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The Great Outdoors For NHL Players

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By CARTER GADDIS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 1, 2008

Updated: 12/31/2007 10:55 pm

TAMPA - The small town of Rocky Mountain House in the Canadian province of Alberta is located within reasonable driving distance of two of that country's great cities, Edmonton and Calgary, as well as one of the most scenic spots in the world, Banff National Park.

Growing up amid such natural and man-made splendor, Lightning forward Nick Tarnasky preferred to gaze out his back windows at home as winter came on and watch for the season's first hard freeze.

With that came hockey. Only when the family's backyard rink was good and frozen would Tarnasky's father allow it to be used.

For little Nick, it became a ritual as memorable as any holiday. And it got him started on a career path that would one day lead to a job playing for the Lightning.

"My dad would start getting the yard ready," Tarnasky said. "It would take him four or five days of flooding so it would be thick enough to play on. So, I'd be out there checking every day. 'Is this thick enough? No, you've got to wait one more day.' It was like Christmas morning every morning, waiting for that rink to be ready."

It's a common tale among NHL players, many of whom grew up playing outdoors, shrugging off freezing temperatures to skate all day and into the night on backyard rinks or frozen ponds or even iced-over streets.

The league will pay homage to the outdoor grass roots of the game with today's Winter Classic between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Buffalo Sabres on an outdoor rink built on top of the football field at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y.

More than 70,000 fans are expected to witness the first NHL regular-season game played outdoors in the U.S.

In 2003, the Canadiens and Oilers drew 57,167 to Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium for the league's first regular-season game outdoors. And in 1991, the Kings and Rangers played a preseason game outdoors at Caesars Palace in the 80-degree September heat of Las Vegas.

Those were spectacles, far removed from the backyard rinks and frozen ponds of Canada and the northern U.S. Yet, they represented something important in the lives of players who took their first, halting strides on skates with nothing above their heads but clouds and blue sky.

"Kids from Canada, that's what we grew up doing, is playing outside," said Lightning forward and Montreal native Mathieu Darche. "I mean, we played in our leagues, but that wasn't enough. We played two, three times a week. We'd go to school, get home - my parents wouldn't let me go outside until I did my homework, so I did my homework real quick - and go out and play and come back for dinner."

It was the same for Lightning center Andreas Karlsson, who grew up in the Swedish town of Ludvika, located in central Sweden northwest of Stockholm.

"After school, we went straight to the rink," Karlsson said. "And we'd stay all day. When we got sore and it was hard to move, that's when it was time to go home."

On the north shore of Lake Ontario in the town of Port Hope, Ontario, Lightning defenseman Shane O'Brien grew up with a rink that spanned both his back yard and his neighbor's; the families agreed to knock down the fence to enlarge the playing surface.

"And there was an outdoor rink in Port Hope, and sometimes I'd play over there," O'Brien said. "Usually after school, we'd go over there and play some pickup with the boys, and every weekend. There was nothing else to do, so ..."

South of Canada, in the little Massachusetts town of Agawan outside of Springfield, Lightning defenseman Doug Janik said his family's backyard rink normally was useable from December to March.

"We'd play all the time, but also there were a lot less kids to play with," Janik said. "Like in Canada, you'd probably have 20 kids to play, and we probably had three or four at the most."

What's different about playing the game outdoors? Simply put, the weather becomes a factor.

During that 2003 outdoor game between Montreal and Edmonton, the temperature dipped below zero degrees.

For Montreal native Darche, such playing conditions were routine during his formative years.

"I remember I even played through it once when I was about 12," Darche said. "I ended up getting frostbite on my toes. I lost a piece of skin off the top of my big toe. We played and we weren't thinking about anything and we played for I don't know how many hours."

Cold is one thing. Snow or rain could cut short a session in a hurry, even in wintry Sweden.

"You can't play in snow," Karlsson said. "You couldn't see the puck."

NBC broadcaster and former Boston Bruins defenseman Mike Milbury, on a recent NHL conference call, described the exhilaration of battling the elements as a kid.

"I grew up in a little town south of Boston dotted with small ponds, and it's where you stumble across black ice on an October day and get out there and go for as long as you could possibly go," said Milbury, a native of Brighton, Mass. "And there is something about playing the game free form, free flowing when it's that cold and nasty, but you feel like you can... in the right moment, you can feel like you're skating 40 miles an hour."

Tarnasky remembers driving along country roads near Rocky Mountain House and seeing a rink in every yard. In Canada, especially, the routine of waking up, strapping on the skates, playing until lunch, eating with your skates on and dashing back out into the cold to play the day away was as close as it got to hockey paradise.

"Especially over Christmas break, we'd be out there six, seven hours a day, all day freezing," Tarnasky said. "But it was what we did all day, until it was time to go to bed."

NHL WINTER CLASSIC

WHO: Penguins vs. Sabres

WHEN: 1 p.m. today

WHERE: Ralph Wilson Stadium, Orchard Park, N.Y.

TV: WFLA, Channel 8

Reporter Carter Gaddis can be reached at (813) 259-8291 or igaddis@tampatrib.com.

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