Inside Sweden’s tiny hockey factory

By Stephen Brunt in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden
Photography by Kristian Holm

t’s still early autumn, but already the sun is dipping low in the mid-afternoon. By Christmas, it will be dark here not long after lunch. So—a northern town, a 600-km drive from Stockholm in the direction of the Arctic Circle, the kind of place many of us in Canada know or have known. The trees and rocks and rocks and trees, the sparkling lakes, the forests now speckled with hues of orange and yellow. On the horizon, steam belching from the stacks of the pulp mill, and occasionally a whiff of that distinct acrid odour. It could be Parry Sound or Corner Brook or a thousand Canadian places like them. Just take out all of the Tim Hortons, add a tiny, perfect pedestrian main street, make nearly everyone fit and stylish and attractive (it would appear the 70-year-old Swede still has something on us, lo these many years later…), and you have Ornskoldsvik.

Don’t bother trying to pronounce it. Even the Swedes shorten it to O-vik to avoid the tongue twists.

“It’s on the ocean and it’s beautiful,” Daniel Sedin says. “In the summer, it’s a special place. Winter is dark and cold, but that’s when we play hockey.”

Of course, hockey. There are half a dozen frosty local rinks where you can imagine parka-wearing parents clutching coffee and hot chocolate for warmth, and there is the photogenic Fjallraven Center, perched on the edge of the harbour that leads out to the Gulf of Bothnia. It looks like a three-quarter-sized version of a NHL building, an impression confirmed once inside.

Saturday is hockey night in O-vik—though with the game starting at four, the rhythm of the day seems a little bit off. Inside, a less-than-capacity crowd has gathered to watch the local heroes, Modo, in an early-season Swedish Hockey League match against Vaxjo, and have already seen the home side fall behind in the first period. A lot of the accoutrements are familiar: the music, the projections on the ice during the pre-game buildup, the advertising on the boards. There are differences, though: the international ice surface, and the soccer-style cheering section at one end of the building, where a pocket of superfans stands on “terraces,” singing and chanting and waving flags from start to finish. (They used to put the visiting team’s ultras right next to them, until fighting became an issue. Now the interlopers are confined to a far upper corner of the rink, though tonight the travelling crew from Vaxjo seems to consist of three or four young women with a flag.) Modo has stumbled through the first part of the SHL season with a 3-4 record, and the early returns tonight suggest they’re overmatched.

This is what the game looks like in the holy city of Swedish hockey. This is what it looks like in the place that has produced so many players per capita that a Swedish economist once suggested it ought to have a population of 12 million instead of the 28,991 who live in O-vik. This is the home of Anders Hedberg, Peter Forsberg, Markus Naslund, the Sedin twins, Victor Hedman and 19 other past and present NHLers who have graduated from its system on their way to North America. “It’s a small town, a blue-collar town,” Forsberg says. “The people work in factories and they love hockey. We have a beautiful rink. It’s really cold, and all the athletic talent goes to play hockey—not like the United States, where it’s football, basketball, baseball or hockey. Everyone in O-vik plays hockey. When I grew up, we had all those rinks but we also had outdoor rinks. If you wanted to become a great player you could skate as much as you wanted. Fifteen people on the ice every night, throwing sticks to pick teams. It was outstanding.”

And it sounds awfully familiar. Just whose myth is this, anyway?

o, you have come to find the secret?” The grinning I-know-better speaker in the Fjallraven Center press box is Hasse Andersson, a sportswriting legend hereabouts, author of a Peter Forsberg biography, Magic Boy. And, over the course of several days, on learning that a television crew from the iconic Hockey Night in Canada (yes, iconic even here) is in town to do a story on the one thing their town is famous for, people ask that question again and again. To be followed, all but inevitably, by a second one: “Do you know this Don Cherry? Why is it that he doesn’t like the Swedish hockey player?” No joke.

