It’s 16 degrees with a windchill making it feel like 3.
A dozen buddies gather on a freshly scraped and resurfaced sheet of ice in a western suburb of Minneapolis for a nighttime pickup hockey game in the backyard of a magnificent home. The ice is so illuminated you’d swear you’re inside an NHL arena if not for the wonderful, unmistakable scent of a wood-burning fire next to the rink and, of course, the frosty temperature. Christmas lights stream the fencing and bushes that surround the rink, and soft music plays from speakers mounted at both ends of the ice.
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The setting is perfect, and so is the symphony of sound coming from pucks striking the boards and skates carving the ice. Quips and chirps and snickers pass from the lips of laughing, smack-talking pals as they get ready for their weekly game.
“How are we going to pick teams?” Justin Morneau asks after they agree to split the players into four groups of three.
“Lefties vs. righties?” somebody responds.
“Tall guys vs. short guys?” asks another.
“How about Canadians vs. Americans?”
“What about our old uniform numbers?”
“Why don’t we put our sticks in the middle?” Joe Mauer pipes up.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s old school,” says Wes Walz.
“Buff, Buff, Buff, where are you?” Paul Martin yells out.
“Right here!”
“Buff, we need you. Get out here,” Jordan Leopold yells.
And with that, Dustin Byfuglien, minutes after arriving on his fluorescent yellow four-wheeler for the sole purpose of being a spectator, at least on this night, falls to his knees and slides out to center-ice.
Like kids on a neighborhood pond, the former professional baseball and hockey players toss their sticks into a pile for the ritual of choosing teams before a game of shinny.
Wearing a plaid flannel shirt untucked and flowing over his cargo pants, “Big Buff” — the hulking former Winnipeg Jets defenseman who a few years ago walked away from the game with two years and $14 million left on his contract — begins separating sticks at random into four piles with a wide, gap-toothed smile.
With the teams picked, Morneau blurts out, “Anthems? Hats off, boys!”
With no American or Canadian flag hanging, players remove their helmets, toques and Santa hats and turn toward the southern end zone, where a half-hour earlier Morneau and Mauer, with grins creasing their faces, fastened a Mauer Chevrolet banner onto the fence because the one thing that had been missing during the three years of this “Wednesday Game” was sponsorship signage.
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Leopold, Prosser and Martin comically begin singing, “O Canada.”
After they decide which two teams will start the round-robin tournament of games, Nate Prosser skates to the sideboards to exit the ice.
“You got benched already?” Mark Parrish chirps.
“Yup, right to the Pross box,” Prosser says. “Nothing changes.”
As Big Buff puts another log on the fire, Parrish says it’s so cold he can barely feel his toes inside his skates.
“This is like early October in Winnipeg,” Byfuglien deadpans.
On the ice are former Major League Baseball players and NHLers with resumes that include MVPs, batting titles, Gold Gloves, Hobey Bakers, NCAA championships and All-Star Game nods. Their professional playing days may be behind them, but they still starve for competition and for the camaraderie they once found as active players.
Morneau, who grew up in Western Canada dreaming of playing in the NHL, started this Wednesday pickup game 31/2 years ago. He put in the rink and built a barn that acts as a maintenance shed and warming house. Half the barn is a locker room, outfitted with stalls for gear, and, of course, a beer fridge.
“I feel like we’re the last generation of just calling your buddies up from down the street and asking them to come over and play,” says Morneau, wearing a New Westminster Royals hockey jersey. “I never wanted to leave the clubhouse because I knew at some point I wasn’t going to be allowed back in.”
Says Parrish: “We’re all in that same boat. It’s maybe a little bit of reliving the glory years, but more than anything it’s being on the ice and having fun playing a game. I don’t care how old we are, we’re a bunch of immature kids.”
(Editor’s note: To see this special outdoor game come alive, click on the short documentary below from Minnesota filmmaker Marius Anderson.)
Fifteen minutes before puck drop, Morneau takes one final lap on his modified Zamboni to smooth over any rough patches on the ice. Though the setting for their first-ever night game is pristine under the white-yellow glow of the lights surrounding the rink, the ice is not.
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A storm the previous week wreaked havoc, dumping a mixture of rain and snow. Still, Morneau smiles as he steers the tractor outfitted with ice-resurfacing equipment into a garage just off the rink.
“My hope always as the ice man is that the ice is good,” Morneau says. “You don’t want a bad hop or to hurt the knee or the ankle or something.”
Morneau spends as many as 10 hours a week preparing the ice for the weekly game, which typically lasts no more than an hour.
