Sean Flaherty

The Cohasset Winter Garden was a special place for me growing up.  Walking through those doors was like being transported into another world.  I loved the smell of the place.  I loved the rubber mats everywhere and the benches and the spectator stands.  I loved the pro shop and the noise the skate sharpening guy made when he put the skate blade against the grinding wheel.  Whenever I hear that sound, I think of the Winter Garden.  I used to stare at the racks of brand-new hockey sticks leaning against the back wall of the pro shop.  I wondered about the guy driving the Zamboni and how he got that job.  I loved getting a brand-new roll of black tape and wrapping my stick blade with it.  I loved banging pucks off the boards and the way the guy would drop the net onto those metal pegs to hold it in place.  I loved that you could walk out of the building in May or June and it would be seventy degrees outside and there would still be a big pile of snow out back.

 

In time, we got real hockey skates, decent helmets, shin pads and pants, and shoulder and elbow pads.  It caused some problems though when we got handed socks and a garter belt.  Not one kid knew what to do with the garter belt.  It looked like something you saw on a clothesline but didn’t pay any attention to until they told you to fasten it around your waist.  Some kids never recovered from their inability to snap the metal clips around the tops of their hockey socks.  And then when Mr. Taylor told the hockey mothers they should go down to the pro shop and buy athletic cups for their sons if they wanted to prevent potential catastrophe, it was chaos at the Winter Garden all over again.  Not one kid knew what to do with his cup.  Half of the kids in the locker room put it over their face, thinking it was to protect against a broken nose.  The other half threw their cups around the locker room like they were frisbees.

 

Somehow, we got our act together and started to play hockey.  I remember the Scituate Braves Mites program was the first start.  We played at Cohasset initially then ventured out to other far-off places like Weymouth, Braintree, Rockland, and Brockton to play other 7- and 8-year-olds.  As far as I can recall, Joe Henderson, whose son was a year older than me, was my first coach in the Braves.  Ed Taylor coached the older kids – Bantams and Midgets.  Mr. Henderson was an excellent coach and I had him through Squirts and Peewees. 

 

We had at least one game a week, but probably not more than one hour of ice practice.  In grade school, Tuesdays were half days.  You got out of school at 12:30 and had the entire afternoon to goof off.  But I had hockey practice every Tuesday afternoon.  My mother drove me to the Winter Garden around 1:30 and came back an hour or so later and waited for me in the parking lot.  She didn’t like spending an hour and a half inside the rink.  It was too cold.  By the time I got home from practice, I had to deliver my newspapers.  So Tuesdays were great for every kid at Wampatuck but I had hockey practice and a job delivering papers.  Sometimes I wished I could just goof off on Tuesdays like every other kid. 

 

A year or so later Coach Henderson came up with a great idea – he contacted the Scituate School Department and received permission to use the gym at Wampatuck School to run simulated practice sessions after the school day was over.  He used the big gym there as an ice surface with imaginary blue lines and faceoff circles.  But, of course, we just had our sneakers on.  Coach would position us for certain scenarios.  This is really when we learned how to forecheck, how to break out from our own end, how to set up the power play, and how to set up the box when you were short-handed.  Plus, we were in the same school I went to every day but I didn’t have to go to class.  We did this week after week and it helped us to learn the fundamentals of hockey. 

 

While I was in the third grade at Wampatuck, I carried a paperback copy of Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Bruins by Stan Fischler to school.  I didn’t know who Stan Fischler was, but he must have been really important if he wrote a book about the Bruins.  I carried that book back and forth to school every day and read it and reread it several times.  I still have that paperback and consider it one of my most prized possessions.  I have great memories of watching those Bruins games with my father in the early 70s on WSBK Channel 38.  That Johnny Peirson used to get pretty excited.  It seemed like a world apart, but that book made me feel like I was right there.  Bobby Orr, My Game was another book that I devoured as soon as I got it for Christmas.  I learned an awful lot about exercise and conditioning that I wouldn’t have had any idea of had it not been for that book.

 

I started shooting pucks in the backyard when I was nine or ten.  My father used to bring me home small pieces of Formica countertop left over from job sites.  The carpenter would cut a hole in the Formica for the plumber to drop the kitchen sink in.  The leftover piece was only about 2’ by 3’ but it made for a nice smooth surface for shooting pucks.  Because it was small, I learned to release the puck quickly.  I set up a 4’ x 6’ piece of plywood about 20 feet away and fired pucks at the holes I cut out of it.  It was time to go in the house when I couldn’t find any of the pucks in the dark.  I also had two of those hand grips with the spring in the middle that I used to take to school with me.  I would squeeze those things for hours.  It took a while but I eventually started to build some strength in my hands and forearms.  Getting off a quick snapshot was my goal and after a year or so of squeezing those grips I began to notice an improvement in my shooting ability.

 

We eventually got invited to big hockey tournaments, which was exciting.  I still have the invitation I received in the mail for the Bobby Orr Invitational Hockey Tournament in Tyngsborough.  No one I knew had ever heard of this place but if Bobby Orr himself invited you to play hockey there, you were going.  All of the older kids in Scituate – the Peewees and the Bantams and the Midgets - played in that tournament and watching them from the stands of those rinks was a big thrill.  That was the first time I actually saw older kids play hockey and play it well.  Those kids playing bantam and midget hockey were really talented.  And big.  Peter Wood and Matt Higgins and I watched the bantam and midget games and we couldn’t believe how good those older kids were.

 

We played hockey down the Cape a lot.  My mother always drove because my father got nervous navigating roads that he didn’t recognize.  Ironically, the only time he ever drove outside the town of Scituate was when he was going to hockey rinks.  Otherwise, the risks were just too great.  I remember getting in the car and going to Falmouth and Dennis-Yarmouth.  They had good rinks down there.  We used to stay with the Dennis-Yarmouth kids rather than travel back to Scituate.  It felt strange to play a hockey game against some kid you never met before and then be invited back to his house for a burger.  I also remember going down to play games in Rhode Island occasionally.  We played teams from Providence, Cranston, and Warwick.  I remember playing at the hockey rink at Brown University.  The locker rooms seemed huge.

 

When Pilgrim Arena in Hingham opened under new management in 1974, I played up there almost every week.  Those locker rooms were spacious compared to the Winter Garden.  I also played a lot of hockey in the Weymouth Arena and the Ridge Arena in Braintree.  That place was big.  One weekend when I was about ten, I had a Squirt game in Falmouth in the morning and my mother drove me to Braintree to play with the Peewees in a night game at Ridge Arena.  They must have been shorthanded to bring a Squirt up to Peewees but I loved it.  The kids were all at least a year older than me and I got to play on a regular line that day.  Playing two games in two different rinks in one day was special.

 

We also got invited to Lake Placid every year.  That tournament was huge, with the Scituate Braves sending Squirts, Peewees, Bantams, and Midgets to play teams you never heard of.  The opposing teams used to give us patches to sew onto our Braves jackets.  They looked good next to all the other patches our mothers sewed on there.  I remember I had a patch that said Verdun.  I had never heard of Verdun, but the patch looked good on my jacket.  Matt Higgins, Peter Wood, and I would go everywhere in Lake Placid.  To the rink, to the restaurant, to the pool.  It was such a blast staying in the Holiday Inn for three or four days.  One year Alan Litchfield took a slapshot and cracked the glass at the old rink.  A guy who worked there said it had never happened before.  I don’t think he even knew how to replace the pane of glass.  My father loved watching hockey games in the big rink there.  He told me about a Canadian defenseman he had just watched dominate a game one afternoon.  His name was Raymond Bourque.

 
I remember one year we got new helmets.  I think someone figured out that the old three-piece helmets were not exactly safe if you went into the boards headfirst.  So we lined up one day and got fitted for new Cooper “bubble” helmets.  These were filled with padding and were really tight to the head.  It was a lot safer than my old three-piece helmet, but I hated it.  Right when I got home, I started thinking of ways to remove the padding so it was looser on my head.  A few years later I got a nice new CCM helmet.  I wore that one through high school.  Originally I had a clear plastic visor on it.  When I got to high school, I was forced to remove the visor and put a cage on it.  I hated those cages.  It was tough for me to see everything through a cage. 

 

I got my first real pair of brand-new hockey skates when I was twelve or thirteen.  Up until then, I had someone else’s hand-me-down Bauer or Hyde skates.  I didn’t care though.  I figured if you put brand new blue and white laces in them, they looked almost new.  I used to go into the pro shop at the Hingham rink and look at the skates.  One day my father looked at my skates and said, “I think it’s time for new skates, don’t you?”  It was close to Christmas that year and he told me to go try on a pair of CCM Junior Tacks.  I found a pair that fit and told the man working there that my father was going to pay for them.  Turns out my father had a pro shop credit of like $50 that he won in a card game or something and used it to buy me skates as a Christmas present.  I only had those Junior Tacks for a year though.  I took my paper route money and traded them back in at the pro shop for a new pair of CCM Super Tacks and wore them through high school.  I still have my Super Tacks and they fit like a glove.  Of course, you can’t wear a sock in them, but I never liked wearing socks in my skates anyway. 

