The Arena – a legendary junior hockey home

Medicine Hat Tigers fans celebrate a goal in last year's WHL playoffs at The Arena.

 Tigers play out their final games at the old Ash Avenue barn

    At age 37, The Arena experienced its prime moment.
    Anyone that is a fan of the Medicine Hat Tigers can still see Brennan Bosch's overtime goal. On May 14, 2007, the Tigers were battling the Vancouver Giants in Game 7 of the Western Hockey League championship series, and the teams were locked in a 2-2 tie in double overtime.
    Both clubs were going to the Memorial Cup tournament, because Vancouver was the host team. Even with that in mind, the Tigers and Giants became fierce rivals over that championship series, not giving and inch and playing like everything was on the line.
    If you were at the Tigers legendary home rink that night, you can still see the game's deciding play.
    Bosch had the puck near the blue-line in his own zone, and he was tapped by a swinging stick of a Giants player. The Tigers talented centre went down to his knees, quickly got up and a 3-on-1 break ensued.

Rroary, the Tigers mascot, gets the fans going at The Arena.

    The Martensville, Sask., product skated two to three strides past the Vancouver blue-line and wired home the winner low stick side on Giants goaltender Tyson Sexsmith. The sellout crowd of 4,006 spectators at The Arena exploded like never before with the home side pulling out a 3-2 win and capturing a WHL title.
    In that one moment, you experienced everything that made The Arena special. A storied junior hockey team was winning a league championship in a classic junior hockey rink that had character. The victory came in a city of about 60,000 people that felt special to be a junior hockey town.
    As the Tigers celebrated on the ice, they looked into the stands and saw family members, fans they knew, rink attendants and the team's legendary play-by-play voice Bob Ridley up in the broadcast booth. They occupied the same spots game in and game out.
    Goaltender and local product Matt Keetley was answering questions during a post-game interview on the ice, and out of nowhere, he pointed to the stands and yelled out in joy that he saw his whole family. It wouldn't be that much of an exaggeration to say everyone that was partial to the Tigers cause felt like family for that one night.
    In major junior hockey, the Tigers are a legendary team. They have built a huge staple of memories in their storied home rink. Most can be recalled by Ridley, who has called all but one of the team's games as the play-by-play voice.
    For the players, coaches and staff that have passed though the Tigers since they were born in 1970, The Arena is a second home.
    In the 1970s, they used to shoehorn the fans into the barn that contained the "Smartie Box" coloured seats. Stories were often told that fans stood five deep in the walkway that circled the top of the stands to watch games.
    They saw Lanny McDonald and Tom Lysiak lead the Tigers to their first league title in 1973. They also got to see tough as nails characters like defenceman and later 1987 Memorial Cup winning head coach Bryan Maxwell, who always seemed to crack the right joke. Barry Melrose, who was sporting his mullet style haircut, made his first claim to fame at The Arena guiding the Tigers as head coach to a second straight Memorial Cup win in 1988.

A young fan cheers on the Tigers at The Arena.

    It was a building a Gas City youngster named Trevor Linden dreamed of playing in, when he attended games as a boy. He more than made good on that dream helping the Tigers win their back-to-back Memorial Cup titles. The trip to the 1987 title included a Game 7 WHL championship victory over the Portland Winterhawks, which saw fans jumping over the glass to celebrate with the team on the ice.
    It was a place Jason Chimera cried his eyes out over, because he didn't want to leave after being traded in the late 1990s.
    The Arena was where head coach Willie Desjardins brought the Tigers into their current era of success. When the team was at one of its darkest points having missed the playoffs for five consecutive seasons, Desjardins was the one that preached hockey was one of the best games there is and the rink is one of the best places to beat. He was the man that talked heart and soul character guys like Steve Marr into staying with the game, when there was every reason to walk away.
    Following his first season in 2002-03, the Tigers ended the playoff drought and fell in the second round to the powerhouse Red Deer Rebels in a tough seven-game series. A year later, they won the franchise's fourth league title making that run in what was then known as the loudest barn in the WHL.
    Countless NHL players have graced The Arena ice wearing orange and black. A way larger majority the hit the ice arriving as boys and departing as quality young men. The Arena was the place they grew up in.
    It seems everywhere you walk in the building you will encounter a part of its history.
    Or, if you just want to have a friendly visit with someone, Tigers assistant trainer Ken Stickel, who is a fixture there, always loves to chat.

