Here's how the greatest hockey player that ever played the game developed his shot....
In fact, that house had something to do with the way I learned to play hockey. I was obsessed with the game, just like the kids around me, and I was always looking for ways to get better at it. Firing pucks at your garage door is probably something that young hockey players have always done. But we didn’t have a driveway, so I’d open the door and shoot right through. The granite rock face that channelled the spring runoff into our kitchen provided the back wall of the garage — the rock had been left exposed because nobody ever saw a need to build a wall to hide it. Young hockey players tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake as they perfect their marksmanship, but I can safely say that, despite firing thousands of pucks, I never put a dent in that granite.
I would use weighted pucks that I created by coring out the rubber and adding melted lead.
The heavier pucks were far more difficult to shoot. The idea was that if I could handle heavy pucks, the lighter ones would seem easy in comparison once I got on the ice. I had managed to scrounge up a couple of pieces of plywood, and would lean one of them up against the rock cut, and that would be my net. The other one I’d lay on the floor in the doorway of the garage so I had a smooth surface to shoot from.
It was almost as good as shooting off a sheet of ice, and the plywood allowed me to really let fly with those weighted disks. The garage had a light, so even with dusk approaching I could still practice. Trust me, I shot a lot of pucks at that makeshift plywood net during those years when I was a youngster.