Back-yard rinks bring families and neighborhoods together

His father threaded a smudged garden hose from a laundry-room tap down the hallway's orange shag carpeting, through the rec room and out an open window into numbing Minnesota winters at the old house in Cottage Grove.

A generation later, in an act of domestic diplomacy at Greg Kemper's own home in St. Paul's Highland Park, a hose runs directly out a side basement window, past summer's withered day lilies and alongside the little garage that holds his wife's potting soil and ceramic pots on one wall and his ice chisel and rubber squeegee on the other.

There, in a fenced space not much bigger than a suburban great room, he gives life in winter to his back-yard rink, an endangered Northern tradition that returns sport to the way it once was and unites fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, husbands and wives, neighbors and strangers.

Before dawn, on lunch breaks, after work or long into the night, Kemper and other Minnesota parents -- how many exactly, nobody knows -- can be found alone out back working, just as their parents once did, silhouetted by moonlight and a few rigged 300-watt floodlight bulbs.

By night, their breath and the rising, frosty mist from the flowing garden hose commingle. By day, after repeated thin floodings have coated dormant grass with a smooth, gleaming sheet of ice, the back yard fills with children. A few -- the home team -- come clomping down carpeted cement stairs from back-porch benches. The rest arrive from all over the neighborhood and points beyond, their skates looped over hockey-stick blades, their names scrawled in marker and taped to their helmets.

Sometimes they stay all day and all night -- as long as the weather stays cold. The sounds of sticks on ice, pucks on plywood and laughter on the north wind transform a plastic liner, wooden studs and thousands of gallons of water into an outdoor music box.

"It's something that my folks did for me, and I'll do for my kids as long as they want it," said Kemper, a moving-company operations manager who has flooded his back yard the past three winters for daughter, Kate, 7, and son, Jack, 5. "It's really something from the heart. To go out and watch your kid love something you worked hard to build. . . . Anybody can build a swing set in their back yard. For a kid to have an ice rink in their own back yard, that can be magic."

The essence of the game

Anybody, as well, can appreciate Minnesota's glorious summers. Back-yard rinks and frozen ponds allow kids of any age to carry summer's warmth with them all winter long.

They are a Minnesota tradition as old as the game, born on ponds and rivers during long Northern winters and raised, unorganized and as free as the rhythm of skating itself, in city neighborhoods and on country farms. Back-yard hockey was the foundation for two U.S. Olympic men's gold medal teams and became a definition of a state and its people.

Indiana remembers its straw-haired boy throwing a ball at a rusty barnyard hoop until dark. Minnesota remembers its children skating down frozen streets, snow piled high on each side, to the nearest outdoor rink.

"That's who we are," said Joe Micheletti, an NCAA champion with the 1974 Gophers, a former NHL defenseman, and one of seven boys in Hibbing's famous hockey family who played nightly in their back yard even though a city rink waited two blocks away. "Everybody I knew, that's how we grew up. You'd go out, play until your feet froze and come in until they thawed out. Then you'd go play again, until your mother called you back inside to go to bed."

The sport moved indoors long ago, and now is segmented by traveling-team coaches into one-hour increments of ice time. Minnesota winters seem to begin much later and end much earlier than when Micheletti was a child. But back-yard hockey, stubbornly bucking recent warm winters, isn't just a quaint relic of a simpler time. Part science project, part meditation, it exists in all shapes and all sizes, depending upon the proximity of pine trees, telephone lines, back alleys and the experience and devotion of the rink's architect.

Hidden behind hedges and family-room additions, they are largely undetectable, except for the wafting sounds of pickup games and skating parties during the day or the soft glow of floodlights at night.

