The mind is willing, so the body doesn’t have much choice

Mike Duggan and his hockey friends were strapping on their equipment on a recent morning when their banter, as it often does, turned to the subject of joint replacement surgery.

Duggan, 74, the proud owner of a hip replacement, marveled at the sheer number of titanium body parts in the locker room. He gestured toward Mitch Boriskin, who was squeezing into a pair of skates along the opposite wall.

“I don’t think there’s an original part of you in it,” Duggan said.

Boriskin, 70, smiled. “Two fake knees, a spinal cord stimulator, 25 surgeries,” he began, as if he were rattling off a scoreboard.

“And one lobotomy,” Duggan interjected, as laughter echoed through the room.

At least all that titanium was put to good use. Their team, Oregon Old Growth, joined dozens of others from across North America to compete in the Snoopy Senior Hockey Tournament this month in Santa Rosa, California, about 60 miles north of San Francisco.

The tournament has become a summer ritual for hundreds of recreational players – all between the ages of 40 and 90 – who gather each year at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, where Charles M. Schulz, creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip and a lifelong hockey fanatic, founded the event in 1975.

By now everyone knows what to expect: the skating is slow, the jokes fly by and the laughter flows as freely as the beer.

“If you like drying paint, you’re fascinated,” said Larry Meredith, 82, the captain of the Berkeley Bears, a team in the tournament’s 70-plus division.

Sports can feel like a game for young people. Maybe you play in high school, maybe you find a regular pick-up game or beer league after college. But eventually, families, jobs, and the various other constraints of adult life conspire to pull you away.

However, these senior skaters represent a generation that is increasingly distancing itself from this timeline. They understand how fitness and camaraderie can be beneficial for both body and mind. They stick with the games they love even when their bodies beg them to reconsider.

“You don’t stop because you get old, you get old because you stop,” said Rich Haskell, 86, a player from New Port Richey, Florida. “A friend of mine died a few years ago. He played hockey in the morning and died in the evening. You can’t do it better than that.”

The tournament has the casual atmosphere of a week-and-a-half summer camp. Campers and RVs are parked in the arena parking lot, where players drink beer, grill meat and socialize between games.

The names of this year’s roster — California Antiques, Michigan Oldtimers, Seattle Seniles and Colorado Fading Stars, to name a few — are a nod to the players’ advanced ages and developed senses of humor.

“We used to just be the Colorado Stars,” says Rich Maslow, 74. “But then we turned 70.”

Maslow and his teammates were scheduled to play at 6:30 a.m. that day, the earliest time, which meant they had to assemble before sunrise.

“We all have to get up at 6:30 to pee anyway, so we might as well play some hockey,” said Craig Kocian, 78, of Arvada, Colorado, as they dressed for the game.

Kocian described himself as having “adult onset hockey syndrome.” But many other participants started playing when they were children and let the game weave itself through the decades of their lives.

Among them was Terry Harper, 83, who played 19 seasons as a defenseman in the NHL. When he retired, he threw away his equipment, he said, and for the next 10 years he stayed away from the ice. But in 1992, a neighbor lured him to Santa Rosa, and Harper, who grew up playing in his backyard in Saskatchewan, felt a long-dormant pleasure center in his brain reactivate.

“I came here and had the best time I’ve ever had in hockey,” said Harper, who, it must be said, won five Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens. “There was no pressure, no travel. I discovered that hockey is fun.”

Harper, playing for the Bears, took his time on the ice. For starters, changing direction took a few more beats than before. But his handling and anticipation betrayed his expertise, and he smiled the entire game, even after getting hit in the face.

“I got a stick to my chin!” Harper shouted happily as he skated over to the bench and stuck his tongue out to see if there was blood.

Harper and the other players said hockey just made them feel good. It gave them a method and a reason to stave off the natural effects of aging.

And by sliding on skates, they could actually generate some speed.

“If we tried to run away, we wouldn’t get anywhere,” Maslow said.

But the players also hinted at something less tangible, a swirl of individuality, ritual and sensory memory that lured them back to the ice week after week.

“It’s part of who I am, and that feeling is very powerful,” Meredith said of hockey. “Maybe that’s why I stick around, because it goes back to going to the rink, smelling those smells that you can only find at an indoor rink, those hockey smells.”

Schulz was the same way. He ate breakfast and lunch at the ice rink he built and opened in 1969. While he spent most days at the drawing board, he saw his Tuesday night games as a kind of spiritual balm.

“He always said, ‘It’s the only thing that gives me pleasure,’” said Jean Schulz, his widow.

He played until he died, at the age of 77, in 2000. Many players said they would like to do the same.

But when the specter of injury and physical decay hangs over the tournament, the older players defuse it with dark humour.

Bob Carolan, 82, a retired pulmonologist from Eugene, Oregon, recalled an incident about 15 years ago in which he resuscitated a player on the ice who was having a heart attack.

“The best play I ever made was at Snoopy,” said Carolan, who ran into the same man at a tournament a decade later. “He had an implantable defibrillator, but he was still playing.”

After their early morning game, the Fading Stars came off the ice and stripped down. Out came a case of Coors Light. It was 7:40 a.m. When a visitor saw the beer company’s logo on the team’s jerseys, he asked if it was a sponsor.

“The only sponsorship we’re looking for is Viagra,” said Murray Platt, 68, of Denver.

Also, Dave McCay, 72, of Denver, who came down with a cold, scored four goals in the team’s opening game, sprained an ankle in the second and arrived for the third in a walking boot.

That leg had caused him problems before—he held up a photo of twelve screws, a steel rod and a plate in it—and his wife had begun to cautiously question his priorities. But slowing down has not occurred to him.

“I believe this will give you a better quality of life,” McCay said, leaning on a pair of crutches, “even if you have to limp a little bit.”