TO THE CASUAL OBSERVER, there’s something fresh and exhilarating about hockey. Glinting steel blades cutting hard ice, spraying frost. Fans in scarves and cozy fleece pullovers. Handsome athletes like Wayne “The Great One” Gretzky, Bobby “The Golden Jet” Hull and “Super” Mario Lemieux swooshing toward the goal with grace and power, breath visible in the chill of the rink. Hockey evokes the brisk, frozen tundra of remote northern climes. If American football is the bratwurst with-sauerkraut of spectator sports, then hockey is the York Peppermint Patty.
And yet, anyone who’s ever carried a hockey bag, sat next to one or ridden in a vehicle with one can tell you about another side of this icy-cool sport. Hockey players know it. Youth-hockey moms know it. Anyone who’s ventured into the Indianapolis Ice dressing room at Pepsi Coliseum knows it. Hockey stinks.
PLAGUED BY A HOST of injuries, the Indianapolis Ice stank it up on the ice last season, winning only 20 of 64 games and finishing dead last in their division. It was their worst effort since the organization, as a cost-saving measure, left the now-defunct International Hockey League (once the hockey equivalent of Triple-A baseball) for the lower-tier Central Hockey League in 1999. At the time, fans booed the move because it dropped the franchise another rung down the competition ladder from the world-class National Hockey League. IHL players were one step away from the big time; CHL players are yet another step, maybe two, below that.
This doesn’t mean Ice management is handing out contracts to anyone who can skate: They invited about 30 players to training camp this year, of whom only 18 made the roster for the first game of the regular season. Some of the hopefuls came from as far as Eastern Europe and the remote stretches of Canada’s Yukon Territory. Each paid his own way.
It isn’t as though they’re turning out for the big bucks. Depending on their level of experience, CHL players earn between $12,000 and $30,000 over the course of a five-month season. On the up side, the Ice provides free housing. Single guys usually double up in modest furnished quarters in Bent Tree apartments on the northwest side; if they’ve paid their dues—toughed it out through enough seasons of grueling competition and often crummy living conditionsthey’re rewarded with a place of their own. Married players, who account for nearly half the roster, share apartments with their spouses. The average age of the Ice players is around 26, and as a service to young jocks who might not be accustomed to looking out for themselves, the Ice Booster Club provides each household with a hospitality basket full of necessities: razors, toothpaste, grocery coupons, a list of local pizza places that deliver—and soap.
BUT NO AMOUNT of soap can change the fact that the Ice literally stink. It’s not that they’re gross or have poor hygiene (not necessarily, at least). Put the blame on the sport itself. Hockey is never dry. In fact, it’s downright moist. The stick-wielding, bladeflashing gladiators who play the gamewho make skidding falls on rock-hard surfaces and take bone-rattling checks into unforgiving boards—are the most heavily padded athletes in sport. And if there’s one thing those pads do as thoroughly as protect players, it’s soak up sweat. “You have all this equipment on,” says veteran Ice goaltender Jamie Morris. He’s just come from a hard practice, helmet in hand, steam rising from his soaked hair. “Sweat stays in the equipment, then dries. If you go to the gym and get all sweaty, you can go home and wash your clothes. But we can’t just throw our equipment in the washer.”
Even though Morris is one of the older guys on the team—he turns 29 this month—his boyish good looks give him a fresh, youthful appearance. He doesn’t look like a guy who would smell. And most of the time, he doesn’t. Catch him coming off the ice, however, and he reeks. Well, okay, his pads reek. Like some perverse twist on a plug-in airfreshener, the full bodysuit of gear he dons to protect himself from flying pucks contains a latent stench that’s activated by body heat and catalyzed by fresh, acrid perspiration. Imagine, say, a crock of pond scum simmering over a dung fire.
In the off-season, players are required to take their equipment home in the evenings after practice. Morris’ smelled so bad that his wife, Jennifer, had to lay down the law: no gear inside the apartment. “I’ve never smelled another smell like it,” she says. “I’m sure the neighbors love it: He drapes his stuff all over our balcony to dry. It smells like 14-year-old socks that have never been washed. And since Jamie’s a goalie, even when his equipment’s off you can sometimes still smell it—on his hands, his face. A couple of months ago, when he hung his socks outside on the balcony, I asked him, ‘Can I wash those?’ Whoa—that was the wrong question.”
Morris wears the same pair of socks during every game and every practice, which says a lot about how he approaches the game. Sure, catching small pucks traveling in excess of 100 miles per hour takes acute reflexes and well-honed skill. But putting your glove in the right place at the right time also requires intuition and luck. Consequently, netminders tend to be a superstitious breed. Any alteration in routine—any change in clothing, for instance—can break a winning streak. “I’ve only managed to wash those socks a couple of times,” says Darrin Flinchem, the Ice’s hardworking equipment manager. And even then, to avoid provoking the hockey gods, Morris will let Flinchem wash the precious stockings only in a load by themselves, untouched by any other garments.
