Golden Years - Training Camps
Week 1 - 2006-07

At an NHL training camp, veterans try to reclaim their roster spots and youngsters do their best to supplant them. Team management evaluates the talent on hand and decides who stays and plays the game at the highest level, who gets sent down to the minors for seasoning and who is counselled to look for honest work outside the game.

While it is still a rite of passage in the life of every NHLer, the training camp experience is not what it once was, especially for rookies. The prospects of today have usually spent considerable time in developmental programs designed to produce the next generation of elite players. Setting foot in a big league dressing room for the first time is not as big a shock to their system as it was for those who made the jump in the forties, fifties and sixties. They’ve had year-round training routines since their early teens and, represented by professionals who do their bargaining for them, command a lot more respect than did their counterparts of a generation or two ago.

Today’s hopefuls come to camp knowing they won’t be subjected to the treatment that was routine for a kid hoping to make the grade in the days when the vast majority of players were expendable, easily replaceable, $5000 pieces of hockey-playing machinery. There are limits mandated restricting the amount and types of activities they can be subjected to and they get the best counselling available in terms of nutrition, fitness and lifestyle. For most of them, it represents very little change from their experiences in amateur hockey.

Years ago, teams weighed and measured each kid when they signed him to the c-form and that tied his hockey career to the club for as long as the organization saw fit to retain them. When they came to camp, they were thrown into the maelstrom, competing against proven veterans who saw them as a distinct threat to their livelihood. For every one of the newcomers that stuck with the team, someone had to leave. With under a hundred NHL jobs up for grabs, competition often boiled over into fisticuffs with more than a few rookies needing medical assistance after tangling with a vet.

No tactic was too underhanded for a veteran with a family to support and no action too reprehensible if it might make the difference between the NHL and one of the many minor circuits that dotted the hockey world. On the other hand, for a youngster trying to make a name for himself, particularly a kid with a reputation as a tough customer, the fastest path to the top sometimes appeared to be over the body of the guy that held the job he was after.

Appearances are deceiving, however, and more than one kid was carried from the field of battle after tangling with older, wilier veterans they hoped to replace. Every fall, the Red Wings’ veterans wondered who would be so foolhardy as to try to make a name for himself by taking out Gordie Howe and waited for the bloodletting. Every year, some kid tried it and paid the price for choosing that course of action.

It has been argued by a number of veterans of the hockey wars that cattle received better medical treatment than players did in the years before the advent of the 12-team NHL. It’s not much of an understatement, considering that in the forties and fifties, Toronto Maple Leafs trainer, Tim Daly, had a panacea called Ichthammol that he applied liberally to any injury that didn’t involve an open wound. It is still used today, but only by veterinary practitioners.

Nutrition was a word, not a science when the league’s entire player payroll amounted to less than what a fifth-line forward brings home every month. Beer and red meat featured prominently in a team’s advice to its players. A steak was the best way to prepare a person’s body for the rigors of combat on the ice. Protein was the key and nothing had more of it than beef.

Things were a little trickier with hops, however. Older guys, seen to be heading into the twilight of their careers were ordered to change the habits of a lifetime and stop after a couple post-game pops. Little guys, leaving as many as five pounds on the ice every night, were advised that a fourth or fifth brew would help them rehydrate, putting the lost weight back on their scrawny frames, the better to equip them for their rigorous profession.

Then as now, exhibition games were a staple of NHL training camps; they were a way to generate income for the club. Today, the vast majority of games are played between NHL teams, even if they have to go overseas to find a rink to play in. In the days before hockey joined the global village, many teams avoided their NHL rivals until the season opened. Some teams held exhibition tours to wind up their training camps, playing games against local teams while scooping up the bulk of the proceeds. More than a few teams paid for their preseason expenses by playing their way back towards their home base as they ticked off the days to the first game of the regular season.

Others preferred to play against their farm teams, making for games that were sometimes more lively than any either squad would play in the upcoming season. In the late 1940s, the Montreal Canadiens played annual exhibition matches against QSHL clubs. They were far from friendly outings. Guys who had been cut from the Habs a day or two earlier faced off against the kids who had taken their jobs. The games were tightly contested affairs with a lot of men having a last chance to prove the Canadiens wrong. Blood flowed freely; exciting offensive plays and spectacular goaltending performances were the order of the day with the affiliates giving a more than respectable account of themselves before the practice was discontinued.

As the sixties gave way to the seventies and players began earning the kind of money reflected by box office revenue, they found themselves becoming valued assets to their corporate employers. What were once standard business practices for the NHL became outmoded means of doing business as hockey remade itself, becoming less about the game and more about the event, a transition made by all major sporting concerns.

Most guys who made it to the NHL in the days before cable television look at today’s players and sigh when they see the way things have changed, both financially and in terms of the attention paid to the care and handling of the men who earn a living doing what they did a half century ago. They sigh not out of envy or regret, but because they’d do it all over again at the drop of a hat, under the same circumstances and for the same money as they did the first time around.