Putting Age on Ice

They're over 60, and they call themselves the Geri-Hatricks. But their hockey skills tell a different story.

Byline: Jonathan Pitts
Source: SUN STAFF

Published on Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Section: TODAY Page: 1E
Edition: FINAL
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© 2003 The Baltimore Sun

He gathers the puck at center ice, fakes to his left and finds open terrain up the boards. Bill Wellington, a Detroit native who has played ice hockey since he was 5, calls to mind a forward for the NHL Red Wings as he shows the puck to one defender, snatches it from another, then lurches into the offensive zone, eyeing the enemy net for an opening that might change the game.

With his bandy-legged gait, Wellington scares few with his speed, and his shot reminds no one of Brett Hull. But the "Golden Brett" should have his pluck. At 82, this geriatric Gretzky may be the one senior citizen you'd want running your power play with the Stanley Cup on the line. "Seventy-five years I've been at this," he says afterward, limping around a locker room on his two artificial hips. "I guess I've taken a liking to it."

You might say that. It isn't just that Wellington, a retired CIA economist who once flew planes for the Army Air Force, braves age, infirmity and year-round meteorological extremes to get to the games he says he can't live without. The Silver Spring resident is an impresario for the elderly. Three years ago, he founded the Geri-Hatricks, the group he's playing with tonight, a collection of skaters 60 and older who gather for weekly scrimmages, compete in national tournaments and generally enjoy a reputation as the Devils of the dentured set.

The name "came to me from out of the blue," says Wellington, who asked himself a while back "how I could get a bunch of geezers out on the ice with me." A puckster who scores three times in a game has netted a "hat trick." The pun belies the players' approach, which might be described as serious - with a caveat.

"We're old, but we're athletes, eh?" Wellington says. "So we do like to win. But mostly it's about getting out there and continuing to play a sport we all love."

Grumpy Old Men seems to meet Slap Shot as the group splits into red and gold teams and the game unfolds at the Ice Gardens rink in Laurel. It's not hard to spot the skill that won this bunch a gold medal at the Senior Olympics in 2000, on the same Lake Placid, N.Y., rink where the United States pulled off its "Miracle on Ice" 20 years earlier. The play is surprisingly crisp.

Most skaters, such as Jim O'Brien, 64, a Massachusetts native who starred at Merrimack College in the 1950s, and Bill Oliver, 63, a Baltimore micro-brewer who grew up in Ontario and played at Cornell University, get up ice in a hurry. Their strides are seamless. They trade rink-wide passes that speak of good team play - and perhaps, just a bit, of a desperation not to have to carry the puck too far themselves. "As you get older," says Wellington, "you have to play smarter. It saves energy."

O'Brien and Oliver make things happen when they take the ice together, and their speed and teamwork set up one scoring chance after another. Oliver, the swiftest man in the game, is far from the hardest worker, but he's always ready for a breakout pass. Fifteen minutes in, he has tested the goalie six times. Soon, he sets up O'Brien for a quick shot from the side of the net, and the gold team takes a 1-0 lead.

But whimsy, too, is in the air. The gold team's very logo - a satire of the San Jose Sharks' predatory mascot - is a set of choppers biting a hockey stick in two. Wellington loses a puck and takes a razzing. "Keep in mind, he's an old man!" hollers Chris Sturm, 69, a fleet youngster from Ellicott City. Sturm rides Dave Gilmer, 70, a bulky defenseman from St. Leonard, into the boards, and the two exchange a playful shove - tottering Tie Domis on the verge of a brawl. "You've got to protect yourself," says Sturm.

As the players tape up before the game, the banter is ruthless and comical. Wellington is derided as "somebody's great-great-great grandfather." He pleads, in his defense, that he once played at St. Michael's College in Vermont, which he clearly considers a hockey hotbed. "Hey, I played at a real hawkey school," says O'Brien in his thick Boston brogue. "They didn't let us wear tutus at Merrimack."

"Well, that was back in the dark ages of hockey," retorts Bob Ruppel, 71, of Lutherville, a man less concerned than he might be with the niceties of chronology. "Did they have skates back then?"

O'Brien, a bright-eyed sort who could pass for 55, recalls the good old days before mandatory face masks. "You had to eat that puck," he says. "Back then, you kept your stick on the ice. If you didn't, you were guaranteed a trip to the dentist."

Sturm, too, remembers those days. The balding forward with the salt in his beard can't recall just when he lost those two front choppers, but his smile, a timeless hockey image, came courtesy of a Baltimore boy. It must have happened during a pickup game on natural ice. Sturm grew up near Woodlawn Cemetery, and he and his neighborhood pals used the graveyard pond as a rink.

"Wasn't much else to do but skate," he says. "We'd come home after school, shovel off the surface, play till dark. Saturdays and Sundays, we'd play sunup to sundown. No coaches, no training. There was no money for that."

They wore several pairs of socks under too-big skates, played with hand-me-down sticks and used magazines for shin guards.

Meanwhile, up in the rarefied hockey air of Ontario, Oliver, who started skating before he turned 2, was just as resourceful. "Yep," says the man who owns the Wharf Rat, a restaurant across from Camden Yards. "It was the Eaton's catalog on one leg, the Simpson's on the other."

Perhaps it matters little that in one of the sport's most fabled towns - Hall of Famers Bobby Hull, Gerry Cheevers and Stan Mikita played or grew up in Ste. Catharines - Oliver starred on a youth team that won the province championship, then competed in Junior "A" and earned a four-year scholarship. The Geri-Hatricks seem to care more that he simply knew Hull, a man whose powerful slap shot made him an NHL legend.

