The OHL Arena Guide - Windsor Arena, Windsor Spitfires

First Visit: October 31, 2002
CHL Arena: 6
OHL Arena: 6

Old Time Hockey. The phrase itself means different things to different people. It's a t-shirt slogan and a rallying cry. To the neanderthals, it conjures visions of the mythic days when men were men and put foil on their knuckles before trying to kill each other on the ice. To others, it's a helmetless, black-and-white Orr or Howe skating smoothly down the ice before burying one past the goalie. To me, the phrase is best applied to a place where you really feel the crushing weight of history bearing down on you, and nowhere in the OHL was this more apparent than Windsor Arena. There really was nowhere else like it in hockey.

The Windsor Arena was the oldest arena in the CHL when it closed, having been built in 1924. Nothing can exist for eighty years without acquiring a bit of character, and Windsor Arena was no exception. Its nickname is "the Barn" and when you first see the rink you realise how very appropriate that name is - the place looks just like an old barn down on the farm. The building has painted yellow walls and a huge brown roof, and stands out in the middle of an open area on the fringe of downtown. The rink is located beside a city park but the main entrance is close to a city street, and entering the Arena almost feels like walking into a store. The main entrance is tiny, the ticket booth is almost an afterthought, and you enter into the concourse almost immediately.

The concourse is the smallest you've ever seen. You're right under the seats but close to the ice, and consequently the ceiling is only a foot taller than a normal adult male. All of the concessions, washrooms, and other things of the sort are located on the outside of the concourse. (As are the dressing rooms - both teams had to walk across the concourse six times over the course of a game, often to a dressing-down from fans.) Once you find your section, you step out through a tunnel so narrow it could be called a "doorway" and you're in the seating area. The dark grey paint and dingy lighting give the feeling of being in some sort of cave, and only serves to intensify the magnificent whiteness of the ice upon first glimpse. It was one of the OHL's truly remarkable sights.

The building has a high, vaulted ceiling and steeply raked seats, and at the back of every section they dispense with seats altogether and have only wooden benches. Many of the red seats are originals from 1924, but they're surprisingly comfortable. Windsor Arena still had obstructed-view seats - there are support columns at the back of every section. If you're in one of the last few rows you could wind up looking through a pillar all game long. Windsor's seats are also about as cramped as you can get while still being reasonably comfortable. However, some seats in Windsor are quite simply the best in hockey. The seats start at the top of the glass, like in Val-d'Or, and go up on an incredibly steep angle from there. From a fifth or sixth row seat, you're well above the top of the glass and close enough to hear every word being said on the ice.

Windsor also has what must be considered the best old-school seats in hockey in sections 7 and 8 behind the visitor's net. The Arena used to have a smaller ice surface, and so when they expanded it to its present 195' length many years ago, they took out several rows of seats from those sections. As a result, there are only three rows of seats in sections 7/8, and they start right at the very top of the glass and hang over the ice. It's an angle for watching hockey that's not possible to get anywhere else, essentially sitting on top of the glass, and it's amazing.

The scoreclock was old and inadequate - it doesn't even have room to put up a player's number beside the penalty time. The announcer is fine, blending into the atmosphere without being annoying. Washrooms are poor - dark, dingy and sparse. The press box is at the back of one section and is almost an afterthought - you could easily walk right in if there wasn't any security. The "team store" is in actuality a kiosk dug out of the side of the building and has a limited selection of gear. Concessions are standard-issue arena fare. The ice surface is small and the Spits always had a team tailored to the small surface and claustrophobic atmosphere.

Windsor Arena changed a lot in the last few years is hosted the OHL. HD video boards were installed in two corners of the rink in the last few years the rink was open, but for some reason, they didn't show the play while it was on. The sound system - once one of the league's worst - was upgraded and met at least a minimum standard for the last few years of the Barn's life. There were also a lot fewer wooden benches (although there are still a few) as the city bought the old plastic seats from the London Ice House when that arena closed. My last visits also saw a much cleaner and more up-to-date arena than in years previous. There were renovations which directly improved the game - the players' benches, for example, used to be located in the attacking zones, which made clearing the puck along the glass impossible, plus it made changing lines in the second period incredibly difficult. The renovation moved the benches where they belong, and also enclosed them to protect the players from fans. It used to be that fans could hurl abuse and objects at visitors; now, the glass prevents that.

Windsor Arena also had more than its share of crazies who did a great deal to add to the general atmosphere. Windsor Arena rocked like new buildings never will, and the crowd noise inside was jaw-dropping. Spitfire fans were easily the second-loudest I've yet encountered on my travels after those in Erie. London fans in the old Gardens/Ice House were very close, as are Ranger fans, but I'd still give the title to the blue-collar autoworkers who packed 'em in every Thursday night in Windsor. The weak-willed visitor would probably have found Windsor crowds intimidating. In the playoffs, most visitors would have found them intimidating.

A few illustrations of Windsor crowds seem to be in order. My first game at the Barn was on Halloween 2002 as I drove down with a buddy to see the Knights-Spitfires game. As we were walking across a park from where we parked our car, we noticed the guy in front of us wearing a Rick Nash Knights sweater. "Good," we thought, "more Knights fans." Wrong. The guy was actually dressed up for Halloween as a "typical retarded Knights fan" and spent the game applauding at the wrong time and shouting abuse!

Another example was the longstanding feud between former Knights trainer Don "Branks" Brankley and the Windsor fans. Whenever a Knight went down and Branks stepped on to the ice, the Spits fans all chanted "Waterboy" at him. Branks, for his part, was famous for walking excruciatingly slowly to get back to the bench, and has been known to flip Spits fans the bird when the referee wasn't watching. Back in the 80's, when Windsor city council first began discussing a new arena, Branks got a shirt made reading "Save Windsor Arena" and wore it all year to Windsor games. He also once wore a shirt during the game reading "I Hate Windsor".

That said, facilities were either nonexistent or run-down and the building needed replacing. The Arena is history now, at least in an OHL context. It still stands, but it hasn't hosted hockey or been open to the public for more than a decade. It was a place where there weren't any suits inside the cramped hallways, and the hot, sweaty and loud arena did its best to put off the fickle. But for real hockey fans, there weren't many better places to watch a game; a place where you could sit hovering over the ice with a Coke and hot dog in hand and watch a game uninterrupted by sideshows, promotions or distractions. The non-corporate atmosphere has disappeared at the new WFCU Centre, so for those of us who saw pure Old Time Hockey before it was too late, we can say that we're thankful that we got to experience it.