Dodson’s perseverance, skill to be on display for U.S. at Reeve Hockey Classic 

The pull didn’t make any sense. Travis Dodson had grown up in New Mexico, a state of few ice rinks and little hockey knowledge. And yet, as he watched the gold medal game between the United States and Russia in para ice hockey unfolding in front of him at the 2014 Paralympics, Dodson was mesmerized.

“I felt like I had finally seen a sport that was really calling to me,” Dodson said. “I was like, ‘man, I think that could be my sport. I think I could be pretty good at it.’ It just kind of seems like it fits.”

He had come to Sochi as a member of the cross-country skiing team.

He would leave knowing that wasn’t his future.

It was seven years after a grenade attack on Valentine’s Day in 2007 had cost Dodson both of his legs, seven years after his world was upended and his friend, Lance Cpl. Daniel T. Morris, 19, was killed, taking too much shrapnel to the chest, years after his first try at a sled had gone awry and he settled on cross-country.

This time, as he watched, Dodson could feel the allure of the sport, its physicality and team dynamic, and he knew that it would be a match. He was 28 years old, though, had never watched the sport, barely knew the rules of hockey, let alone what he would need to do to succeed in time to make the 2018 Paralympics.

Icing was confusing. He needed to understand off-sides.

But he worked at it, learned the ins and outs, became a fast and fierce player to rival anyone who’d grown up in the sport. It has now been seven years since Dodson made his first Paralympic team, winning two gold medals in the interim, as the U.S. squad barrels toward the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics.

“He just seems like such a natural hockey player in so many ways,” former coach Derek Daniels said. “It’s very unique to find an athlete who doesn’t have a background in a certain sport, who then acquires an injury, and is very successful at the adaptive sport, to the Paralympic level.”

Before the Olympics, though, Dodson will help lead the U.S. team at the first Reeve Hockey Classic on Feb. 19 in Boston. The event, which will take place the night before the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game, will see the U.S and Canada’s national sled hockey teams compete in a game put on by the NHL in cooperation with USA Hockey and Hockey Canada at Kasabuski Rink in Saugus, Massachusetts. The game will financially support the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s ‘Quality of Life Grant Program’ with the Reeve family participating in the ceremonial puck drop.

Each team will hold a practice open the public on Feb. 18, but capacity is limited.

Dodson will be with his teammates, showing his game to new and old audiences, all while the eyes of the hockey world are on Boston during the 4 Nations Face-Off, being held in Montreal and Boston from Feb. 12-20.

He will share what was apparent to him from the first time he laid eyes on sled hockey, back in Sochi. That this was the sport for him. That it was right.

“It’s been great,” Dodson said. “Our team has some of the best chemistry of any team, any international team, we just get along so well. No one really cares who scores. We’re all in it together. It’s been everything I had hoped it would be, and more.”

* * * *

Dodson doesn’t think the grenade could have landed in his lap, as reports at the time said happened. It seems impossible, that he could have made it out without the damage overwhelming his body.

But it couldn’t have been far, either, the weapon passing through the burglar bars on the second-story window of the temporary combat outpost where they were on Feb. 14, 2007.

“I don’t remember seeing the grenade,” he said. “I just feel like it would have done so much more damage to other parts of my body if that would have happened. But I think there’s a good chance that I saw it and maybe tried to kind of get away from it. I think the blast might have taken away that little bit of short-term memory.

“But there’s no way it went off in my lap. There’s no way I would have survived that.”

Dodson didn’t come from a military family, but the decision felt right. School wasn’t for him and, though he felt something of a call to service for the country, he wanted an adventure, an experience, a chance to travel. He joined the Marines.

“It just seemed like a such a no-brainer answer to me, to join,” Dodson said.

It was 2005. He was 19.

Dodson became a machine-gunner, stationed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. Almost immediately, his unit, Company G, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment got the orders: They would be headed to Iraq in seven months for a seven-month tour.

The grenade landed six months in.

“We were occupying a house and we got contact, the house started getting shot,” Dodson said. “They ended up throwing a grenade into one of the windows. It blew off both my legs and killed one of my friends.”

It was 5:15 p.m., as evening fell, according to a “Stars and Stripes” story written at the time by a reporter embedded with the unit. Six people were in the second-story room, with Dodson on the floor, cleaning his rifle, and Morris near the window.

Dodson remembers being on the ground, that his head hurt.

“I got flipped over and then I had my hands, I was checking, so I was picking up pieces of my leg and stuff,” Dodson said. “Then people were on me right away, trying to work on me. I remember talking to them. I was actually pretty coherent during the whole thing.”

They wrapped a tourniquet up around his hip to attempt to stop the bleeding from the femoral artery, to keep him from bleeding out.

They were talking to him, trying to keep him conscious. He made it to the helicopter, where he asked for morphine. The scene goes black, after that.

When they arrived at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq, a call went out for O-positive blood.

They had run out.

Here, Dodson pauses in his story. His voice turns thick.

“People stopped doing whatever they were doing,” he said. “They’re at the mess hall or they were working out. And they put out a call and people went running, you know, to donate blood.”

The words stop, again.

“So when you hear about stuff like that, it’s just … yeah,” he said. “They didn’t even know me. They just knew that someone was injured and they had to go do it.”

He later learned, he said, so much blood was taken from those offering that some passed out. He needed, it was reported, more than 30 units of blood, nearly three times the volume of blood in an adult’s body.

Dodson was transported to National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where there were surgeries, work to stabilize him and get him ready to head off, again, for the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio.

The Center, for newly injured amputees, helped with prosthetics and rehabilitation. Dodson would be there for two years, as he learned to live with his new reality.

