Pure passion

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This article was published 08/04/2016 (3647 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ron Castelane takes a deep breath before scanning a piece of treasured history: a photo of the 1964 Allan Cup champion Winnipeg Maroons.

“One, two, three, four,” he quickly counts from his Fort Garry home, pausing briefly before starting up again. “Five, six, seven.”

Then, silence.

Castelane, a hard-working centre, was part of a talented Maroons team that banded together to defeat the Woodstock Athletics, a skilled and gritty team from Ontario, in four straight games to win the 65th instalment of senior hockey’s greatest prize. He’d been there before three other times, but this was his first championship.

The silence breaks.

“Nine players,” Castelane pronounces. “That’s how many have moved on and that’s not counting coaches or management, all of whom are now deceased too.”

At 85, the memories that were once vivid in his early 30s have now mostly faded. Castelane doesn’t remember who scored which goals or when; nor is he quick to recite any significant moment from that playoff run, even if his team did lose only one game in three different series.

There are a still a few things still with him from his eight-year career with the Maroons. He still remembers the brutality — “It was tough. It was dirty,” he says — but above all else, he’s reminded of the love and respect each guy had for the game.

“We loved the game more than anybody else in the country,” he says. “We played for nothing. We just loved it. We practised every day and we just… we were just a good family team that played hard, you know?”

In the decades that have passed since Castelane and his teammates hoisted the Allan Cup, a lot has changed in senior hockey. No longer do most teams practice every day like the Maroons, who had their own dressing room at the Winnipeg Arena.

Many don’t draw the same large crowds, either — “Everybody used to throw in 25 cents and we would try and guess how many people would be in the stands,” recalls Castelane. “Sometimes there would be 5,000.”

Teams no longer travel across provincial borders to play league games. The gruelling best-of-seven series once used to crown Allan Cup champions are also long gone.

Of all the things that are different, there remins one important element — perhaps the most important: that love for the game.

That love will be on full display in Manitoba beginning Monday in Steinbach when the prairie town kicks off Day 1 of the 108th Allan Cup. All week, six teams from across the country will be in battle, vying for one of hockey’s oldest trophies in a tournament that remains as competitive as any this country has to offer.

How else would you explain grown men, already past their prime, travelling hundreds of kilometres to put their bodies on the line for compensation that barely covers gas money? Or why hundreds of fans also make the trip to follow and cheer on their hometown teams?

For Ryan Bonni, a 1997 second-round pick of the Vancouver Canucks and captain of this year’s host team, the South East Prairie Thunder, the tournament scratches an itch that surfaces every year since he retired from professional hockey in 2010.

Since joining the team in 2012 he’s won the Allan Cup twice, including last year’s tournament in Newfoundland.

The games are still competitive, the competition still fierce. It’s exactly the brand of hockey Bonni still craves; a chance to be back in a hockey-hungry environment while he’s still able to push his body to the limit.

“The amount of hockey you play in a short amount of time,” says Bonni, 37, unable to hold back a laugh. “The pro career, I never needed ice bags that often.”

Bonni’s story is not unique. Most players, all of whom are of amateur status and range from their 20s to 40s, will have played at a high level at one point or another over their careers, including a few with long stints in the NHL.

NHL star Theoren Fleury made waves in 2005 when he laced up the skates for the Alberta-based Horse Lake Thunder.

Pat Falloon, who was drafted second overall in 1991 and played 578 NHL games, turned heads when he left his farm in Foxwarren to play for the Ile-des-Chenes North Stars, winning the championship in 2003 in double overtime.

This year, it will be another local product in Arron Asham, a native of Portage la Prairie who played parts of 15 seasons with Montreal, the New York Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the New York Rangers. He’ll be part of a competitive Grand Falls-Windsor team out of central Newfoundland.

As much as it is a chance for players to temporarily re-live their glory days, the Allan Cup is also for the fans; the dedicated faithful in small towns dotted across the country who make the local rink their weekend home during hockey season.

Wade Giesbrecht will be one of hundreds who will flock to Steinbach this week. The self-proclaimed Don Cherry of senior hockey — a nickname inspired by a fellow chatter after taking expection to one of Giesbrecht’s provocative rants on a league message board — Giesbrecht has been following his hometown team, the Bentley Generals, since he was a youngster.

Every weekend he and the rest of the small Alberta town would walk down to the old Bentley Arena to watch the local stars play, a tradition that goes back even before his time, when his mom and dad used to attend games in the early ’70s.

“I know what the players go through to be a part of it and it’s just really hard not to get emotionally attached,” says Giesbrecht, 40, who has started to take his three-year-old son to games.

Needless to say, Giesbrecht will be in Steinbach this week cheering on the Generals. Since 2004, he’s missed just two Allan Cup tournaments.

Asked when he got first got hooked, he paints a picture of his first Allan Cup in Saint-Georges, Que., in 2004.

“I remember walking into the rink and because it was a French community I couldn’t read any of the signs,” he says.

“I thought, ‘That’s cool they’ve got an American League game going here before the tournament starts’ because I was looking at the pace of the play and it was five strides faster and better than anything I’d ever seen.”

It wasn’t long before he realized he was staring at the competition.

“I started to get a sinking feeling in my gut that these were actually teams we were going to have to play in the next few days,” he says. “Yeah, that was it.”

A piece of history he now treasures.

 

jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca

twitter: @jeffkhamilton