The Hockey Sticks on the Wall

We stopped for lunch with a big group at the Canadian Brewhouse in Cochrane, Alberta. You walk in, and the bench in the waiting area has a back made of hockey sticks.

Not mounted like trophies. Stacked — dozens of them laid horizontally under a wood cap rail, shafts out, so the whole seat back is brand names at eye level. Sher-Wood. CCM. Titan. Reebok. Bigshot. Model numbers that meant something to whoever bought them: 5030, T20, 7000, TPM 1010, 10K. Words that were once features — Heat, Ultimate, Top Prospect, Street.

It reads as decor. Look at it a second longer and it reads as a list.

The list

The thing worth writing about is that a wall of retired equipment is also a record of an industry consolidating. These sticks are wood. Almost nobody plays with wood now. The brands printed on them went through the same twenty years that the material did, and several of the names on that wall no longer mean what they say — bought, retired, or licensed onto something else.

Titan is the clearest case. Gretzky won in Edmonton with a Titan, the 2020 model. Titan belonged to a Montreal company that renamed itself The Hockey Company in 1999, and it sat in a portfolio with Canadien, Heaton, Jofa, Koho and CCM. Reebok bought the lot in 2004 for 329 million US dollars. Adidas bought Reebok the year after. Everything except CCM was phased out. A Titan on that wall is a name that was retired by a company that was itself bought twice.

Reebok is on the wall as well, a few sticks along, which is the part that makes me laugh. Reebok put its own name on hockey sticks after buying and shelving the brands it had paid for. Then Adidas sold CCM in 2017, for 110 million, to a Toronto private-equity firm. CCM changed hands again in 2024.

Sher-Wood is the Canadian one, out of Sherbrooke, Quebec. It sent composite stick production to China in 2011, which cost about forty jobs; the Sherbrooke site stayed on as head office and distribution with around a hundred and ten. The name belongs to Canadian Tire now, along with Hespeler and Victoriaville.

CCM is the survivor. Of the six names in that 2004 sale it is the one that still fronts a full line of sticks.

Then there is the material. Easton released the Synergy in 2001, the first one-piece composite that NHL players actually took to, and within a few years most of the league had switched. Every stick on that wall is from the losing side of that.

Nobody assembling the wall was making that point. They needed a back for a bench and had a supply of dead sticks. The meaning is accidental, which is the part I like.

The room it is in

Saturday, one in the afternoon, late May. On the big screen: PSG and Arsenal, 1–1. That is the Champions League final, in Budapest, and one in the afternoon in Alberta is nine at night in Hungary. It finished 1–1 and PSG won it on penalties after extra time, so what we were watching over lunch was a European club final going the distance.

On the screen beside it: hockey.

Two sports, two continents, one room, both being watched at once by different tables. That is not incidental to the format. The room is built for it — kegs cut down into light fixtures, bottles lit along the wall, screens angled so that no booth has a bad one, and a floor plan that swallows a group our size without anyone having to ask.

Our server ran the whole table without it ever feeling like work. Drinks kept coming, she checked in often, nobody waited. Feeding a large travelling group fast, while a game is on, is a specific job, and this is a building designed around it.

What we ate

Burgers, poutine, fish and chips, a Caesar salad. The fried pickles were delicious. Everyone enjoyed their meal.

I had the steak bites and a side salad with balsamic, to stay off the carbs. At a Canadian brewhouse. Where the menu is poutine and fried pickles and the fries come in a bowl the size of the salad plate.

There is a whole small piece in that and I am not sure it belongs in this one.