"He was a massive guy, even as a kid," says Oliver. "His dad ran a cement plant, and Bobby used to carry those heavy bags. He had that athlete's physique before anyone knew what `working out' meant. Once, he was over at the house, and we were playing around. He picked me up and tossed me against a wall. He only used one arm."

To chat with the Geri-Hatricks is to soak up hockey history, especially that of Washington and Baltimore. Half a century ago, long before the National Hockey League brought the Capitals to Landover in 1974, kids in the region were icing memories on rivers, lakes and ponds, and sometimes in organized play indoors.

Gilmer, who drives an hour each way to make the weekly game, was, conveniently, the son of a milkman. "Dad would be done with his rounds by 2," he says, "so we could skate after I got out of school." The Washington-area native remembers but one indoor rink, Uline Arena, in the nation's capital in the 1940s. It was home to the now-defunct minor-league Chiefs, whom he occasionally saw play.

Gilmer didn't take up the sport until he was about 30, when he started teaming with other adult skaters for regular pickup games. Forty years later, three of those skaters are Geri-Hatricks teammates.

Up in Charm City, Sturm taught himself the game. The town's best players came from West Baltimore, he says, where his makeshift cemetery rink, and ponds in Dickeyville and Franklintown, were the hockey hubs.

By the time he entered Forest Park High School in the late '40s, a five-team high-school league was thriving. Forest Park, Polytechnic, Loyola, Calvert Hall and Mount Saint Joseph all had squads on the ice, and Sturm remembers thousands packing the old Sports Center arena on North Avenue to root at Friday-night doubleheaders.

Forest Park and Calvert Hall fought for the city title most years. Sturm was a starter on the team that won the regular season in 1952, only to lose to its closest rival in the playoffs.

"My picture was in the Sunpapers on March 15 that year," he says through his gap-toothed grin. "I took a few years off, but mostly I've kept up with [hockey].

"And here we are again. Funny how that works."

In some ways, Wellington is the most serious Geri-Hatrick. He's not the swiftest, but he may be the most involved. He's in demand in age-bracketed national tournaments across the country. In late July, he played for an over-75 team in the legendary Snoopy tournament for seniors, held annually at the rink the late Charles Schulz (creator of "Peanuts" and a lifelong hockey fanatic) built in his adopted hometown of San Jose, Calif.

The tourney's star might have been Red Berenson, the former NHL All-Star and coach who now runs the powerhouse Division I program at the University of Michigan. "Serious player," says the Geri-Hatrick in awe. But his team also excelled, seizing the gold medal in its division.

The 82-year-old is accustomed to hockey success, much of which came in deepening the sport's roots in the region. He founded, and helps operate, the Capital Hockey League at Fort Dupont Ice Arena in Washington. That pool of players, ages 18 to 82, helps fill out the Geri-Hatrick roster, along with six Baltimoreans who have played together off and on for more than three decades.

The team can claim a national profile. NBC's Today show reported its national championship in 2000. The new captain, John Buchleitner, is angling to bring the 2004 Senior Olympic tourney to Maryland. And the team's collective doggedness has gained attention in the health-care field. When Dr. J. Patrick Caulfield of Bethesda "saved my hockey life" with hip-replacement operations in 1996 and 1998, Wellington became a poster boy for the surgery. "No one should suffer the kind of pain I had," he says. He starred, along with 11 teammates, in a TV commercial for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons that aired nationwide.

"Bill's a prominent guy," says Sturm. "He has done so much for hockey. And I got to be the comic relief. They did a shot of me putting in my partial [dental) plate."

Wellington, a team player, always looks to pass first, to shoot second, but at times takes his unselfishness a little far. He stickhandles side-to-side into the red team's zone, eyes peeled for a teammate. He sees no one open, holds on too long, and sees a scoring chance disappear. The puck ends up behind the goal, not in it, and the enemy breaks out, another crisis averted.

After the game, Oliver, who has scored his usual three goals in a tight win, shows why he is MVP. He hauls out the ritual post-game beer, brought in straight from his Wharf Rat brewery. "It's a low-alcohol beer," he says, a gourmand among the goons. "Full-bodied. An excellent choice for lunch."

Meanwhile, local hockey's great-great-great granddad is taking yet another ribbing. The "youngsters" remind him of his gaffe on the ice.

Wellington faces the music, as usual, like a grown-up.

"I've heard that from a few coaches lately," he says. " `Don't wait so long,' they say. `Shoot the puck.' It isn't bad advice, eh? I guess I'm learning."

ILLUSTRATION: Photo(s)
GRAPH_SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER T. ASSAF : SUN STAFF PHOTOS
CAPTION: 1. Before taking to the rink at Ice Gardens in Laurel, Bill Wellington, 82, helps teammate Bob Ruppel, 71, put on his jersey.
2. Geri-Hatrick member Bill Wellington looks to skate around a defender during a Saturday-night game in Laurel.
3. As his teammates take a breather, Dick Baker, 61, goes over the wall as a replacement.
4. Jim O'Brien (right) fends off a player as they go after the puck at Laurel's Ice Gardens. O'Brien, 64, was a college star in the 1950s.
5. Bill Oliver, 63, tapes up his hockey stick before a Geri-Ha tricks game.