With the help of a professional company that floods it, the rink has gone in every November for the past four years. Using chillers and glycol commonly used in NHL rinks, Morneau is able to maintain good ice until the outdoor temperature rises above 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
He first pitched the idea of the rink to his wife, Krista, in the fall of 2018 as a way for his children to accrue extra ice time at home. Of his five children ages 2 to 11, three have already played hockey. But it was quickly evident to Krista what the rink was really about. Shortly after the ice went in, Morneau began to host a group of friends for a weekly game of pickup hockey.
“I always said, ‘Be truthful. This isn’t for the kids. It’s for you,’” Krista says. “Everyone drop their kids off at school, come and trash talk, play for half an hour and then sit in the warming house and talk longer than for what you play. It’s just a good way for them all to connect.”
Morneau, 40, admits the early part of his post-playing career wasn’t easy. He last played for Team Canada during the 2017 World Baseball Classic and hoped to use the event as a springboard for one more season in the big leagues. But he never got a call and officially retired in January 2018.
While family obligations and hobby-farming take up the bulk of Morneau’s days, the part-time Twins analyst still sought other ways to fill the void of time spent with teammates in the clubhouse, on buses and planes and in the dugout.
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To do so, he found a new cast of teammates.
Among the regulars are former Twins third baseman Corey Koskie, Twins equipment manager Rod McCormick and Mauer, who started to play after he retired in November 2018. Twins vice president of communications and content Dustin Morse and travel director Mike Herman also occasionally play.
Parrish, 45, who lives five minutes up the road, signed on early, too.
Included in a talented, rotating cast of former NHL players beyond Parrish is Walz, 51, Byfuglien, 36, Prosser, 35, Martin, 40, Leopold, 41, Ryan Malone, 42, Blake Sloan, 46, and Keith Ballard, 39, plus former pros Geno Parrish, 47, Mark’s big brother, who just may have the best hands of them all, and Mike Rucinski, 46.
“I like to think of it as a little sanctuary in the backyard where guys can come out and can be left alone,” Morneau says. “We can kind of get a little bit of that locker room talk here in the warming house and go back and talk about the glory days and just have a little fun get-together. And then everyone goes about their day.”
“It’s a mini-locker room replicated once a week.”
Joe Mauer rocking his Minnesota high school colors. (Marius Anderson / Special to The Athletic)Anticipation for each game starts building a few days earlier when Morneau sends a group text message to establish a time for the puck drop and a roster. But the electronic chain quickly devolves into an outlet for trash talking.
What happens on Wednesday lives forever in the text thread. Playful banter isn’t restricted to the ice and warming house.
“We rip on each other,” Koskie says. “You have to have thick skin.”
Wins and losses. Funny moments. Boneheaded plays.
All become targets in the amount of time it takes to type and hit send. Every time a game is announced, the relentless bashing of one another begins again.
“It’s just having fun with guys, keeping each other accountable, laughing, joking and having a good time,” Mauer says. “As you can see, we’re all competitive.”
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One of Koskie’s favorite moments is when Morneau informed the group he had purchased a Zamboni to manage the ice. Morneau is such a perfectionist that he’s willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to keep the ice in tip-top shape.
Koskie quickly texted Morneau back to tell him he was crazy — the ice was too small for an industrial-sized Zamboni. In Koskie’s estimation, there was no way a Zamboni could turn around on Morneau’s 80-by-44-foot patch. Morneau was adamant it would work. The Zamboni salesperson had assured him.
A day later, Koskie headed to Morneau’s house for the unveiling. Within minutes, Morneau went from a proud Zamboni driver to a frustrated one. Morneau’s Zamboni adventure has lived in infamy. The rest of the group knew within a millisecond.
“He got it and was all excited,” says Koskie, 48. “I go over there for the inception and he goes to turn and he can’t turn. He calls the guy up and the guy came to pick it up the next day.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, I told you so.’ But sometimes these young cats got to go through it themselves, figure it out and make their own mistakes.”
The game is competitive but civil. (Marius Anderson / Special to The Athletic)As they dart across the ice in pursuit of the puck, the players are mindful of one another.
This is not kill-or-be-killed hockey.
Dirty play is nonexistent. Same with physicality. Aside from Mauer’s playful lunge at Morneau in the first game of the night, high sticking almost never occurs.
But make no mistake: These guys compete.
“Walzy still can play,” Koskie says of the former Wild center. “He takes his game to a whole different level. When Walzy shows up, you want him on your team because he’s going to be going into the corners. When everybody else is gasping for air, Walzy’s getting his second wind and he’s dominating.”
Parrish, who had a history of concussions during his 12-year NHL career, is quick to point out that the guys who have suffered head injuries are the ones who wear helmets.
