A really lousy day, but then Ivan McLelland calls

The snow started early in the morning and was still pelting down like cold flapjacks by late afternoon. One of those days when you just want to hunker down, get the job done, and pick up a meat lovers’ pizza on the way home.

The jangle of the phone interrupts my concentration and I reluctantly pick up the call.

“Rothenburger,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.

“Mel? Ivan McLelland calling!”

Like a shot from a 50,000-volt Taser, the voice shocks my nerve endings into instant attention. I‘m momentarily paralyzed.

This is Ivan McLelland, the greatest goalie in the history of hockey, on the other end of the line. My boyhood hero; hell, every Canadian baby boomer’s boyhood hero.

“Hello?”

“Ivan, how you doing?” I manage to blurt.

Ivan McLelland, who backstopped the Penticton Vees to the 1955 World Ice Hockey Championships in Germany, blanking the Soviets 5-0 in the final game as he chalked up four shutouts and gave up only five goals in the tournament.

“Look at those boys mobbing Ivan McLelland!” screamed Foster Hewitt as the game — broadcast across the country — ended and the Vees swarmed their goalie in jubilation. “They’re just beating poor old Ivan to pieces!”

I was 11 years old. I’ll never forget it.

Understand, this wasn’t just a hockey game; it was the Free World against the “Commies,” considered at the time to be just plain evil. Worse than evil — they’d clobbered another Canadian team in the championships only a year earlier.

Ivan McLelland. The Warwicks — Grant, Dickie, and Billy, later mirrored as the brawling Hanson Brothers in those Slapshot movies.

Brother Grant was the player coach. He told the team if they lost to the Russians, they might as well book a flight to China, because there was no way they’d be allowed back into Canada.

“Since when were you ever a hockey fan?” you ask.

What you have to understand is that this was REAL hockey, played by men — admittedly, young men, in their 20s, some early 30s, on their way up to the Bigs or on their way down, but grownups. “Amateur” in terms of pay, but not in play.

This was the kind of hockey where shops all over the South Okanagan — in Penticton, in Oliver, in Osoyoos, in Peachland — were shuttered early on game night so everyone could catch an early dinner and begin the drive to the Penticton Memorial Arena, an uncomfortable wooden barn much like the one we still have in Kamloops.

The Okanagan Senior A Hockey League.  The Vees of old. There was never an empty seat. This was hockey. Stories about the team are like a bottomless cup of coffee.

And now, 57 years later, I meet Ivan McLelland on the phone. He’d been talking to our reporter Catherine Litt about a search for the history of a Penticton Vees hat, which turned out to be one that was worn by waitresses at the Warwicks’ café. Catherine let it be known to Ivan that I was a big Vees fan, a big Ivan fan.

So, in the spring, Ivan is going to drive up here and we’re going for a coffee, and he’s going to tell me about the book he’s writing about the Vees.

I’m going for coffee with the greatest goaltender in history.