If you build it…

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/12/2016 (3253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All Kyle Calder wants for Christmas is his two front seats.

In November 2014, Calder and his fiancée, Stefanie Sobieski, purchased a house in the RM of Brokenhead, near Beausejour. Given their location, Calder, a self-proclaimed hockey nut, figured they wouldn’t be able to attend as many Winnipeg Jets home games as they had in seasons past, when they called Transcona home. So the Red Seal journeyman carpenter came up with a Plan B, and began converting a section of their basement into the second coming of the MTS Centre.

“What I’d eventually love to do is replace our loveseat with a pair of those red, pull-down seats from the old Winnipeg Arena,” he says, muting the volume on his 60-inch flatscreen TV, which — surprise, surprise — is broadcasting NHL highlights from the previous evening. “I saw two (seats) for sale on Kijiji a while ago but the guy was asking something crazy like $300 a piece, so I was like, I guess I’ll keep looking.”

Calder, 28, was eight years old when the Jets 1.0 moved to Arizona for the start of the 1996-97 NHL campaign. He was heartbroken, he says, but despite switching his allegiance to the Colorado Avalanche and later, the Pittsburgh Penguins, he never removed the Jets pennants and Teemu Selanne posters from his bedroom walls.

“Stefanie and I started dating just before the Jets came back. Even though she now yells at the TV as much as I do, back then she was more of what I’d describe as a casual hockey fan,” says Calder, who dropped everything he was doing when the reborn Jets’ crest and colours were unveiled during a ceremony at 17 Wing Winnipeg’s No. 10 Hangar in September 2011. He drove directly to River City Sports to pre-order a pair of matching home jerseys, one for himself and a second for Sobieski.

“I’d always dreamed about getting my team back and as soon as True North announced the Jets were returning, I warned (Stefanie) that things were about to get really serious.”

Well, how’s this for serious? In order to make their rec-room floor resemble the ice surface at the downtown arena, they slapped six coats of grey primer on it, followed by six coats of white concrete paint. (To ensure the ceiling beams were the precise shade of “polar night blue” he was aiming for, Calder took his Jets jersey to the paint store, where staff scanned it and came up with a tint he calls a “100 per cent colour match.”)

“When I first did the floor I was super-anal about it. If any of my buddies came over and weren’t wearing socks, I made them put on an emergency pair I kept downstairs, before allowing them to step on the ‘ice,’” says Calder, who also successfully tackled the red and blue lines. Since Sobieski has a steadier hand, he enlisted her help for the faceoff circles. “Originally, I didn’t even want anybody to have food or drinks down here to prevent spills. But now that this is our main hangout area, I’ve had to loosen up some.”

Calder’s 400-square-foot lair is built almost precisely to scale except for the boards, which are 1.2 metres high, the standard set by the NHL. Besides being the perfect environment to enjoy a tilt on the tube or stage an NHL 17 tournament on PlayStation, the room also affords him ample space to display his ever-growing collection of Jets memorabilia. His treasures include autographed 8x10s photos, game-used sticks and pucks, McFarlane action figures and two cases of Fan Brew, a libation that, when it hit liquor store shelves in 2012, was purported to have “bottled up the spirit of Winnipeg Jets fans.”

“This is that Fan Brew that Budweiser came out with, which was supposedly made with water from the Red River,” Calder says, opening a box to show a visitor he still has “a few good ones” left. “They aren’t exactly the greatest beers, mind you. I mean, they could have just pretended the water was from the Red. They didn’t have to actually use it.”

The couple’s fan cave has another use, as well. In November, Calder and Sobieski joined a co-ed hockey team that competes in a league in Beausejour. Sometimes on the day of games, he persuades his better half to strap on a set of goalie pads and tend a regulation-sized net that rests steps away from a Jets mini-fridge, so he can work on his wrist shot.

“We’re getting married in September 2018 and she’s been making noise about having a Stanley Cup-style wedding cake at the ceremony,” Calder says, picking the top corner of his cage with the same model of stick Jets defenceman Jacob Trouba employs. “The first thing people assume is that this room is all about me and that she simply puts up with it, but that isn’t the case at all. She really is one in a million.”

Going forward, Calder has a few things up his jersey sleeve. He plans to install a washroom adjacent to their haunt (no word if it will feature a trough or not), and he wants to invite a few Jet players over for an afternoon of video games, at which time he’d ask them to sign his boards.

Thirdly, he hopes to put his carpentry skills to good use by helping fellow sports fanatics convert a room in their own homes into a retreat dedicated to their favourite team.

“I have a client who has talked about building a Green Bay Packers-themed room so yeah, that’s kind of my goal down the road. I mean, doing man caves for a living would definitely be a dream job.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca