Who has spent the most time on the ice of Canadian Tire Centre since it was opened 30 years ago?
On the surface, it seems like an open-and-shut query for the hockey nerds interested. Though the NHL only began tracking time-on-ice data in 1997-98, two years after the building was opened, one of Chris Phillips or Daniel Alfredsson has to be the answer, right?
Wrong. The real answer, dwarfing both Phillips and Alfredsson, is Zamboni driver Glen McDonald, followed closely by his colleagues Silvano Bergnach, Ralph Yeretch, and Sean Cavanagh. McDonald has served as part of the game-night crew — who lead the ice crew — since March 1996, while his three colleagues debuted in 2000.
On this game night, like the thousands before them, their nightly Tim Hortons order sits waiting for the drivers and ice crew to spill in about two-and-a-half hours before puck drop, coffees and donuts quickly losing their warmth in the cold tunnel.
On-air personalities — TSN’s Jamie MacLennan and Claire Hanna on this particular evening — and off-ice officials weave their ways through the area, which just barely offers enough room to turn the two machines around every time they do a cut of the ice. Boots sit by the chairs where the team changes into their skates.
Retired NHL linesman Derek Nansen — who refereed Sean while coming up in the Kanata minor hockey system — enters with his grandson, ears burning, just minutes after the four recollect his final NHL game, which occurred last April at Canadian Tire Centre.
His grandson happily hops on a Zamboni, these surprisingly only the third set of choppers the building has seen since it opened.
Meanwhile, the four all declare the 2007 Stanley Cup Final — McDonald and Bergnach drove Game 3, which the Senators won at home — the highlight of their careers. The area around the Zamboni tunnel (between Gate 2 and Gate 3) turned into a miniature city as broadcast trucks filled in the space in the loading dock behind them.
In 2009, when Jordan Eberle scored the tying goal in the Gold Medal Game at the World Junior Championships, they were there watching, just feet away from the action.
In the spring of 2015, the four cleaned dozens of hamburgers off the ice during the Hamburglar run, the most on the night of March 19th, when rookie Curtis Lazar decided to celebrate a 6-4 win over Minnesota with a bite of a McDouble.
In December 2017, the group made a rare departure from Kanata, travelling to Parliament Hill to prepare and maintain the ice for the NHL 100 Classic’s alumni game. “Snowed a lot that night, did a lot of shovelling,” said Cavanagh. “But it was a great atmosphere, great turnout, and who knows if it will ever happen again, so very special,” added McDonald.
Last season, McDonald welcomed his son Tyler to the crew. The younger McDonald is a play-by-play commentator whose resumes include stints on the air in U SPORTS and the OHL. By day though, he operates an arena, like the current four drivers do or have done, before retiring or being promoted to supervisor positions.
The two McDonalds now commute to games together from Barrhaven, listening to TSN 1200, a special part of their game nights.
And a much nicer commute than some of the drivershave had to do while on the job. Backup Zambonis would sometimes be needed and borrowed from Bell Sensplex, the nearby Senators practice facility.
“I prefer snow than rain,” said Cavanagh. “Rain was not fun with the umbrella. We were having issues with the old machines, one caught on fire.”
“I had a cab slow down, roll the back window down, there’s a guy in the back laughing at me,” Bergnach says of his worst commute.
Because of course, while moments like the Stanley Cup Finals, gold medals, jersey retirements, and other celebrations stick out in the building’s history, their funniest tales come from some-less publicized events.
Back when the ice crew was only a couple deep (now, there are 10–12 cleaning the ice), Cavanagh caught an edge in a rut and ended up in a heap on the ice.
Legendary Detroit Red Wings defenceman Chris Chelios helped Cavanagh up, not before giving him a friendly punch. “What I saw, the Detroit players were around him in a circle, all of a sudden I couldn’t see where he was,” Bergnach explains. “All of a sudden, the Detroit players are jumping back and here’s Chelios picking him up. That was funny.”
A friendly punch from the hard-nosed Chelios pales in comparison to McDonald’s run-in with John Tortorella, while the outspoken coach was behind the bench of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Well, this TV timeout he wasn’t really behind the bench. ‘Torts’ was at ice level, face to face with an unlucky ice shoveller.
Again, back in the earlier days, there was only a couple of shovellers for these two-minute breaks, so they had to make a quick sweep. McDonald thinks Tim Swords, now the Director of Event Production with the organization, might have been on the opposite side of the ice from the benches that night.
“As I’m going along that side, the first couple of Tampa Bay players move away, and let me through. The next three didn’t,” said McDonald.
“And then the first two close in, and I realize I couldn’t keep going through. I look up, and I realize I’m right nose-to-nose with ‘Torts’, and he looks at me as he’s drawing up a play, and he yells ‘Get out of here!’”
“Probably with some different words,” adds Yeretch. “I said, ‘I’m trying, but I can’t!’” continues McDonald. “The players on the ice all started laughing and let me through.”
Another night, during Alexei Kovalev’s tenure in Ottawa from 2009–11, they were tasked with finding pendants broken off the Russian sniper’s necklace which had fallen off during the game. They never did find them before deciding to cut the hours-long search short to flood the ice, despite hours of searching on their hands and knees.
Following another game around that time, the group found themselves at the same bar — O’Connors Irish Pub, which was located in Kanata Centrum before it closed in 2014 — as the Lightning. Cavanagh remembers letting them in their booth and hiding his Sens gear under his jacket.
Now, the group — the larger group, with the other members of the ice crew included — often gathers to play pool at MacLaren’s on Elgin Street. Of course, they watch the Senators on the bar’s television sets during away games and are sometimes recognized by fans.
Meanwhile, spending hours on the same ice as NHL players doesn’t usually invite conversation. But former players-turned-Senators staffers Chris Neil, Daniel Alfredsson, and Chris Phillips stick out as players who greet the ice staff.
“Those three will acknowledge you when you’re walking by,” says Cavanagh. “I don’t know if it’s just an age thing, or it’s because they’ve been around as long as we have or even longer, those three will give you a nod or a hello.”
While the older three’s careers on ice resurfacers predate the NHL coming to Ottawa, Cavanagh was thrown right into the fire. He began in the NHL while he was working as a part-timer with the former City of Kanata.
“I was younger than all these guys, I remember deeming myself the youngest in the NHL,” said Cavanagh. “I was 19 or 20 when I started driving here. Back then you worked your way up or you were on the conversion crew, or at least I did. One day they just asked, they found out through the grapevine that I could drive a Zamboni.”
The Zambonis sport a hydrostatic gas pedal, meaning the farther you push it, the more fluid flows, making the machine go faster. As soon as you let off the gas, the machine stops — an important science lesson for the young driver.
“My legs were shaking so bad the first couple of games that the machine stopped,” he laughed. But Cavanagh’s parents, who had season tickets in the corner of Canadian Tire Centre, had their entire section cheering on the rookie.
26 years later, the shaking has stopped. They’re all long past their ‘Welcome to the NHL’ moments. McDonald and Bergnach, the good luck charms, await their next crack at preparing the ice for a Stanley Cup Finals game.