The long and the short of it

In modern sport's big-business terms, the Kemper's modest 16-foot-by-42-foot ice sheet with 2-foot-high boards could be called a "boutique" back-yard rink. And then there's the rink of Bemidji High School shop teacher Bryan Hammitt. It's tucked into the Norway pines on its own lot next to his log home: Well more than half the size of an average NHL ice surface, this "back-yard" rink with near perfect ice is surrounded by real hockey boards, a fish house-turned-warming hut and three 35-foot telephone poles with spotlights bright enough that Hammitt once worried airplanes might mistake his rink for the Bemidji airport. A neighbor even bought for the rink a vintage ice-resurfacing Zamboni on the Internet from a Michigan man last summer.

"There's just something about it," said Hammitt, who built the rink for sons Tanner, 3, and Tate, 9 months, but welcomes children from all over his neighborhood as long as they bring a helmet and a parent. "I love shoveling the rink. I love making the ice look pretty. I love watching my 3-year-old son take his first steps on skates. That's where I live in the winter."

Most rink owners, inspired by fuzzy-warm memories from their childhood rinks, tackle their own project with information gleaned from Internet sites and chat rooms devoted to the art of making a back-yard rink. Among the great controversies: plastic liner or snow base? The discussions can get heated. There's no substitute, though, for simple trial and error.

Autumn brings with it the annual rite of digging post holes for the rink's side and end boards. November summons a seasonal love affair with The Weather Channel. Rink builders anxiously await the first Canadian cold fronts, playing a guessing game before selecting just the right moment to begin a flooding process that can go around the clock for a week or more. Enough water is sprayed that city bureaucrats have called rink owners, wanting to send out a worker to check for a winter water leak.

"My favorite time is 2 a.m.," said Dwight DiGiacomo, a Medtronic engineer, a former Michigan Tech hockey player and a New Brighton back-yard rink builder whose father stayed up nights flooding the family rink following a 12-hour shift at a Thunder Bay, Ontario, paper mill. "It's so peaceful out there."

Whatever the methods or hours, each rink builder alone must learn back-yard hockey's fundamental law of hydrodynamics.

"Water seeking its own level will always find it in your neighbor's yard," said Jack Falla, a Boston University journalism professor and former Sports Illustrated hockey writer who failed spectacularly in his first attempt to build a rink as a boy but has successfully done so for the past 20 years at his Natick, Mass., home.

Back to the old school

That is only the first of many lessons. Whatever the size, whatever the shape, back-yard rinks for generations have taught children the basics of mathematics and dermatology, the value of hard work and community, and other important life lessons long before they might have learned them otherwise.

In bygone Minnesota winters, namely those in which snow fell in fall and didn't melt until spring, there existed The One Commandment: If you plan to skate, you must shovel the rink first.

Snowblowers and pickup plows have replaced old-fashioned hard work, but Falla and other back-yard hockey purists insist shoveling's labor still reveals both the nature of your rink's players and symbolically makes the ice new again daily.

For generations, unsuspecting young skaters called the Fryberger home in Duluth's Hunter Park neighborhood and asked whether the family rink -- open for the 56th consecutive winter this year -- was ready for skating after a heavy snowfall. Laverne Fryberger, the rink's grand matriarch for five decades until she died last winter at age 90, always answered yes, then handed the young rubes a new shovel when they arrived.

"We'd play in any weather, didn't matter," said 1980 U.S Olympian Phil Verchota, who, like 1960 gold medal winner Tommy Williams before him, grew up on the Fryberger rink. "We weren't supposed to play if it was under 10 below, but kids don't listen. We'd monitor each other to see if your cheeks or your ears or your nose was turning white. Those were simpler times."

Today, preschoolers yet to learn their multiplication tables sit in basement warming houses and debate how many goals -- and how many hat tricks -- each scored that day.

Those children who still play back-yard or pond hockey -- along with their regular dose of organized youth leagues -- are among the relative few today who will ever know the joy of skating and stickhandling unfettered by the demands of a time clock or definitive scoreboard.

College and pro hockey players -- both women and men -- are faster, stronger, better than ever. But two-time U.S. Olympic coach Herb Brooks suggests today's "20-minute" players -- they spend an hour dressing and traveling to a game and another hour returning, all for about 20 minutes of action in an hour's game -- are missing something that yesteryear's players learned skating hour after hour for nothing more than a neighborhood trophy made from an orange pylon and duct tape.

