Culture
How an injury led Jets goalie Chris Driedger to create a documentary about roller hockey
Chris Driedger was 16 minutes away from winning the 2022 men’s World Championships for Team Canada when disaster struck.
A post-to-post push led to the complete tear of his ACL, ending his night and putting his professional hockey career in jeopardy. He watched Finland complete its comeback from the sidelines, feeling helpless, haunted by the “click” sound his knee had made when he pushed into his right post.
Driedger was given a nine month recovery timeline. Back at home, it was six months before doctors let him skate. Instead of letting the monotony of daily rehab defeat him, he discovered a new passion and spent the next three years following it through.
This is the story of how a Winnipeg-born goaltender — now part of the Jets organization, just down the road from where he grew up — found himself producing a documentary film about a California-based roller hockey league with one of the most unique backstories in hockey history. It’s called “Pro Beach Hockey: Sun, Surf and Slapshots” and Driedger says producing it helped change his mindset at one of the darkest times in his career.
“It was a lifesaver having something else going on to take my mind off the fact that I wasn’t able to play hockey — which is, you know, my entire life.”
By the late 1990s, Wayne Gretzky had come and gone from Los Angeles but his legacy remained. Interest in hockey was at an all-time high and businesspeople went looking for a way to capitalize. One of those people was David B. McLane, the wrestling promoter who started GLOW: The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.
McLane wanted to take a run at roller hockey, taking his experience in the entertainment industry to brand new terrain, so he created a league called Pro Beach Hockey. Games were played on outdoor rinks with ramps behind the net, angled glass to keep the ball (not puck) in the play, and a two point line that worked similarly to the three point line in basketball.
The league was populated with ex-roller-hockey stars, including a few NHL players, running for two months for three straight summers — turning roller hockey into an outsized spectacle. It was made for TV, with all three seasons airing on ESPN2, but developed a cult audience at Huntington Beach where it was filmed.
Driedger was four years old when the league launched. He didn’t find out about it until partway through his first season with the Seattle Kraken, where he was reunited with longtime teammate and friend, Max McCormick.
Over brunch, McCormick told Driedger about his friend Jake Cimperman and the idea for a “roller hockey documentary.” McCormick was skeptical at first, Driedger says, but the moment McCormick showed him the league’s teaser video, Driedger was hooked.
“It was this weird, interesting mix of the WWE and the NHL that I’d never seen before,” Driedger says. “I just watched it and instantly thought, ‘If I saw this teaser, I would want to watch the documentary.’”
Driedger nudged McCormick to set up a call with Cimperman. That call and the ones that followed went well; eventually Driedger and McCormick helped send Cimperman to Los Angeles to start interviewing people for the film. The three of them held regular meetings to sort out the direction of the documentary, plan marketing, and strategize its release, creating a production company called Sin Bin Studios.
Driedger says the biggest driving force for his involvement was his own curiosity.
“The league was just so wild and fast-paced and unique and aired on ESPN. That brought this level of intrigue and I wanted to know more. There were ramps behind the net and I wanted to know who thought of that. How did that play out in games? Did the players go up these ramps? I’m thinking in my head: Imagine there’s ramps on the ice in hockey. That would be absurd. So there were a lot of questions I wanted answers to.”
An outdoor rink at Huntington Beach. (Courtesy Shelly Castellano)
“And the characters were really good. Mike Butters from Winnipeg was playing at 6-foot-3, 255 pounds or something like that and he was a fighter … All of it was before my time but it just seemed wild, like I wanted to know way more about it just from the teaser.”
All of those questions took a backseat during Driedger’s first season in Seattle — and again when Driedger got the call to play for Team Canada.
But the curiosity remained. When Driedger tore his ACL, went home, and started what would become nine months of rehab, he needed a healthy place away from the rink to direct his ambitions. He’d already taken a personality aptitude test facilitated by former Jets defenceman Jay Harrison through the NHLPA. He’d spoken with personal strategists John Hierlihy and Duncan Fletcher, exploring business opportunities in real estate.
It was only after Driedger got hurt that he thought to mention the documentary to Hierlihy, who proved to be an invaluable resource.
“John immediately mentioned two or three people I should talk to. ‘This buddy of mine actually played in the league. This buddy of mine is a lawyer in film, he works for Paramount Plus — talk to him.’ It just opened up a treasure trove of contacts that I didn’t even know was out there,” Driedger says.”