 

My friend Johnny Coscia’s mother drove us up to Holovak & Coughlin Sporting Goods in Arlington one day.  It must have been a Saturday in the fall.  We had heard that colleges like Harvard and B.C. got all their hockey equipment there.  Johnny’s father was good friends with Arthur Coughlin and the guys that worked there showed us all the hockey equipment they had in stock.  I had never seen so many brand-new hockey sticks – Kohos, Northlands, Sher-Woods, Christians, Titans, Canadiens, Torspos – you name it, they had it.  They had college hockey shirts and shin pads and elbow pads and every brand of skate ever made.  There was a promotional poster of Bobby Orr in the store wearing Rawlings hockey gloves.  One of the guys working at the store saw me looking at the poster and said, “Do you want to try on a pair of those gloves Orr is wearing?”  Before I could answer him, he was opening a brand-new box of those gloves right in front of me.  I thought, 'These are the best-looking hockey gloves ever made.  No wonder Bobby Orr wears them.'  I put them on and didn’t take them off.  The guy at the counter said he was going to give me a deal on them.  I figured there was no way my mother was going to buy me those gloves and I only had ten dollars on me.  But Mr. Coughlin or one of his employees handed me the box and said, “Take them.”  I wore those gloves for years.  As a matter of fact, I never bought another pair of hockey gloves.  I still have my Rawlings Bobby Orr gloves from 1975.

 

As I got into Bantams and Midgets, the competition got a lot better.  Some guys that stood out as exceptionally good hockey players in those days were Peter Goodwin, Michael Hoar, Mike Monaco, David Livingston, Stephen McPhail, and Greg Apostle.  When the Braves and Whales merged and Norwell was brought into the organization, there were more kids competing for spots on teams.  As a matter of fact, when I got into Bantams in 1977 there were so many kids playing hockey that Scituate had four Bantam teams: A, B-1, B-2, and C.  The Bantam A’s played out of Squantum.  The rest of us played out of Pilgrim Arena.  Sometimes we played out of the Quincy rink behind the police station off the Southern Artery.

 

That Bantam A team was coached by Jimmy Grip and Lee Royer.  Michael Hoar, Peter Camerlengo, Wayne Cox, and Kevin Murphy were on that team.  It seemed to me like Camerlengo, Cox, and Murph had been playing on the same line for years.  They were never broken up, even in high school.  Butch Sheehan was the goalie for that Bantam A team.  Butch and I were good friends.  We played Peewee hockey together.  He used to invite me over to his house on Old Forge Road all the time.  We’d play street hockey and watch hockey games on weekend afternoons when the games were on NBC.  Butch was an awesome teammate.  He was a cutup in the locker room but a real competitor when the puck dropped.  He really hated to lose.  Butch didn’t care what team they put him on or what rink they sent him to.  He just enjoyed playing goalie and having fun. 

 

I remember playing in a game against Agawam in a Peewee tournament we were invited to.  This huge defenseman wound up and blasted a slapshot at our net.  Butch reached out to grab it about waist-high on his glove side.  The puck went right into the webbing of Butch’s goalie glove and the whole thing – glove and puck – came flying off Butch’s hand and landed in the back of the net.  There was a brief discussion among the coaches and officials as to whether that counted as a goal or not.  Poor Butch probably never saw the shot coming at him but he couldn’t overcome his natural instinct to try to glove everything.  He made a great effort at stopping the puck, but he didn’t figure it would take the glove right off of his hand.  Being a goalie is tough, especially when you get to high school.  If there’s someone on the roster in front of you, you have to sit a lot.  Oftentimes, for a whole season.  Butch finally started in goal his senior year in high school (my junior year) and was exceptional.  Coach McKeever, who played goalie in high school and college, loved him.

 

The following year, 1978, I moved up to Bantam A.  We had a good team that year.  Most of us were high school freshmen but we played so few games in high school that bantam hockey was all we had.  We won the AHA-CM District 4 Bantam Championship in February and went on to the Bantam State Championship at the Burlington Ice Palace in March.  We had a mix of Scituate, Norwell, and Cohasset kids on the team.  Our lines were: David Livingston centering Stephen McPhail and Chris West, Greg Apostle centering me and Duncan Gillis, and Robert Devereaux centering Dom Campadelli and David Damrell.  Our defensemen were Neal Doherty, Peter Goodwin, Wayne Townsend, and Sean Murphy.  Goalies were Stephen Bowen and Rollie Belyea.  Rollie was a Norwell kid and a tremendous competitor.  He played every game in net like it was the Stanley Cup finals.  Always yelling at the opposing forwards and jabbing his goalie stick into the back of their legs.  Stevie Bowen was from Cohasset.  He practically lived at the Cohasset Winter Garden.  He graduated from Cohasset High School, was accepted to the United States Naval Academy, and became a NASA astronaut.