Cole Sanford and the Tigers celebrate a goal at The Arena.

    However, The Arena's time as the home of the Tigers is coming to a close after 45 seasons. Tonight, the Tigers will play their final regular season game in their long-time home against the Saskatoon Blades at 7:30 p.m. local time.
    Next season, the Tigers will call the brand new Medicine Hat Regional Event Centre home.
    Before they make their move into their new home, the Tigers will embark on one more playoff run playing out of The Arena. The Brandon Wheat Kings and the Kelowna Rockets are the favourites to win the WHL crown, but the Tigers are in the mix.
    If fate would have it, it would almost be fitting if the Tigers could give The Arena one more Ray Lewis type last ride. Being the home of one more WHL championship and Memorial Cup winning team would create a fairy tale ending for the building that sits on Ash Avenue S.E. along the banks of the South Saskatchewan River.

    If you have any comments about this blog, feel free to email them to stankssports@gmail.com.

May God forever bless “The Boogeyman”

            It is a book I don’t wanted to glance into, but I do anyways.

            A Christmas gift, I am nowhere near finishing it. I jump to a page or two here and a page or two there depending upon where curiousity takes me at that point in time.

            The book is written by John Branch and it is about the life of late NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard entitled, “Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard.” Anyone that follows hockey knows that the book penned by the New York Times writer will enter tough areas.

Boogaard died on May 13, 2011 at age 28 from an accidental overdose of alcohol and painkillers. The painkillers were used to treat his concussion injuries.

            Boogaard played in the WHL during the years I covered the league. He was with the Medicine Hat Tigers, when I was in Prince Albert, and I arrived in the Gas City shortly after his time with the Tigers came to an end.

            I was on shift at the Medicine Hat News the night Boogaard passed. Locally, the word arrived in the newsroom at the 9 p.m. hour.

            My first reaction was shock.

            I asked my co-worker, Scott Schmidt, if Boogaard had really died. He did some checking on various Internet lines and quickly confirmed that Boogaard, who played mostly in the NHL with the Minnesota Wild and finished with the New York Rangers, had passed.

            My next reaction was I could name 10 people in town off the top of my head that would immediately be sad about the news. As deadline was approaching and I was handling layout in sports, I quickly pieced together an obituary with quotes from old stories I had written on “The Boogeyman.”

            When my shift ended, I became sad. I was sad, because I knew how well Boogaard was loved in Medicine Hat.

Knowing this love, I have mixed emotions, when it comes to checking out Branch’s book. I am hesitant to discover the struggles Boogaard had in the later years of his life.

When I am ready and the curiosity is up, I do check the book out.

In Medicine Hat, Boogaard was seen as the life of the party comedian and everyone’s best friend. He kept in touch big time with his old billet mom, Doris Sullivan, and Tigers assistant trainer, Ken Stickel, and sent them a variety of his NHL gear.

            He was far from the 6-foot-7, 258-pound, monster type guy spectators saw engaging in brawls on the ice. Looking back to how some of his on-ice fighting incidents were covered in the WHL, I believe at the time we in the media painted a way more aggressive picture of the man, which did him a disservice. Hindsight is always 20-20.

            I only got to deal with Boogaard on a couple of occasions. I wish there would have been more.

            The highlight was writing a catch-up feature on him shortly before Christmas of 2006. I phoned his mother, Joanne, for a cell number.

There was kind of amusement and a bit of an unsure moment, because a reporter from Medicine Hat wanted to talk to Derek. I could tell mom was a bit concerned about what Derek was going to say in the interview.

She passed on the cell number and said, “Please be good.”

I left a message on Derek’s phone, and he called back within five minutes. He quickly rolled off a pile of one-liners, and I laughed so hard that it took a bit to get into the interview.

Boogaard then asked how Tigers head coach and general manager Willie Desjardins was doing and quickly went into a story about his only training camp under Desjardins back in 2002. At that time, the Tigers didn’t have a rookie camp, and the rookies skated in scrimmages with the veterans.

