The best thing that could happen to the ice crew at Wrigley is to have no one talking about the ice at Wrigley.
The thing about being Dan Craig is that success in his job is bound to make him relatively well-known. If the ice is good at Wrigley Field this Thursday, he’ll get his props, and we’ll all move on.
If it all goes wrong though, Craig will be legendary.
You can just hear the guys standing around a bar, on New Year’s Day 2027, while Winnipeg is playing Houston on a rink built at The Forks in the Manitoba capital. One guy says: "Remember when they played at Wrigley Field that time? And they had to stop the game midway through because the ice was so bad?"
Guy No. 2: "Oh yeah. Remember that ice maker the NHL used? They called him their ‘ice guru?’"
Guy No. 1: "Yah. Dan something… Dan Craig, I think. Yeah, Dan Craig. Wonder whatever happened to him?"
The Winter Classic has become more than just a New Year’s Day foray for commissioner Gary Bettman’s National Hockey League. In a sport where the All-Star game has never really worked, and with a post-season in which interest becomes regionalized as the playoffs chug from May into June, this outdoor game has become a crucial entry point into mainstream America.
A game skeptics originally thought would get buried in the New Year’s Day television ratings by American college bowl games has thus far found a niche. The sight of Sidney Crosby pushing a puck through the snow in Buffalo last year returned ratings that were 250 per cent better for NBC than their regular hockey numbers.
So, the Winter Classic has become for Bettman something we don’t often associate with the commissioner: A major success story for the NHL in America.
That is, as long as Craig gets his ice right.
"So far here (in Chicago), we’ve had it from minus-6 degrees Fahrenheit, to 58 degrees, to pouring rain," Craig said. "And we had six inches of snow on the ice eight days before that. Mother Nature has tested us as good as she can test us. The team is still standing, and ready to go."
You would think that rain on game day would be Craig’s worst fear, but he says the new system will freeze the water almost on contact -– as long as the rain isn’t torrential.
He did the ice at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium back in 2003, a game that began at minus-23 C and quickly lost two or three degrees as the sun set behind the stands. Where as in Chicago, Craig has a threshold in his mind –- believed to be about six or seven Celsius -- above which the ice might not remain playable, in Edmonton there was no concern over melting.
"There was a cut-off line, and we ended up below it," he said. "Everyone was OK with that so we went ahead (and played the game)."
Legend has it that Montreal’s Saku Koivu did not want to play back in ‘03. It was too cold, and the ice was too chippy. But the story goes that with nearly 60,000 folks in the stands and television ready to roll, Habs GM Bob Ganey told Koivu to lace ‘em up and play.
In Buffalo, a tricky obstacle was the crown on the football field at Ralph Wilson Stadium to facilitate run-off. That’s not exactly what an ice-maker is looking for.
"The equipment is different here," said Craig, who will benefit from the league’s investment in state of the art ice making equipment. The rink will be built atop pipes lying beneath aluminum sheeting. The aluminum rink floor reacts more quicker to pipes underneath than the cement found in most NHL buildings, and should provide a more even temperature to avoid the troublesome patches of bad ice that caused delays last year in Buffalo.
What it all means is, technology has come far enough now that it’s getting harder and harder for disaster to strike, the way it nearly did during the Nagano Olympics. There, Mark Messier’s skate chipped a big piece of ice near the boards, the cut through a line that was part of the freezing grid.
"We had a nice glycol spray up on top of the glass," Craig said.
For the last three and a half minutes of the game the ice plant was useless. Had it happened in the first period, it would have been a disaster.
Shorty Jenkins, the most famous ice maker in curling, wrote a book on making ice.
He calls it: "Shorty’s 36 Years of Screw-Ups."
That is why Craig would rather remain anonymous.
