Esposito brothers began road to Hockey Hall of Fame playing in great outdoors

The NHL and conservation non-profit Ducks Unlimited Canada are teaming up to tell stories of current and former NHL players and how access to community ponds and the outdoors helped shape their love for the sport. Today, in the first entry of this series, a look at how Phil and Tony Esposito fell in love with the game in the great outdoors:

It was indoors where Phil Esposito became one of the greatest players in hockey history. But the Boston Bruins legend began his journey into the record books on rinks without roofs, a fact he’s never forgotten.

Esposito starred in NHL arenas across North America and another in Moscow, the heart and soul of Team Canada of the historic 1972 Summit Series against a select team of Soviets.

But speak to him about the roots of his career and he’ll take you outdoors, to his boyhood’s backyard rink in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to another frozen sheet near his elementary school, to one more about a half-mile from his home in a community park that in 1981 was renamed in his honor.

You can almost see the vapor of his breath when Esposito speaks nostalgically of the cold, crisp air of the Soo, as his hometown is commonly called. It was under a sprawling sky sprinkled with stars and speckled with snow that he fell in love with the game that still burns brightly in his heart.

Phil Esposito with his three NHL teams: from left: Chicago Black Hawks, Boston Bruins and New York Rangers.

The 82-year-old sharp-shooting center lights up in conversation about how profoundly lung-chilling outdoor hockey touched him and his late brother, Tony, a fellow Hall of Famer who in many ways defined goaltending for the Chicago Black Hawks during the 1970s.

“It was fun. So much fun,” Esposito said from his home in Tampa, working today as a radio analyst for Tampa Bay Lightning broadcasts.

“There wasn’t a time or a day during the wintertime that I can remember, unless we had a snowstorm or rain, that Tony and I weren’t outdoors involved in hockey in some way.”

The brilliant brothers were inducted into the Hall of Fame four years apart, Phil in 1984, Tony following him.

Tony Esposito (left) is congratulated by his brother, Phil, after the goalie was awarded the 1970 Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie; and in Toronto during Game 2 of the historic 1972 Summit Series.

Phil was the gifted sniper of the Bruins, a two-time Stanley Cup champion whose career began with the Black Hawks in 1963-64, took him to Boston in 1967-68, and finally to the New York Rangers for six seasons beginning in 1975-76. Five times he won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading point-scorer, twice he won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the League’s most valuable player.

His 1,590 points in 1,282 regular-season games played ranks 11th all-time; his 717 goals rank seventh.

Tony debuted with the Montreal Canadiens in 1968-69, then moved on to Chicago the following year for 15 seasons; he won the Calder Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year in 1969-70 and three times won the Vezina Trophy as the League’s best goalie based on his goals-against average.

They would be teammates in bantam, though when Phil went off to Sarnia, Ontario to play Junior B, Tony quit the game for a year to play some football before returning to hockey with the newly formed Junior A Soo Greyhounds.

Tony Esposito, with his iconic mask, and his older brother, Phil, with a copy of the 1971 book “The Brothers Esposito,” in Tampa in 2017.

In time, they were in the NHL. Phil arrived five years before his brother, who had gone to study business at Michigan Tech and play goal for the Huskies, a three-time first-team All-America selection.

But long before that, they were inseparable outdoors in the Soo.

Phil and Tony, 14 months his junior, were on the ice at age 4 and 3, slipping and sliding around a rink made by their father, Patrick. Two apple trees in the yard, about five feet apart, formed goal posts.

“Tony was a way better skater than I was,” Phil recalled. “And he was walking before this chubby kid was, too.”

Together, they would develop leg strength at their grandparents’ house, across the alley from the family home.

Phil and Tony Esposito as co-instructors in a 1970s hockey school.

“Our grandfather used to put a dollar bill on the clothesline and Tony and I would jump up to try to reach it,” Esposito said, laughing. “We couldn’t do it, but the older we got and the closer we got to it, he’d just move the dollar out a little farther on the line. He was a beauty.”

He chuckles when told that couldn’t happen today, $1 banknotes no longer produced in Canada.

“Not only that,” he said, “you don’t have clotheslines, either.”

It wasn’t long before the brothers were skating on a rink a block or so from their King Edward School, with other neighborhood kids helping to install the rink boards in the late fall. When they weren’t there, they were putting in long hours at nearby Central Park, which featured a small changing cabin and warming stove.

The father of a friend operated a service station in the Soo, happily driving his snowplow-equipped truck to each rink to clear the ice for the endless games.

Phil and Tony Esposito’s parents, Frances and Patrick, with two photos of their sons: Tony (left) and Phil circa 1946 and 1950 in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Phil’s first skates were primitive double-runners, hand-me-downs fastened to his shoes or boots with a leather strap. Real hockey skates would follow, his father buying him a pair at a bargain store.

They were at least a couple of sizes too large; his feet were almost lost in them, two or three pairs of heavy wool socks needed to fill them out.

“Thank God my ankles were strong,” Esposito said. “There was absolutely no support in those skates.”

If Phil was destined to become one of hockey’s most prolific goal-scorers, Tony found his way into the net more by circumstance. The brothers and a couple of their friends would practice shooting on an outdoor rink, one of them rotating to play goal. Tony’s shooting prowess, or lack thereof, often made him the goalie.

It was a quarter-mile from the family home to Central Park’s rink, and some of Phil’s fondest boyhood memories are of hiking in the bitter cold with his brother to pickup games.

Phil Esposito watches the action from the Boston Bruins bench during the 1967-68 season.

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.”

Phil Esposito eludes the check of Toronto’s Billy MacMillan behind the net of goalie Bruce Gamble during a 1970 game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

No hard feelings, of course, the brothers eventually playing against each other in the NHL, as teammates on Team Canada in the Summit Series, and Tony serving as general manager of the Lightning, brought in by his brother who co-founded the team.

Phil and Tony have each said it’s in part because of where they grew up that they found a path to NHL stardom. Sault Ste. Marie, on the eastern tip of Lake Superior, nestled between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, was a small steel town during their 1940s and ’50s adolescence, cold enough that Tony remembered it having outdoor ice for five months of the year and good asphalt the other seven for road hockey.

In time, NHL and international arenas would be their professional homes, but it was on roofless rinks that their careers would begin.

Tony was lost to pancreatic cancer in 2021 at age 78 and not a day goes by that his brother doesn’t think of their unbreakable bond.

On this day, Phil Esposito is picturing them together in the great outdoors, when hockey was frozen fingers and toes, the clank of pucks off goal posts, the thump of a slap shot off heavy wood boards, a deflection hissing into a snowbank, endless Soo games of their youth still being played in his memory and imagination.

Top photo: Phil Esposito in action with the Boston Bruins during a 1970s game.