 

That year was the most competitive hockey I had played up until that point.  We had some pretty good talent on our team, but so did everyone else.  The consequences of winning or losing felt different that year.  We weren’t kids anymore.  The coach talked to us like we were adults.  There was more pressure and responsibility.  There was more of a “we’re all in this together” sense in the locker room.  You played all out because you didn’t want to disappoint your teammates.  That was the one big thing that the coach of that team was able to teach us – play hard and don’t forget that hockey’s a team game.  At a Bantam tournament we were invited to in Stoneham, I asked the coach if I could play the off-wing.  He couldn’t come up with any reason why I shouldn’t, so I set up on the left instead of the right.  Had my best game of the year.  Scored one goal each period, the last one high on the stick side.  Being righthanded had its advantages when moving from left to right.  They gave me some kind of plaque for the hat trick.  I wish I knew where it went.

 

When I got to high school, funds were low in the school’s athletic department.  Hockey was an expensive sport and was perennially in danger of being dropped.  My freshman year there was a varsity and a junior varsity team.  I went out for j.v. and made the team.  There weren’t any freshman on the varsity that year.  I don’t remember playing many games that year.  We practiced hard and scrimmaged against ourselves most of the time.  Many of the freshmen and sophomores on that team had played Scituate youth hockey from the age of six or seven.  We were very talented.  The storm of ’78 happened in the middle of the season and fouled up the school and hockey schedules.  Charlie Lanzetta was the j.v. coach that year.  He was a golf pro in Rockland and was offered the job.  I never really made a connection with him.  Paul Johnson was the head coach and I got along with him great. 

 

My sophomore year I tried out for varsity and made the team, eventually.  When the first roster was announced in December, there was only one sophomore on it and it wasn’t me.  A month later, either due to guys dropping off or simply not playing well, I got put on the team.  It was me, Mike Monaco, and Richard Wilson for sophomores on varsity.  David Damrell was the rare freshman who made the team.  I was psyched.  This was Bill McKeever’s first year as head coach.  I had him for History in the eighth grade and I knew him pretty well.  He was coaching hockey at South Shore Vo Tech then and we’d talk about hockey from time to time.  You couldn’t help but like him as a teacher.  He was never as serious as the teachers I had for Math or English.  Sometimes, going to History class felt like getting a midday break from real schoolwork. 

 

That year, 1978-1979, I basically played fourth line but at least I was on the team.  Some of the upperclassmen on that team – Michael Galvin, Andy Marhoffer, Danny Higgins, Jeff Damrell, Jimmy Magill, Dave DelGrosso, Brad Warren, and Stephen Breen – were a lot bigger and faster than me.  I used to watch what they did in practices and games and try to copy them.  Charlie Hoar, Mike Monaco, and I used to sit on the end of the bench usually with Butch Sheehan and wait to get called in. 

 

One time we were playing Randolph in Randolph and Coach McKeever puts me in.  We’re taking a faceoff in our end.  The puck comes back to Kim Langway at left defense.  I’m playing right wing so I have to cover him.  The guy was huge.  He pulls back like he’s taking the hardest slapshot of all time and I have to get in front of it and try to block it.  I think McKeever sent me in to see how I’d react.  I got in front of him, put my hands down to my side with the palms open and facing him and closed my eyes.  Thank God that thing didn’t hit me or I’d be dead.  I generally got three shifts a game on fourth line, usually with Charlie Hoar, Mike Monaco, or Al Ragge.  Just getting to dress that season with guys two years older than me was a thrill.  Even the bus rides were fun except the one time the seniors made us chew tobacco.  That wasn’t pleasant. 

 

My junior year I played with Mike Monaco, Al Ragge, and sometimes Michael O’Brien.  Michael O’Brien was someone who, like me, practically grew up at the Winter Garden.  He played many years of youth hockey and was an excellent high school hockey player.  His father, Jack O’Brien, was an instructor for Ed Taylor and he was very good with getting kids to learn to skate properly.  As a matter of fact, it was Jack O’Brien who noticed me having trouble with crossovers when I was six or seven and got me skating correctly.  Once I understood the inside and outside edges of the skate blade, I became a much better skater.  Mr. O’Brien helped countless Scituate kids learn to skate and probably never got the credit he deserved.  He was a quiet man by nature but I know he took immense satisfaction in seeing his charges improve their skating skills.

