The goalie is Dennis Kemp

Artist Ken Danby, as you may have heard, died this past week of an apparent heart attack while canoeing in Algonquin Park. As soon as I learned of his death, I thought of his son, Sean.
The Danbys, at the time, lived just outside of Guelph, Ont., where I grew up, on a rural property near Rockwood. Sean and I — I think he's a year, maybe two, younger than me — went to the same high school in Guelph, John F. Ross CVI. He was, if I remember, an enthusiastic musician and a pretty good football player. It's been years since I've seen him but I hope he finds some strength knowing that the thoughts of long-ago friends are with him.

My parents — and me, too — liked Sean's dad's work a lot and they've purchased some of his prints over the years.
One of the reasons that I like Danby's art is simple enough: He saw and painted the same landscapes in Puslinch Township and Eramosa Township, near the tiny hamlets of Rockwood, Eden Mills, Arkell, and Hillsburgh that I loved exploring as a teenager who hiked and biked from our home on Guelph's eastern edge south towards Milton and east towards Georgetown. Whatever it was I felt as I biked over those rolling hills or came upon as I hiked the Arkell Trail, he seemed to capture it in his work.
One of the prints my parents bought was his classic At The Crease (left). They gave it to me a few years ago and it now hangs in my basement.
Like those paintings set in Eramosa Township, I, like millions of Canadians I suppose, felt a deep personal connection with At The Crease because, again, like millions of others, I grew up playing hockey and dreaming of an NHL career and that painting smelled of the rink, a smell I might add — a cold odd mixture of Zamboni diesel fumes, tobacco smoke, popcorn and sweat — that was a good and comforting smell. Now, as it turns out, I've learned there's another reason I feel connected to that particular work: It's a painting of a goalie I used to watch play and he's guarding a net whose hemp I've actually bulged, to paraphrase some of the broadcaster poets who used to work Hockey Night in Canada.
Ottawa Citizen writer Randy Boswell writes today that, according to Wayne Gretzky, the model for that painting is Dennis Kemp, who plied his trade for, among others, the Guelph Biltmore Mad Hatters, the junior B team that my dad used to take me to watch on Friday nights every now and again at the old Guelph Memorial Gardens. Kemp also played hockey for Wayne's dad in Brantford, near Guelph.
In Guelph, I remember watching future NHLers like Doug Riseborough, John Van Boxmeer, Brian McLellan, and George McPhee play for the Junior B Mad Hatters and others in Guelph. The Biltmore Mad Hatters, named that way for their sponsor, hat manufacturer Biltmore, would become the Guelph CMCs and then later the Holody Platers. A local hockey fan named Joe Holody owned an electro-plating business in Guelph and, thus, the “Platers”, whose franchise subsequently moved to Owen Sound, was born.
The jersey colours for the Biltmores, the CMCs or the Platers, as I remember them, were kind of reminiscent of the Chicago Black Hawks at the time — mostly black and white with some red accents. I would see, them, of course, at the Gardens in their home whites and, it is that jersey, if you look at At The Crease closely, that the goalie is was wearing for Danby's painting.
Now, though I wished hard for it, I never played in front of a sell-out crowd at Guelph Memorial Gardens, but the rep teams I played for — double-A and triple-A — played at the Gardens from time to time, skating and shooting through the same crease Danby immortalized in 1972. In fact, now that I know I'm looking at one of the creases at the Gardens, I'll bet I can tell which end Kemp was painted in. If you look over the goalie's glove hand, behind the glass, you'll see what is actually a greyish-brown divider moving diagonally up towards the top of the painting. That divider part of the “Zamboni tunnel” at the Garden's west end and would have been the end of the rink that the home team Biltmore's would have defended in the first and third periods. There were no such dividers at the other end, just rows of brightly painted yellow seats behind that net.