“When a goalie gets on a hot streak,” Morris says, “he won’t wash the stuff underneath his pads because there’s a lot of luck in there. It goes back to goalie being such a lonely position. You’re constantly talking to yourself. If you play good one day, you ask yourself, ‘What did I do right?’ Smell is one of those things. It automatically gets you back into the right frame of mind the next time you play.” Ah, the sweet smell of success.
Even Flinchem gets caught up in the superstition. On the first day of training camp this season, amid a flurry of new faces and new gear to repair, the equipment guy went out of his way to track down Morris and tell him he’d seen his rank mesh laundry bag lying somewhere it didn’t belong. “If Jamie loses a shirt that he normally wears under his pads,” Flinchem says, “it could throw off his whole game.”
CRISPLY OUTFITTED in a black-andwhite sweatsuit, the spiky-haired Flinchem wages an ongoing battle against what he calls “the funk.” His bunker is a dark, subterranean equipment room in the cement bowels of the Coliseum, reachable only by a narrow, winding staircase. A photo of the Hanson Brothers, a trio of goons from the gloriously graphic ’70s hockey movie Slap Shot, hangs on the wall behind Flinchems workbench.
While players are fighting to work up a stink on the ice, Flinchem hustles behind the lines to minimize the casualties. To help keep his players looking and smelling respectable, he calls in reinforcements from Tuchman Cleaners—namely Pat Miller, a neat, grandmotherly woman with a blonde bouffant who has cleaned the team’s grubby uniforms during every one of their 15 years as a franchise. She washes every jersey before the start of the season with Exec 120°, an industrialstrength detergent manufactured by a company once commissioned to make soap for astronauts. “They don’t smell too bad,” she says politely. After all these years, Miller is not easily shocked.
The Ice’s jerseys stay clean until about the third game of the season. “Then the funk comes right back,” Flinchem says. That’s when he goes to work. A small washing machine in the Ice training room, situated beneath a shelf stocked with bleach, stain-remover and detergent, runs continuously whenever guys are there sweating. Any piece of a player’s attire Flinchem can get his hands on, he throws in the wash—from T-shirts, socks and jocks to removable pad inserts, the worst culprits in hockey odor. (Goalie Morris, partly in defense of his unique funk, points out that his equipment doesn’t have the same removable pad inserts as the gear worn by players at other positions.)
When they’re not washing pads, Flinchem and his assistants are spraying on Lysol to deodorize them. And while it’s tough to imagine that any player would want to stink, the Ice aren’t always Flinchem’s best allies in the war on funk. “I don’t want them putting that stuff on my gear,” an unapologetic Morris says of the Lysol. “I don’t want to smell like roses out there.”
The older gear gets, the harder it is to keep it smelling like roses, whether or not players let Flinchem spray it. And when a guy gets attached to a piece of equipment, when it fits just right, he’s loath to retire it—no matter how tattered and fungus-inhabited it may be—for newer, safer stuff. “Some guys have equipment they’ve been using for years, since they were in junior-level hockey, and they don’t want to give it up,” says Flinchem. “Even when you wash it, it’s dirty again after one wearing.”
To minimize the unpleasant working conditions that fetid gear creates, Flinchem takes preemptive measures to keep equipment dry. That’s no easy task, considering that hockey is played on water—frozen water, yes, but water nonetheless. Consider that the Ice play seven of their 32 CHL road games in Texas this season: “In Texas in November, it’s still 90 degrees outside,” says veteran defenseman and fan favorite Bernie John. “It gets hot on the ice. As the game wears on, the ice gets slushy.” A player can soak as many as four pairs of gloves in a single game. As if sweating and wet ice weren’t enough to dampen the players’ uniforms, they douse themselves with squirt bottles to cool down while sitting on the bench.
When the Ice play back-to-back home games, Flinchem and his assistants spread out the equipment and train industrial steel fans on it until it’s dry. On the road, however, it’s a different story. In order to hustle the team on to the next city, the equipment guys sometimes have to pack the gear wet and hope they arrive in the next town early enough to dry it before the game. Otherwise, players are in for a nasty surprise when they slip back into the stuff. “When it’s soaked, it’s pretty slimy,” says Flinchem. Or worse: One time last season the team flew into Indy late at night after a road game in Texas. Half of their equipment made it home on the plane; the other half sat on an airport tarmac in Chicago and froze. The next night, only half the team could suit up for pregame warmups because the other guys’ equipment hadn’t thawed.
You can’t accuse Flinchem of being unprepared to deal with moisture. He likens himself to a rock-‘n’-roll roadie, the difference being that his black travel trunks are full of tools, towels and miscellaneous hockey parts instead of mike stands and patch cords. He opens one trunk to reveal several handheld hair dryers, perfect for warming up gloves and skates. Pinned to the inside of the lid are family photos of his dog and kids.
