The coming of another Ice Age

ICE HOCKEY WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP BUILD UP:From humble beginnings on Dublin's two over-crowded rinks, Irish ice hockey has had to struggle to get where it is now, on the road to its sixth World Championship, writes SEÁN KENNY

A DEFINITION of a niche market: “For sale! 1 x Olympia Ice Resurfacer”. So says a small advertisement on the Irish Ice Hockey Association (IIHA) website.

Irish ice hockey is a little miracle on ice: 18 teams operating out of a single public rink. Amateur players paying for ice time. Overachievement. Unfulfilled promises of new facilities.

Given a puck and a stretch of ice, Irish ice hockey has always got on with the game. From April 10th to 18th the Irish national team will compete in its sixth consecutive World Championships, travelling this year to New Zealand with a 20-man, all-Ireland panel selected from the Irish Ice Hockey League, now two seasons old.

An explanation is in order. How did temperate, sport-saturated Ireland acquire ice hockey? Cliff Saunders, president of the IIHA and a former Ireland international, was there when the sport solidified from remote rumour into reality. The game took those first cloudy breaths in the mid-1980s, in the old Dolphin’s Barn and Phibsborough ice rinks in Dublin, which were designed purely for skating.

Saunders, a regular at the Phibsborough rink, heard hockey skates enabled the wearer to accelerate faster than figure skates. He was 16. Guess what he saved up to buy?

“Then an ice hockey stick and puck were introduced to me by the owners of the facility. I asked a few other guys and we started our own little team up, the Phibsborough Flyers. There was a club based in the Dolphin’s Barn rink called the Rialto Rockets and we started playing against each other. Naturally, there was a rivalry between us.”

Those early games were crude affairs, played with the minimum of equipment. The wearing of helmets was considered poor etiquette. As the IIHA website notes, in the delicate tones of euphemism, “the team with most physical presence on the day usually came out the winner”.

“Even the goalies didn’t wear face masks,” says Saunders. “It was ignorance, but it toughened us up pretty quickly. As a kid, you actually felt better if you got a cut on your face or a busted lip. That was part and parcel of being an ice hockey player.

“I realise now how stupid we were and we were very lucky none of the guys lost any teeth over all those years.”

It was always a DIY job. Saunders and a handful of others gleaned what they could from watching NHL games courtesy of fuzzy pirated TV signals.

“We really learnt from watching the telly. There were a few Canadians who played in Dublin at the time but back then they didn’t want to know us.

“They wouldn’t even let us train with them because they’d have to come down to our level. But I suppose that was part of the development. It really pushed me to prove that the Irish could take this sport on. I loved it and I wanted to pursue the fact that there were no proper facilities.”

Then, such facilities as there were vanished. By the turn of the millennium, both Dublin rinks had closed. They had been undersized and overcrowded. Now they were gone, a dream swallowed whole by a voracious property market.

Irish ice hockey could have died right then. It was kept alive by a handful of devotees who travelled the long miles to Belfast to play first in the Dundonald International Ice Bowl and later in the Odyssey Arena, home of the Belfast Giants, a professional side competing in the UK Elite League. They would catch an hour or two of ice time while the Giants players took lunch, or even squeeze in a session in the lonely hour after midnight.

In 2004, an Ireland national team entered its first World Championships, at Division Three level. Ireland’s general manager, Mick Higgins, picks up the story.

“We had our first ever victory against Armenia in Iceland on St Patrick’s Day, 2004 and we made the sports pages in North America, but it went completely unrecognised here.

“In Vancouver and Toronto they knew more about it than people here. Us having our first victory on St Patrick’s Day was obviously too much for the local editors to pass up,” he says.

IN 2007 it all began to crystallise. Playing at the newly built, Olympic-sized Dundalk Ice Dome, Ireland took silver in Division Three of the World Championships, gaining promotion for the first time. A couple of thousand spectators watched Ireland earn second place courtesy of a penalty shoot-out in their final match. It was as big as the small-time gets.

“After only a couple of years, to make our first expedition to Division Two was a great achievement,” says Higgins.

“We’re sort of seen as a success story of international hockey, because we came from nowhere, basically.

“There were kids playing for the under-18 team in the Worlds in Turkey who took the game up based on that success, so there was an influx of players.”

The inaugural season of the Irish Ice Hockey League, of which Higgins is also chairman, began in autumn 2007.

The IIHA was aware of latent interest in competitive ice hockey among many migrants and a growing group of Irish players. Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Finns, Czechs and Slovaks, among others, signed up. A largely Latvian team, the Latvian Hawks, was formed.

Six teams compete in the top division, a further 12 in the recreational league. How have Irish players fared mingling with all those aristocrats of the ice?

“It raises the visibility of the sport if you’ve got guys coming in from abroad at a fairly high level,” says Higgins.

“It makes it more entertaining to watch and it also gives you something to aspire to. But it is harder for some Irish guys to get on when guys from other countries have so much more experience.”

Nonetheless, the 20-man roster bound for New Zealand is comprised solely of native Irish players, in roughly equal proportions from north and south of the border.

THE DUNDALK Ice Dome echoes daily to the crisp whoosh of blades skimming ice. Once in a while there is the wincing whumph of colliding bodies or the sharp clop of a puck sweetly struck. Pleasing sounds to the ears of Higgins and Saunders.

The Ice Dome, though, is a multipurpose facility stretched taut with demand. Its weekly timetable is a headache committed to paper. Between the figure skating lessons, discos on ice and public sessions, it is not unusual for teams to train well past midnight, if at all.

“When we go away to congress with the international federation, they can’t believe we’ve 18 teams operating out of one rink,” says Higgins.

“Other countries tend to have one or at most two teams in a rink, but 18 is unheard of.”

“Getting a rink in Dublin is key,” adds Saunders. “I’ve parents on the phone to me every day saying, ‘My kid wants to play ice hockey but I can’t travel to Dundalk.’

“We’ve been told by Sports Campus Ireland that over the next few years an ice rink might go out there. Because of the downturn everything’s going to suffer, but I still believe that there are plenty of people out there, not just in Ireland, who’d be willing to invest in a proper facility in Dublin if the land was given to them.”

If Saunders were any more kinetically charged in the furtherance of his sport, he would probably emit sparks. He will keep writing letters, continue pestering government officials. He has chased this dream too long and too hard to let it go.

For now there is another World Championship to look forward to. Ireland competed at Division Two level for the first time in 2008 and the experience was bruising. The team lost each of its five games. Relegated to Division Three this year, the Irish roster reflects the difficulties inherent in taking a largely self-financed amateur team halfway round the world.

As Higgins explains: “We’re travelling with a very different team from the one that played two years ago. There are eight new guys. You have guys who retired, who married, who can’t afford the cost of travelling. If it was back in Dundalk again we’d possibly have a better chance because there’d be guys there who can’t make it to New Zealand.”

Saunders’ long-term goal for Ireland is a place in the Winter Olympics. He considers this a realistic possibility, given time and the right facilities.

“I suppose it’s about trying to get back to Division Two and to sustain that. And when you get to Division Two you don’t really have to go that far to get into the Olympic qualifiers.

“It is the dream, the Olympics. We’ll know in the next five years where we’re going. We definitely need another facility to help us get there, though.”

IRISH-AMERICAN Jim Tibbetts coaches the side on a part-time, voluntary basis. He managed the French national team in the 1998 Winter Olympics. The IIHA regularly flies him over from France. Tibbetts, who appears to hold a Gangs of New York-inspired attitude to his Irish heritage, likes to say, “with blades on their feet and sticks in their hands, how can the Irish not like this sport?”

How indeed?