“A lot of people when you get freshly injured like that, you kind of feel like you want to go into a hole and just not see the world anymore,” Dodson said. “They did a good job of forcing you to go out in public. You couldn’t just stay in your room all day. You had to get out and socialize and go try stuff.”

It was where he was introduced to adaptive sports. It was something to strive for every day, something to work toward.

“Adaptive sports gave me a new passion,” Dodson said. “Immediately I could go and work hard at doing whatever, whether it was wheelchair racing or cross-country. You get to go burn off a bunch of energy and just get a good sweat. It was just good for my mental health. I obviously attribute a lot of where I am now to disabled sports.”

* * * *

Dodson had been in a sled once before, before he fell in love with the sport.

“I couldn’t even stay in the sled and I kind of just wrote it off,” Dodson said. “I was like, ‘oh, that’s not a very fun sport. That sport kind of sucks.’”

But seeing that gold-medal game changed his mind. So when Dodson returned from Sochi, he made contact with a local club, the Chicago Blackhawks Sled Hockey Team, getting in touch with them in December, 2014. The team had a generic sled that worked, as a start. Though, because Dodson was a double amputee, it wasn’t an optimal setup.

“They’re not built for double amputees,” said Daniels, who works for the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and coaches the Blackhawks Sled Hockey team. “They’re just a general program sleds so we had a great equipment manager whose son is also a Paralympian and he kind of built this sled that Travis could get started in. Literally because he didn’t have legs out from and the sleds are so long, we added extra weight to his sled at first, just to get him balanced.”

He started training immediately. Cross-country, at which he said he was “very mediocre,” fell away just as quickly. But it helped, still. The movements and the endurance between sit skiing and skating were similar, used the same strength, the same power.

He may not have known how to play hockey, but he was fast. He could keep up.

“He took to it right away,” Daniels said. “Just because he had the speed would not have made him a Paralympian. He had to put in that effort to learn the game.”

The biggest problem was that he was living near the University of Chicago, in Champaign, Illinois. The team practiced twice a week, Sundays and Wednesdays, from 9 to 11 p.m., in Chicago. The drive was 2-plus hours.

“I told him, we practice twice a week, that’s not going to get you to the Paralympics,” Daniels said. “That’s just going to be a good starter. Next thing I know he’s telling me how he’s basically skating six, seven days a week.”

Part of what Dodson had to learn was how to use his nondominant hand, a fact of life for sled hockey players, who have a stick in each hand and need to use both. Daniels, for instance, often forces players to use their left hands in drills.

So, one day, Dodson asked Daniels to tape his right hand to his stick.

“So literally we taped his hand to the very top of his stick so he could skate, but he couldn’t drop his stick to play the puck,” Daniels said. “He would do that, regularly, just to get more used to using his left hand. Within a year and a half, two years, you’re like this kid’s got a dangerous left-handed shot now. Which, being able to shoot from either side forehand, left or right and just rip that puck, it really gives you the wingspan of like six-feet plus.

“He just became so dangerous on the move with that.”

Still, there was a problem. The 2018 Pyeongchang Paralympics were four years from when he first tried the sport, four years to learn the rules and develop the strength and forge himself as a hockey player from, essentially, zero.

The time was ticking down, the Paralympic team about to be named. Dodson was still on the development team, not yet on the national team, as the date approached.

“They pulled me up to be on that 17-man roster,” he said. “It was a feeling of accomplishment like I really hadn’t had before. All that I had put into sled hockey. My chips were all in. I had given up completely on cross-country. I wasn’t halfway in one sport, halfway in another. I was fully committed.

“And for it to pay off and me to make that 2018 team was just -- it was just something really special for me.”

This was a sport in which he once again had a team, as he had back in the military, a group of people with whom he could win or lose, as opposed to just a set of people with whom he trained. It was one of his favorite parts.

* * * *

The U.S. team has won four straight gold medals at the Paralympics, in 2010 in Vancouver, in Sochi, in Pyeonchang, in 2022 in Beijing. They are one year away from trying to make it five, in 2026 in Milano Cortina.

Dodson is 39.

He is committed to being there in Milano Cortina, in contesting his fourth Paralympic games, his third for the sled hockey team, assuming he is selected. He is committed to earning his third gold medal, the best measurement possible of how right he was when he stared at that final in 2014 and said to himself, That’s it. That’s for me.

“Winning in 2018 will always be pretty special to me,” Dodson said. “One, like how much I had put in in such a short amount of time just to even try to make the team, and then to get selected like at the last moment, it just meant a lot.”

They had come from behind in that game, with 37.8 seconds remaining in regulation, tied the score. They had won in overtime, over Canada.

That, too, made it special.

“When we were celebrating the gold medal on the ice, just remembering that really nine years ago I almost died in Iraq and now I’m on a sheet of ice in Pyeongchang, South Korea, with a gold medal. It was just a contrast of what could have been. Such a stark contrast of what a couple moments in Iraq -- from almost dying to there, where I was.

“It’s crazy to think about.”

He is not ready to let it go yet, not after all that sled hockey has done for him, not after all that he has gained.

There is a fourth straight gold medal for the U.S. to win, a run of dominance that Dodson said the team does not plan to end in 2026.

It has been 18 years since that day in Haqlaniyah, Iraq, since his world was upended and his life nearly lost. The evidence is with him every day. But it no longer weighs on Dodson in the same way it once did.

“Now, I feel so much more comfortable with myself, my life, that the way I am now just kind of feels normal, too,” he said. “So I don’t really look back on it really as anything that bad anymore, even though it was obviously a terrible thing that happened. I look now at my life and what I’ve done and what I get to do and I’m happy with it.”