As Driedger chased down those contacts and became even more invested in the process, his curiosity for Pro Beach Hockey continued to grow. He was fascinated by the league flying 60 professional hockey players to a luxurious California locale like Huntington Beach, where each team was given their own open bar with unlimited food and alcohol.
“Like, how does that play out?” he says, sounding fascinated. “You find out in the documentary. It’s complete chaos.”
The chaos was part blessing, part filmmaking challenge. At first, it was difficult for Cimperman to get interviews with some of the key voices for the documentary. Driedger’s theory is that Huntington Beach got a bit too wild for some athletes — not everybody wanted to revisit those days. But people he talked to about the documentary wanted to help. It turned out Bobby Ryan was a huge fan of Pro Beach Hockey when he was a kid, for example, and that Luc Robitaille and Pat Brisson — two of the biggest names in California hockey — played on the same roller hockey team back in the day. One by one, the pieces fell into place.
“We got Bobby on the documentary and he’s great. He has a cool appearance where he had a crush on the host of Pro Beach Hockey … Luc Robitaille is a big part of the documentary. He was playing on rollerblades all summer on the beaches and he felt that was a bit of his edge. Same with Pat Brisson, the super agent. He and Luke were on the same roller hockey team in the summer … They bring a lot of firepower to the doc and they’re both very well-spoken, very prominent people. I think it just adds a bit of legitimacy.”
At this point, “Pro Beach Hockey: Sun, Surf and Slapshots” is in its final stages of postproduction. Driedger, McCormick, and Cimperman are planning to release it later this year, capping off over three years of collaboration on a project that may not have come to fruition without Driedger’s knee injury. He missed almost an entire NHL season for Seattle. He has only played two NHL games since, but continues to carve out an AHL career.
Driedger’s on-ice career was in legitimate peril — ultimately leading him back to his hometown all of these years later. The Jets had been interested in Driedger for a while; it seems reasonable that they’ll be interested in his AHL mentorship and NHL experience again when the 30-year-old’s contract is up for renewal this summer. For his part, Driedger says he understands he has one shot to make an impression in Winnipeg, calling it a “dream” to play for his hometown team. He’s going to do everything he can to make the most of it, starting with his Winnipeg-themed mask.
There will be tributes to all of his minor hockey teams: the Fort Garry Flyers, the AA Twins, and AAA Monarchs. He hopes to have another opportunity to design a Winnipeg-themed mask next season, but knows more than most that nothing is promised in the NHL. He says he’s making the most of his time in Winnipeg, spending time with close family and friends, and continuing to push himself on the ice and off of it.
“There’s so many ups and downs in hockey. Sometimes things are going great, you’re playing fantastic, and you’re moving up. You’re playing in the minors and now you’re in the NHL and things are exciting. But everyone has down years where things aren’t going well. There’s injuries. It’s just a roller coaster ride, man, and I’ve found having something else going to keep me grounded is super, super helpful.”
Driedger understands that nothing is promised in film, either. He’s thrilled that athletes are starting to take media production into their own hands, but understands Sin Bin Studios won’t likely start its next project with the kind of budget Michael Jordan had for “The Last Dance” or David Beckham for “Beckham.”
“Max and I, we learn by doing,” he says. “The best way to learn is to go ahead, take the plunge, and go do it. It’s been a blast.”
(Top photo of Chris Driedger, Chris Cimperman and Max McCormick: Courtesy Jake Cimperman)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Minneapolis, MN1 minute agoUnited flight from Chicago to Minneapolis diverted to Wisconsin due to unruly passenger: officials
-
Indianapolis, IN6 minutes agoTop seeded West Chester cruises to 12-3 win over University of Indianapolis in the Division II championship
-
Pittsburg, PA13 minutes agoPittsburg man accused of hotel kidnapping, assault enters plea deal
-
Augusta, GA16 minutes agoSenate candidate Derek Dooley visits Lincolnton, Augusta
-
Washington, D.C21 minutes agoMan in critical condition after water rescue in Southwest DC
-
Cleveland, OH28 minutes agoKoby Altman Sounds Like Evan Mobley’s Future With Cavaliers Could Be in Question
-
Austin, TX31 minutes agoBarton Springs Bridge named one of Preservation Texas’ most endangered places for 2026
-
Alabama36 minutes agoA path to employment for Alabama individuals with a criminal background
