of those beautiful cool days when the sun is shining, one of those magical days.”
FINIS
