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Chris Driedger was 16 minutes away from winning the 2022 men’s World Championships for Team Canada when disaster struck.
A post-to-post push led to the complete tear of his ACL, ending his night and putting his professional hockey career in jeopardy.
He watched Finland complete its comeback from the sidelines, feeling helpless, haunted by the “click” sound his knee had made when he pushed into his right post.
Driedger was given a nine-month recovery timeline. Back at home, it was six months before doctors let him skate. Instead of letting the monotony of daily rehab defeat him, he discovered a new passion and spent the next three years following it through.
This is the story of how a Winnipeg-born goaltender – now part of the Jets organization, just down the road from where he grew up – found himself producing a documentary film about a California-based roller hockey league with one of the most unique backstories in hockey history. It’s called “Pro Beach Hockey: Sun, Surf and Slapshots” and Driedger says producing it helped change his mindset at one of the darkest times in his career.
It was a lifesaver having something else going on to take his mind off the fact that he wasn’t able to play hockey – which is, you know, my entire life.
By the late 1990s, Wayne Gretzky had come and gone from Los Angeles but his legacy remained. Interest in hockey was at an all-time high and businesspeople went looking for a way to capitalize. One of those people was David B. McLane, the wrestling promoter who started GLOW: The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.
McLane wanted to take a run at roller hockey, taking his experience in the entertainment industry to brand new terrain, so he created a league called Pro Beach Hockey. Games were played on outdoor rinks with ramps behind the net, angled glass to keep the ball (not puck) in the play, and a two-point line that worked similarly to the three-point line in basketball.
The league was populated with ex-roller-hockey stars, including a few NHL players, running for two months for three straight summers – turning roller hockey into an outsized spectacle. It was made for TV, with all three seasons airing on ESPN2, but developed a cult audience at Huntington Beach where it was filmed.
Driedger was four years old when the league launched. He didn’t find out about it until partway through his first season with the Seattle Kraken, where he was reunited with longtime teammate and friend, Max McCormick.
Over brunch, McCormick told Driedger about his friend Jake Cimperman and the idea for a “roller hockey documentary.” McCormick was skeptical at first, Driedger says, but the moment McCormick showed him the league’s teaser video, Driedger was hooked.
It was this weird, interesting mix of the WWE and the NHL that I’d never seen before. I just watched it and instantly thought, “If I saw this teaser, I would want to watch the documentary.”
Driedger nudged McCormick to set up a call with Cimperman. That call and the ones that followed went well; eventually Driedger and McCormick helped send Cimperman to Los Angeles to start interviewing people for the film. The three of them held regular meetings to sort out the direction of the documentary, plan marketing, and strategize its release, creating a production company called Sin Bin Studios.
The biggest driving force for his involvement was his own curiosity.
The league was just so wild and fast-paced and unique and aired on ESPN. That brought this level of intrigue and I wanted to know more. There were ramps behind the net and I wanted to know who thought of that. How did that play out in games? Did the players go up these ramps? I’m thinking in my head: Imagine there’s ramps on the ice in hockey. That would be absurd. So there were a lot of questions I wanted answers to.
And the characters were really good. Mike Butters from Winnipeg was playing at 6-foot-3, 255 pounds or something like that and he was a fighter… All of it was before my time but it just seemed wild, like I wanted to know way more about it just from the teaser.
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