Gliding toward the Grim Reaper: Eugene’s 70-plus ice hockey team

They aren’t dying to play ice hockey — not yet. But given a choice, most of them can’t imagine a better way to go.

“Pull me off the ice,” Dr. Bob Carolan said. “Finish the game. And then call Kathleen.”

At 84, the retired pulmonologist’s morbid goal of dying on the rink before his buddies finish the game – and his wife gets the call she’s been fearing for years – isn’t all that far-fetched. 

After all, Carolan once performed CPR on a fellow player having a heart attack during the Snoopy’s Senior World Hockey Tournament in Santa Rosa, California.

“Oh, this really doesn’t look good,” Carolan remembers thinking as he watched that game as a spectator in the late ’90s and then went into action. The 60-something guy survived and eventually found his way back onto the ice. Carolan ran into him about a decade later at a tournament in Spokane. He had an implantable defibrillator.

For those who weren’t aware, Eugene has a 70-and-over ice hockey team. They call themselves Oregon Old Growth, and they’re headed back to Santa Rosa for the third straight year to play in the 50th anniversary edition of that tournament, named for a world-famous beagle.

“There’s nothing that’s more fun with your clothes on than hockey,” said team member Mike Duggan, 75, who plays with an artificial hip and who first played the game as a 3-year-old in his native Canada. 

And these guys have fun all year long, playing at the Rink Exchange, the ice rink at the Lane Events Center, from September through May. They all play on separate teams, but travel to two or three out-of-state tournaments a year as Oregon Old Growth.

‘It’s just incredibly fun’

Snoopy’s Senior World Hockey Tournament runs July 18 to July 27 this year, with Oregon Old Growth playing games against the Berkeley (California) Bears July 22, and the Santa Rosa Bombers and the Spokane Oldtimers July 25 at Snoopy’s Home Ice, also known as the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. The arena was built by “Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles M. Schulz, a lifelong ice hockey buff born and raised in Minnesota, who later relocated to Santa Rosa with his family in 1969.

Almost 80 teams will be competing — teams with names like the Elder Skatesman, the Old Puckers, Jurassic Puck and the Santa Rosa Great Pumpkins. Players range in age from 40 to at least 85, maybe older

In 2023, the Berkeley Bears roster included former NHL defenseman Terry Harper, now 85, who was part of five Stanley Cup championship teams with the Montreal Canadians.

“It’s just incredibly fun,” said Oregon Old Growth team member Mike Sheehan, 73. “There’s all this camaraderie, and I have my camper van and another guy has a camper van. People bring a ton of beer, and we just hang out. So it’s really, really a fun time.”

‘It’s just bizarre’

Now, if you’re thinking that playing ice hockey in your 70s and 80s might not be the wisest choice for exercise, well, these guys will tell you that the only thing crazier would be not playing.

“When I can’t do it anymore, I’m just going to do assisted suicide,” joked Mitch Boriskin, 72, during a team barbecue/birthday party for teammate Ken Evans earlier this month in the parking lot by the Rink Exchange. “I can’t imagine living without it. It’s really weirdly important, physically and mentally. It’s just bizarre.”

It’s their raison d’etre.

“Our saying is, ‘It’s not about the hockey,’” said Sheehan, who worked in IT at PeaceHealth for about 35 years after moving back to Eugene in 1980. He published a book in 2023 about the history of the Rink Exchange.

“We have a really tight community. Some of us have played together for 35, 38 years.”

Sure, they’re tough hockey guys on the outside, “but everybody’s really close,” Sheehan said. “And everybody really cares about each other. If anything’s going on, somebody’s sick, or somebody needs help with something, then go to your hockey guys, and they’ll help you out.”

And this is the biggest benefit of playing ice hockey in one’s later years — the social connection.

Being socially disconnected is associated with higher risk of illnesses, including heart disease, stroke, anxiety, depression and dementia, according to an article published last December by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

“Loneliness and social isolation have also been shown to increase the risk for premature death by 26% and 29%, respectively,” according to the article.

As for the physical risks, these men of a certain age say ice hockey is much kinder to their joints than sports such as soccer or basketball. 

“With ice skating, you’re gliding,” Sheehan said. 

