By Hans Eisenbeis

One of the things that separates hockey people from not-hockey people is a certain loss of olfactory innocence.

“The smell” is hard to describe but impossible to miss. Walk into any rink anywhere in the world, and you can smell it even from the bleachers and the concession stand. (Except rinks named after phone companies, banks, utilities,and car manufacturers. These are too big to stink, or else NHL players are too rich to sweat.) Obviously, the closed space of the locker room is where it is most rank. It’s as if “that hockey-bag smell” has leeched into the walls like 50 years of cigarette smoke.

Hanging out at the boy’s practice last week, I got to wondering whether the smell has gotten worse in recent years. Maybe modern diets or early puberty or video games are making kids sweat earlier, harder and stinkier than in the past. Because here’s the deal: It seems worse.

I was a goalie growing up in the 1970s, and I had lots of equipment, and I’m pretty sure I sweat like a pig in that equipment even when we were playing outside and I was standing still and my feet were frozen like cheap steaks and my brother was wearing magazines for shin guards.

But I’m also certain that I never washed my equipment. Never. And my mother’s dedication and the torments she suffered as a goalie mom did not extend to washing my equipment. My things smelled, there can be no question. The memory – like all nose-based memories – is strong.

My brother and I kept our canvas equipment bags in a closet under the stairs in the basement, which come to think of it was about the farthest away they could be without being in the neighbor’s yard. This was called “the hockey closet.”

The hockey closet still stands in the basement of the house my parents are preparing to sell this year. It’s been 30 years since it held hockey equipment. It now contains a boxed crock pot, two golf bags, a pair of obsolete skis and a guitar that has no strings. It also stinks like Hell’s broom closet. In other words, it still smells like a hockey bag.

I imagine a non-hockey person buying my parents’ house. They need a place to put their extra crock pot and golf bags, and they open that door and they either reverse the sale or hire a priest to perform an exorcism.

But we never washed our gear. The only improvement, aromatically speaking,  occurred when we outgrew a pair of breezers or elbow pads and got new ones, and I wore the same leg pads for 10 years because I either didn’t grow or my father bought them way too big or stand-up goalies didn’t notice when their pads were as small as shin guards.

So all of this is to say that we undoubtedly stunk, but not like kids today. My Squirt’s stink is so intense  that many times I drive home from practice with the windows down. I love the boy dearly, but the scent he generates sometimes makes me wonder who his father is. Surely my DNA is not capable of this military-grade odor?

Our team manager is a stand-up guy who, though he does not play himself, is one of the hockey-est people I know. He mentioned that his bicycling clothes, which are all moisture-wicking space-age fibers, have a stubborn stink that laundry detergent can cover but never kill. After a single ride, these clothes smell like the break room at a vinegar factory. It’s like the ghost of every previous ride is concentrated in that fabric, and at some point it’ll become so anti-social that it’ll need to be taken to the dump in haz-mat bags.

I think he’s on to something. Back in the day, my arm pads were not only a paper-thin sheath that barely protected me from slap shots (they seemed to just spread the impact around and make the bruises bigger. I could sometimes read some portion of the words “vulcanized rubber” in reverse on my puny biceps), they were also made out of cotton quilting with a wool lining.

Once in PeeWees, a skater’s blade cut me across the forearm and revealed that they were filled with something like dandelion fluff. This was long before Velcro and high-tech plastic and spandex existed for hockey players. Heck, I’m not sure we even had zippers back then, and people walked around in wool long-johns.

So how does my son’s equipment, which gets washed about twice a month, smell even worse than my never-washed gear? I think it’s the new space-age materials, that no amount of Odor-Guard or Fabreze will ever cover.

Like Tang and frozen ice cream, these new materials must have been designed for actual astronauts. Because in space, no one can hear you scream. And they can’t smell your stink, either. 

Hans Eisenbeis was a stand-up goalie when Ronald Reagan was president, David Lee Roth was the singer of Van Halen, and hockey players were all “he.” It was a different time.