“THE SMELL’S NOT too bad,” Bernie John says while sitting in front of his locker. He’s sweat-soaked from a long, early-season practice. Arguably the best defenseman in the CHL, John is known as a hard worker. His right hand rests casually on a Styrofoam cup nestled between his still-padded legs. He looks thoughtful, pausing between sentences to bend his head to the cup for a small, controlled spit. A 10-year veteran of the minors, he’s a man of few words, not given to complaining. “We leave our stuff here at the rink, and Darrin and his buddies wash it every day,” he says. “They’re probably the top guys I’ve been with.” The sound of secretion fills the dressing room as several other players, each of their bottom lips stuffed with smokeless tobacco, aim for Styrofoam cups of their own. A large garbage can placed smack-dab in the center of the room is full of the discarded “spitters.”
It’s possible that with the sickeningly sweet smell of Skoal Longcut hanging thick in the air, or with the near-empty pot of cheap coffee scorching in the corner, John just doesn’t smell the funk. Or perhaps, like Morris, he’s used to it. “I can’t smell myself,” says Morris. “I’m used to my equipment. I don’t smell the other guys, either.” To men such as Morris and John, who’ve given most of their lives to the game, the stink of hockey is a footnote, a matter of housekeeping. You’d better believe Hull, Lemieux and Gretzky generated some smell in their day (all right, maybe not Gretzky). As in any physically demanding sport, stench is nothing to scorn or be ashamed of—on the contrary, it’s a mark of toughness and grit. If you don’t stink, you’re probably not trying hard enough.
Even if they could smell each other, the Ice players probably wouldn’t care anyway. Longtime pro Kevin St. Jacques, a crafty winger who returned to the Ice this season after starting his pro career here a decade ago, says it’s life in the dressing room that keeps him in the game, despite the fact that, at 32, he’s practically geriatric for this level of pro sport. “It’s the boys,” he says. “Being around the boys. Enjoying another season of trials and tribulations, ups and downs with the guys in here.” He takes a sweeping look around the dressing room as teammates jabber about a recent scrimmage. “This is like my family now.” Morris says it’s common to find hockey types playing golf together in the off-season. “Why? Because they get to be in a group. They’re around hockey. They’re out golfing because they need that camaraderie.” In other words, these guys think their teammates’ shit doesn’t stink—which is fortunate, because in the Ice dressing room, no door separates the bathroom from the lockers.
It would be an exaggeration to say the Ice always stink. The sinks in their dressingroom bathroom are fully stocked with toiletries and odor-fighting agents: baby powder, shaving cream, antibacterial hand soap, mousse, hairstyling gel, hair spray, hospital-grade disinfectant spray and spray-on Right Guard deodorant, which casts a musky pall over the dressing room after games and practices.
“Carter, you got any who-er lure?” St. Jacques shouts across the room. A wily presence on the ice, he’s spent enough time in hockey dressing rooms to be fluent in the nuances of off-color guy-banter. He and John, the team’s two player/assistant coaches and unmarried both, are dressed in their clubbing best, St. Jacques with sport jacket and T-shirt and John with a blue, open-collar shirt. They’re about to hit the town after a game. “No,” comes a reply from behind a mass of bodies. “I don’t have my locker set up for home games yet.” St. Jacques makes his way around the room asking teammates if they have any Brut 33, palming a loaded money clip as though he gets paid in cash after each game. Unsuccessful, he turns to John. “We’ll have to stop by the drugstore and get some on the way,” he says. Reeking in the dressing room is one thing, but you can’t stink when you’re after the scent of a woman.
MINOR-LEAGUE HOCKEY also stinks in ways that transcend the odors of the dressing room. Players endure tortuously long bus trips. On the Ice’s longest road swing of the season, for example, they’ll fly into Texas for a game at Amarillo, then board a bus for games in Albuquerque, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Odessa and Fort Worth before riding all the way back to Indy. They also subject* their bodies to five months of rigorous exertion and hard physical contact. Rugged defensive enforcer Kevin Popp, who counts fisticuffs among the skills in his game repertoire, sported an impressive cut across the nose before the regular season even started. For these guys, bodily damage is an occupational hazard.
To top it off, many of the players toil hundreds if not thousands of miles from a Canadian homeland where hockey is followed with near-religious fervor. Here, in a Midwestern town with big-league football and basketball franchises and a beloved minor-league baseball club, professional hockey promoters have long struggled to find a niche. Indianapolis has had no fewer than five pro teams, of which the Ice has enjoyed the longest run at 15 years, and then only after dropping to a less-costly, lower-profile league.