And when they play at the Rink Exchange or the Snoopy tournament, there’s no body checking allowed. Checking is a common defensive tactic in ice hockey in which players use their body to disrupt an opponent, particularly when slamming them into the boards.

“But there are still collisions,” Sheehan said. “People still do get injured.”

And their significant others still worry.

“My wife? She’s not a fan,” Sheehan said.

Carolan has broken both of his ankles playing. 

“But they get better,” he said, sipping on a beer. “The orthopedist and I are on good terms.”

‘Pure joy’

Keith McConnell, 81, is the other 80-plus player on the team. Like Carolan, he’s in great shape. He’s a runner and avid tennis player. 

McConnell joined the University of Oregon’s Department of Physical Education and Recreation after moving to Eugene from the Bay Area in 2006. He’s teaches classes on fitness walking, jog-run and 5k training.

“I can,” McConnell said, when asked why he still plays ice hockey. “I’m still a good skater, and I enjoy it.”

Boriskin, who’s played in the Snoopy tournament the past two summers, will miss it this year because he’s having lower back surgery for somewhere around the tenth time. Not that that has anything to do with playing ice hockey, he said.

And he plays with a spinal cord stimulator, a surgically implanted device that helps manage chronic back pain. Boriskin has also had both knees replaced, among something like 13 knee surgeries, a couple of neck surgeries and three shoulder surgeries, along with treatment for prostate cancer.

But he still plays ice hockey three times a week most of the year.

In fact, Boriskin used to rise at 4:30 a.m. twice a week when he lived and worked in Oakridge as a nurse practitioner in the 1990s. He would drive to Eugene to play pick-up hockey for 90 minutes before heading back up Highway 58 to get to work by 9 a.m.

He doesn’t plan to stop playing, no matter how many surgeries he’s had or will have in the future.

“This is something unique you can do into your very old age.”

In 2017, Mark Sertich of Duluth, Minnesota, set a Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest ice hockey player when he played in the Snoopy tournament two days after his 96th birthday. Sertich played until he died at 99 in 2020, according to his obituary in the Duluth News Tribune.

“Bob will be skating into his 90s,” Boriskin said of Carolan. “He’s incredible.” 

Carolan, the senior member and captain of Oregon Old Growth, is a hero to all of his teammates, Boriskin said. 

A native of Norwood, Massachusetts, Carolan first hit the ice at age 7 on a frozen pond, like so many other youths who grew up in the Northeast, or the Midwest, or Canada.

“It was kind of Norman Rockwell-like,” remembers Sheehan, who grew up in Melrose, Massachusetts. “You go to school, and you have your skates and your stick, and after school you walk to the pond and play until it gets dark … and do it again the next day.”

When the Lane County Ice Arena opened Dec. 22, 1989, Sheehan and Carolan and Duggan and all the others felt born again.

Duggan moved to Eugene in 1976 and played city league soccer for years.

“When I came home, my wife looked at me and said, ‘You’re not going to play soccer anymore, are you?’ It was just pure joy on my face.”

‘18 seconds of fame’

Two years ago, Duggan found himself and his bearded face in the lead photograph of a story in The New York Times about the 2023 Snoopy tournament.

Of course, when Carolan told the team a Times reporter had contacted him and might show up, his teammates were certain it was a gag.

“We all said, ‘Yeah, right, sure! Right, Bob!” Sheehan recalled. 

But the morning of their final game, Times’ reporter Andrew Keh and a California photographer walked into their locker room.

“Our 18 seconds of fame,” Duggan said at the recent barbecue, a plastic cup of Beer Hall Lager from Oakshire Brewing, which he partly owns, in his hand. 

The team, which will play in the lower of the two 70-and-over divisions, has gone 1-2 the past two summers. Both wins came against the Portland Old Buds, giving Oregon Old Growth state-title bragging rights.

Asked who’s the best player for Oregon Old Growth, most of his teammates said it was Bob Weir, 76, not to be confused with a certain Grateful Dead singer of the same name.

Weir, owner of Bob Weir Tree Service in Eugene, has maintained his strength over the decades by climbing trees. As for his teammates’ nod to his ice hockey prowess, Weir had just one comment:

“It’s a low bar.”