Tony once recalled the pair rushing home from school, getting to the rink, playing until suppertime, eating at the kitchen table still wearing skates, newspapers placed by their mother, Frances, beneath their blades, then hustling back to the game under the night sky.
Phil would dress in full equipment except for his skates, Tony’s goalie equipment loaded onto a toboggan for the walk to the park.
“Dad didn’t drive us, but he’d come and watch us play, standing in the snowbank,” Phil said. “It seemed to us that if we won, he’d drive us home. If we lost, we had to walk. That’s all the motivation we needed to win.”
In goal, Tony wore a baseball catcher’s mask to protect his eyeglasses, lit up one game when the lenses fogged up so badly that he couldn’t see a puck.
“We got beat, and on the walk home I remember cursing Tony out — ‘You’re blind, what’s with you?’ — and calling him names,” Phil said. “I felt so bad about that, not at the time, I’ve got to admit that, but months later when I found out about his fogged glasses.”