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Even though they didn’t play a contact sport like their NHL brethren, Koskie, Mauer and Morneau are no strangers to concussions either. All of their careers were severely impacted by head injuries.
The American League’s 2009 Most Valuable Player, Mauer was considered among the best catchers in the game, a complete package. But he never caught again after suffering the first of two concussions on Aug. 19, 2013.
Mauer, who retired at age 35 after his 2018 concussion, dealt with headaches, nausea, sensitivity to light and vision problems.
Were the pickup game played at full speed, Mauer, now 38, would find another hobby.
“I wouldn’t be on this ice, that’s for sure,” Mauer says with a laugh. “We all want to walk away from that Wednesday morning skate healthy and ready to go back to our families.”
Potentially en route to his second AL MVP award, Morneau suffered the first of his two concussions on July 7, 2010. He missed the rest of the season after taking a knee to the head while breaking up a double play. Five years later, Morneau missed nearly four months with another concussion.
Koskie dove for a ball on July 5, 2006, at Miller Park in Milwaukee and hit his head. Just like that, a nine-year career was derailed as Koskie occasionally experienced symptoms for the next three years.
“I would love to be able to play in a Tuesday-night-at-10-o’clock old-man’s league,” Morneau says. “Not that somebody would run me, but I could be looking back for a pass and make accidental contact. Out here, everyone is aware of each other and nobody wants to be responsible for hurting somebody else.”
With sweat pouring from the top of his steaming head, Parrish and Walz follow Leopold, Martin and Sloan into the locker room to cool down and yuck it up after one of the three-on-three contests.
“I backchecked once that game,” Parrish says proudly.
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“That’s one more time than you ever did in an NHL game,” Leopold, playing in a Santa Claus costume and hat, shoots back.
A chorus of laughter erupts.
“Man, you worked hard that game, Leo,” Parrish says.
Leopold, turning to his old University of Minnesota teammate, Martin, in the neighboring stall, doesn’t miss a beat with his comeback: “I had to work twice as hard because Pauly wasn’t working hard.”
As much as these athletes come for the hockey, this is what they also come for, sitting in the locker room and bantering with their buddies.
“There’s nothing like locker room talk,” says Byfuglien, as he takes a swig of his Molson.
“The chirps, they never end,” says Sloan.
And with that, the barbs continue.
“Walzie gave me the fish hook like seven times that game. I kept thinking, ‘Fuck, I remember that,’” Leopold says.
“Yeah, Walzie, you took at least half a dozen penalties on Santa that game like it was 1998,” quips Parrish.
“Well, you buried me in the corner,” Leopold tells Parrish.
“My knee took the worst of it,” Parrish says.
“I almost choked when you go, ‘Are you OK, Santa?’” Leopold says.
“Parry, that’s a lot of man to move,” Martin tells Parrish.
Leopold gets a kick out of the crack.
“I’m like Buff. You can’t move Buff anymore,” Leopold says.
“Well,” Sloan says, “Parry just put one off my face.”
Parrish: “Your face was in my way.”
Prosser suddenly walks in.
They begin talking about Prosser’s glory days in his hometown of Elk River, Minn. Walz had just accompanied one of his kids to a tournament there and saw a mural featuring Prosser on one of the walls of the new rink.
“How long did it take you to put it up? Did you have to bring your own drill?” Walz says.
“Oh, come on!” Prosser replies as laughs get louder.
Morneau and Mauer walk in and the old stories begin.
They’re riveted as the hockey players unleash story after story. Each story inevitably reminds Morneau and Mauer about something in their history together, and similarly, the hockey guys are all ears.
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“The locker room is what we all miss the most whether we realize it or not,” Parrish says.
It’s time for the championship game.
On this night, it’s Parrish, his brother, Geno, and Walz against Morneau, Morse and Rucinski.
Morneau’s team, surprisingly, jumps out to a 1-0 lead.
That’s when the competitive nature of the hockey guys takes over and they come roaring back for the win by continuing to sling pucks in the 12-inch-by-6-inch goal from long distance.
After the victory, Walz skates over to the Parrish brothers and jokes: “I’m so tired of doing interviews. Can somebody else jump in for me?”
And with that, Parrish, Walz and the rest head back to the warming house.
“It’s a nice distraction from being the daily Uber driver,” Morneau says. “It’s our time. We’re out here and you kind of get lost in the competition.
“It’s a very special thing.”
Editor’s Note: Reporters Dan Hayes and Michael Russo take us inside The Wednesday Game in our narrative podcast.
(Top photo and additional videos: Marius Anderson / Special to The Athletic)
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