But if the life of the hockey minor-leaguer-risking physical injury for peanuts in relative obscurity-sounds thankless to you, then you’re probably not a real hockey fan. Asking a Canadian who grew up watching Gretzky (who, by the way, played his first professional game with the Indianapolis Racers in 1978) why he wants to play pro hockey is like asking a kid from inner-city Chicago why he wants to be like Mike. ” 1 his is my dream/’ says Steve I.ev’ac, a bright-eyed, fast-skating kid fresh out of the Canadian junior leagues who showed up for Ice training camp this year. He busted his butt on the ice for two weeks and, as a rookie, was made to carry the teams smelly equipment from the dressing room to the bus for a road exhibition game. Just days before the start of the regular season, Levac was cut.
The players who do make it enjoy a cult-like following among the Ice’s solid core of about 5,000 diehard, mostly blue-collar fans, many of whom would gladly stand up for their favorite player in a barroom brawl. The fans appreciate hard work, blood and sweat, dirty hands. During one early-season practice in a near-empty Coliseum, a mother and her young son stood close to the glass, watching the Ice conduct a two-on-one drill. “See how fast they’re skating?” the woman said. “They try their hardest, even in practice. Remember that the next time you’re at the rink.” Without looking at her, the boy nodded. He was marveling at a slick, backhanded shot that tugged the net strings in the back of the goal.
Sure, these guys are only in the minor leagues. But they get to be heroes to other people’s kids. And it isn’t seemly for an organization that provides these kinds of role models to stink. So the Ice have made a few changes with the hope of turning things around this year. For one, they’ve brought in rookie head coach Ken McRae, a longtime pro and former journeyman NHLer. He had to move into coaching after several instances of blood-clotting cut short his playing career, and the job change brought him back to the minors. “You’ve got to put in your time as a coach, just like when you’re a player,” he says. In the NHL, McRae enjoyed the best of everything: best facilities, best accommodations, best players. He shared the ice with Gretzky and Lemieux. He shared a dressing room with greats Guy Lafleur, Joe Sakic and Peter Statsny. Now he calls a tiny win-dowless corner of the training room his office. Whistles and clipboards hanging on the wall, it looks like a high-school gym teachers office. Only smaller.
Whether McRae smelled bad as a player is a question for historians. He’s certainly cleaned up now, buzzing around the Coliseum in a golf shirt and pleated slacks or standing behind the bench during games in a well-cut suit. As coach, it’s his job to make sure the Ice rebound from last year’s stinky performances. “It’s going to be like a brearh of fresh air to have some new uys in here/’ he says, demonstrating a fine gift for metaphor. He wanes fans to think well of his players, and he doesn’t wane their behind-the-scenes cursing quoted in this story. He tells me this while taking a whizz into a dressing-room urinal.
McRae seems to be under the impression that the cursing is what struck me most about the dressing room. But what struck me, of course, was the smell—and I’m not the only one. “When people used to take tours of the dressing room,” says Morris, “the first thing they would say is, ‘Jeez, it stinks in here.’” The indoor/outdoor carpeting, after years of serving as a Petri dish for bacteria, mold and fungus, had come to resemble real turf. Imagine the simmering-pot-of-pond-scum smell of Morris’s equipment, then multiply that by 18, the number of players on the Ice roster. Now toss in a pitchfork-full of fresh compost. You get the idea. But at the start of this season, in what was perhaps a symbolic move, the organization ripped the dank old rug out from under the team and sent it to the Dumpster. In its place is new, factory-fresh carpet.
For now, the dressing room doesn’t smell too bad. If the players stay healthy and heed the reminder on the dressing room dry-erase board—DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR—the odor around here should be relatively benign for some time to come.
Out of their own dressing room, however, it seems the Ice are still never far from something that stinks, or used to stink. When asked about conditions on the road, several players mention “The Bat Cave” in Austin, Texas. Officially known as the Travis County Exposition Center, it’s essentially a rodeo-and-livestock barn converted into a hockey arena. Team trainer Todd Champlin remembers another rink of a now-defunct club—he thinks it was in the Texarkana region—in which the visiting team’s dressing room was set up in a once-public men’s room.
On the job, Champlin sees a steady stream of veterans in their late 20s and early 30s, already worn down from years of injuries and hard checks to the boards. Standing in the Ice training room, a room pungent with the mediciny smell of Bengay—tough-guy defenseman Kevin Popp tells Champlin about his off-season EMT training, a fallback for his post-hockey days. “They let me ride along on ambulance runs,” Popp says. He describes arriving at the home of a bedridden woman covered in her own feces. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever smelled in my life,” he says. As the other Ice players will also discover, if they haven’t already, life beyond hockey can stink, too.
As in any physically demanding sport, stench is nothing to be ashamed of—on the contrary, it’s a mark of toughness and grit. If you don’t stink, you’re probably not trying hard enough.