 

We played in a tough Old Colony League my junior year.  Hingham held the top four positions in league scoring leaders the prior year and three of them were coming back as seniors.  Silver Lake was a perennial threat.  The Scituate line of Camerlengo, Cox, and Murphy seemed to dominate every line that was thrown out against them.  These guys had a certain intuition about where they should be in every offensive situation and scored goal after goal with their speed and hockey intelligence.  Butch Sheehan had a great year as the starting goaltender that season and was a true leader in the locker room.  Coach McKeever was smart in electing Butch as co-captain, or at least suggesting that our starting goalie be given a “C”.  We were a .500 team that year and we played above our abilities in a number of games, but we never gave in to a tough opponent.  The other teams knew we weren’t a pushover.

 

The next year was a real experience.  Michael Hoar and I were named co-captains as seniors and we conferred with Coach McKeever often on lineups and opponents.  McKeever had total confidence in Michael and me and we paid it back by bringing our best every game.  Michael centered the first line between Mike Monaco and me and we played every shift like we were born to play hockey.  Michael Hoar was so talented that all Monaco and I had to do was dig the puck out of the corners and get it to him.  Mike Monaco and I often switched wings, Mike being lefthanded and me being righthanded.  I felt that I was more effective shooting from the left and Mike was a natural from the right-wing position. 

 

Michael Hoar was the best hockey player I ever played with.  He had a certain way of frustrating opponents with his speed and his reach - he could put the puck through and around defensemen with relative ease – and his tremendous skating ability.  And he was tall.  Anyone watching those games in 1980 and 1981 could see that Michael was a natural on the ice.  He skated in loose circles when he didn’t have the puck, his head up watching the play develop and his stick blade on the ice.  He had such speed that when the puck came near him, he picked it up quickly and with complete confidence.  As a line, we felt we had a good chance of scoring whenever we stepped on the ice.  And it showed up in the stats quickly. 

 

We were a .500 team and lost a blowout game here and there, but Michael nearly won the OCL scoring title.  Timmy Mitchell of Silver Lake, who scored a ton of goals that year for a team with only one loss, had 51 points that year and Michael, who played on a team that won only half its games, had 37 points with two games left in the season.  I had 33 points with two games left, but only because whenever I fed the puck to Michael he found the back of the net with it.  Michael was named an OCL All-Star along with defenseman Richard Wilson and goaltender Brian Pipes at the conclusion of the season.  I’ll never forget Coach McKeever telling us in the locker room after our last game how proud we made him.  It seemed like a short season, but every one of those games was important to me and all the other guys on that 1980-1981 team. 

 

I thought about playing college hockey, but I was burned out.  I either played or practiced at least once a week for almost twelve years.  I needed a break.  I applied to UVM with the intention of playing hockey, but I didn’t get in.  Colby College accepted me but I had no interest in going way up to Waterville, Maine to go to school.  I went to Bentley College in Waltham instead and graduated with a degree in Finance.  I played in pickup hockey leagues in Watertown and Belmont for three out of the four years I was there and that was enough for me.  I hurt my back badly just after my freshman year and stayed off the ice in 1982.  I got my degree in 1985 and went to work in finance. 

 

Hockey was a huge part of my life growing up.  I played youth baseball for many years, but hockey suited me better.  I always liked and respected my coaches and teammates.  Joe Henderson, Drew Higgins, and Bill McKeever were very important to my development as a hockey player, but one man - Ed Taylor - stood out for getting me started and encouraging me to stay with it.  Mr. Taylor had a major impact on me as a kid, especially in the way I thought about responsibility and commitment.  In addition to my parents and my teachers, he was for a number of years the most influencial adult in my life.  He was both intimidating and inspiring, without really trying to be either.  He had unusual patience and was a great teacher of the sport of hockey.   He made you want to pay attention to what he was saying.  Today, more than fifty years after first meeting him, I still think about him.

 

The Cohasset Winter Garden became a sanctuary of sorts for me after the first year or two of skating there.  I always had much more confidence playing there than in other rinks.  It's a shame that it's gone.  As for growing up playing a sport, there’s something about being thrown into the fire with a bunch of other kids who, like you, have no skating or hockey skills and persevering.  Like all team sports that you learn as a kid, it’s not necessarily all about wins and losses.  It’s really about listening to your coaches, supporting your teammates, and learning how to lose with dignity.  You played as hard as you could, but if you didn’t win, you took the loss like a man and you moved on.  That’s mainly what I got out of hockey.  I’m just sorry that it went by so fast.  It didn’t seem like it at the time, but those twelve years went by in the blink of an eye.  But whenever I see an old teammate from the Scituate Braves or Scituate High School, it’s like going back in time.  And many days, I wish I could.

 

Sean Flaherty

May 2020