"We've got to get back and create an environment where kids just play," said Brooks, the Pittsburgh Penguins' director of player development.

Is it just a coincidence that the greatest player the sport ever produced -- a fellow named Wayne Gretzky -- left his back-yard rink when he was a child just long enough to eat dinner with his skates on?

Brooks said he has proposed the Minnesota Amateur Sports Commission build outdoor rinks with refrigerated ice surfaces and suggests five or six such rinks could be built for the price of one $3 million indoor rink. He said he'd like to see hockey develop its own versions of the great Manhattan playground basketball games he once watched when he coached the New York Rangers.

"You mean to tell me Michael Jordan learned all that in basketball schools? Phooey," Brooks said. "Basketball's greatest players grew up on the blacktop. That's the stuff they make movies out of. Creativity can be fostered and developed. You let players play pickup games in closed quarters -- side board to side board -- and all of a sudden you'll see how their hands work, how their minds work, how they solve problems. We've just got to get out of the way sometimes."

Come together

A back-yard rink unifies families -- entire neighborhoods, even -- in a common project in which everyone's help is asked, and often is delivered. Sharing with neighbors is not only the right thing to do, but it's the smart thing: Introducing everybody to the fun lessens the chance of late-night complaints about light or noise pollution. That sense of community and a back-yard rink's inherent innocence also have allowed rink owners to avoid the nasty modern-day issue of liability, although many carry extra homeowners' insurance just in case.

Advertisements adorn the side boards at Bryan Hammitt's Bemidji rink. It's his way of thanking neighbors and friends -- an electrician, a Bobcat operator, an auto-repair shop owner, the guys down at the local building-supply center -- who helped him level and erect his you-build-it-and-they-will-come Rink of Dreams.

"We live here in winter," said neighbor Theresa Lucas, who brings her boys Alex, 10, Parker, 6, and Owen, 4, down the block to the Hammitt rink just about every time they see the floodlights shine. "Who wouldn't live here? Any kid would live here."

A Minnesota kid who grew to chase a puck in North America's grandest professional ice arenas will never forget the few days he was invited to play at the Potter rink across town in Richfield when he was 8 or 9. Players there warmed themselves before a wood stove in the family garage, then stepped out the back service door onto fresh, smooth ice.

"I can still remember that smell, sitting in the garage there, thawing out your feet, waiting to go out again for another game," Wild forward Darby Hendrickson said. "It was the most fun thing you could do. Tell me, what in the world is better than that? For me and my friends, that was our life. I miss those times, to be honest."

Of sticks and stakes

The memories remain vivid decades later for a simple, truthful reason.

"Because sport connects us to the people we love," the university professor, Jack Falla, said. "That's what ultimately makes it so meaningful."

Falla became the unofficial inspirational leader for a legion of back-yard rink builders when he published his book, "Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds," three years ago. The book's genesis was an essay Falla wrote about his back-yard rink -- the Bacon Street Omni -- for Sports Illustrated in 1984. It appeared on an unnumbered page near the back of the magazine in the same issue that Falla wrote a six-page lead story on Gretzky's Edmonton Oilers winning their first Stanley Cup.

The Stanley Cup piece received barely a ripple of reader response. The rink essay brought a flood of telephone calls, letters and comments.

The next hockey season, Gretzky gave him a used stick at an Oilers morning skate in New Jersey. By that afternoon, Falla was back home near Boston, using the stick, as it was meant to be used, in a pickup game with the neighbor kids. That spring, somebody stepped on the blade during a driveway game, and by June it ended up with all of the rink's other bladeless shafts.

He hammered Gretzky's stick into the soft soil of his back-yard garden and staked a tomato plant to it, where it remained through the long, hot summer until winter's bloom arrived once again.

-- Jerry Zgoda is at jzgoda@startribune.com

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