Boogaard said he bodychecked a 15-year-old into the boards hard, and the poor kid had to be taken to hospital by ambulance. Desjardins gave Boogaard the rest of training camp off, and enforcer said that was the easiest training camp he ever had.

I bought that quote up to Desjardins during a Tigers training camp a couple of years later, and he laughed. The bench boss said he flat out had fears players would get hurt running into Boogaard, because he was so big. That came on top of concerns about what would happened when Boogaard would initiate a hit.

Giving him the rest of camp off seemed like the logical thing to do.

            While Boogaard joked about that training camp memory, he initially took having the rest of that camp off the wrong way.

            After he passed, Sullivan recalled that time in training camp during a media interview. She said Boogaard came home all sad the night of that hit being dejected he couldn’t play. He said it was like he was back in kindergarten and the teachers wouldn’t let him play with the little kids because he was too big.

            That recollection brought to the forefront of how much Boogaard was in a lot of ways a little boy in a man’s body.

Branch did a good job in capturing that in his book, especially when it came to writing about Boogaard meeting Janella D’Amore, who was a figure skater from Portland, Oregon. The two met, while Boogaard was playing for the Tigers, and had a lengthy relationship, which eventually became a common-law marriage.

When the Tigers came through Portland during the 2001-02 campaign, another girl, who was one of D’Amore’s friends, expressed romantic interest in Boogaard. D’Amore tried to play matchmaker through instant messages on the computer, but Boogaard dismissed them.

Boogaard later got back in touch with D’Amore saying he wanted to get to know her better. Through exchanges, Boogaard said he didn’t like D’Amore’s friend that originally showed interest in him, because that friend was a “puck bunny.”

Boogaard and D’Amore met in person at the Wild’s summer in 2002, and he would often tell her she was too pretty for him. Branch did an excellent job of writing how cute and sweet the romance was especially at the start.

Much later in the book, childlike demeanour came out in another way. It came near the end of Boogaard’s only season with NHL’s New York Rangers and in what were the final months of his life.

He has been out for a lengthy time with a concussion, and the Rangers coaches were trying to get him back on the ice. In one skating session, he kept falling down and struggled with coordination. After being sent off the ice, he went through a range of emotions in front of team trainers, screamed people through he was a pill head and cried.

Without even reading further, you knew the sad ending was around the corner.

Over the years, Boogaard was a character that always intrigued me. Desjardins really liked him, like really liked him.

Had Boogaard not been an overage player in the one season both were in Medicine Hat, it is pretty safe to Desjardins would have ensured the enforcer was on the Tigers roster for the whole campaign. Major junior teams can only have three overage players, and those spots are usually held for scorers or strong veteran defencemen. Boogaard was released after playing 27 regular season games that campaign.

Desjardins, who is the current head coach of the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks, saw a potential for Boogaard to be more that a fighter in hockey talking about how well the big man could skate, had an ability to play defence and possessed a booming shot that could be developed.

While watching him play on TV, it was obviously Boogaard could skate extremely well, which was unreal to see from a guy his size. I remember him being able to get down to block shot and then bounce up quickly to help a play transition down ice.

Fighting alone didn’t get Boogaard into the NHL. It was his ability to do other things to go in hand with fighting that did.

Unfortunately, fighting is what helped bring a tragic end to his story.

Boogaard’s death is one thing that cemented me in believing that fighting has to be taken out of hockey, and more serious attention has to be given to concussion injuries.

Whenever someone in Medicine Hat was adamant that fighting needed to remain in hockey and that concussion injuries are not a big deal, I always brought up Boogaard.

I would ask would you rather have Boogaard live the life he did, or would you rather have him here now? The answer would always be it would have been better to have Boogaard here now.

Currently, Boogaard’s family still has a wrongful-death suit filed against the NHL. The late enforcer was always a huge fan favourite, but with the suit before the courts, you can be sure a number of people involved with the league will try to minimize memories of Boogaard’s time in “The Show.”

It will be up to Boogaard’s friends and those that knew him to ensure his memory stays alive regarding how much of a good and quality guy he was.

Rest in peace Boogey. You will forever be missed.

If you have any feedback on this blog, feel free to email comments to stankssports@gmail.com.