Anders Melinder, a local coaching legend who had a direct hand in the development of Forsberg and Naslund, figures he’s addressed the subject for television crews at least nine times. (He’s a little too modest to suggest that he might be part of the answer, though he almost certainly is.) Among the solutions to the Ornskoldsvik riddle that have been offered over the years:

The water.
The air.
The northern lights.
The development system.
The hockey high school.
The socialist politics.
The lack of anything else to do.
A happy fluke.

And every one of them might be at least a little bit true.

But first, the history.

The SHL dates back to 1922, though the team that would become Modo (named after its sponsor, the then-owners of the mill Mo och Domsjo AB, normally abbreviated as MoDo) didn’t come into existence until 1938, and didn’t enter the highest level of Swedish hockey until 1958, the decade in which the sport took off locally. “The city of O-vik is built around the paper mill,” says sports journalist Janne Bengtsson. “MoDo, the owner of the mill, wanted its employees to feel good, so they built a lot of ice surfaces around the city. They built the first big arena, which was in use until five or six years ago. And O-vik has always voted socialist, and the socialists have always supported local sports. They provided arenas, money, everything they needed.”

Teams from Stockholm and its environs had historically dominated Swedish hockey, winning every championship but one until 1965. When Modo won its first Le Mat Trophy—the Swedish Stanley Cup—in 1979, it was very much a triumph of the plucky underdog, with the country boys beating the big-city boys from Djurgardens in the final.

Anders Hedberg was the first native son of O-vik and Modo alumnus to make an impact in North America—first in the World Hockey Association with the Winnipeg Jets, then, from 1978–85, in the NHL with the New York Rangers. His coach at Modo was another legend, Carl-Abel “Kabben” Berglund, an innovator who drew inspiration not just from what was happening across the Atlantic, but also from what was happening in the old Soviet bloc, especially Czechoslovakia. Berglund died in 2008, and a banner bearing his name hangs from the rafters of the Fjallraven Center.

The real watershed moment came in 1973, when two very special boys were born in O-vik just 10 days apart. Forsberg and Naslund were the best of a golden generation of Swedish players. They were drafted sixth and 16th overall, by the Flyers and Penguins respectively, though Forsberg played three more years with Modo before finally making the move to the Quebec Nordiques, who had acquired his rights in the Eric Lindros deal. “I didn’t think I was good enough,” he says. “I didn’t want to leave. I had played for Modo since I was five years old. My dad coached me and went to all the games. I followed my brother to practice. For me, it was my dream to play for Modo, not in the NHL. When I signed the deal to play in Modo, I wanted to stay for the entire contract, and when the day came to leave, I didn’t want to go to Quebec. Maybe I was immature. I guess I was. But I love my home.”

By the end of the 2002–03 season, Forsberg and Naslund were arguably the two best players in hockey, finishing the season one-two in NHL scoring. Forsberg won the Art Ross and Hart Trophies. Naslund won the Lester B. Pearson Award (now known as the Ted Lindsay Award), which the NHLPA presents to the players’ choice of most outstanding player. Two guys from the same little town, on top of the hockey world, beacons for every kid on every rink back home. Melinder is fond of comparing his two famous charges to the great runner Roger Bannister: Once he had broken the seemingly unbreakable four-minute barrier in the mile, others believed they could do it, and once Forsberg and Naslund conquered the NHL, every hockey-playing boy in O-vik believed he could follow in their footsteps.

Forsberg and Naslund were products of the development system Melinder built. Its foundation was a hockey “gymnasium”—a special high school where the most talented teenaged players could combine academics with intensive hockey training. (The high school is still there, housed in a beautifully renovated older building, where the teen boy hockey players—immediately identifiable by their cowboy gait—share space with mostly young women in a specialized arts program. It’s an interesting mix.)

“We have a big tourney for players in Sweden—for 15- and 16-year-olds—and I was scouting it for the hockey gymnasium,” Melinder remembers. “Peter Forsberg’s dad, Kent, was the coach of the team from our area, with Peter and Markus on it, and they won, beating the team from Stockholm. I took the bus home with them, and Kent and I talked. I knew this was a great opportunity. We started to practise as much as the elite teams, as many as 20 hours a week.”

Naslund remembers school work scheduled around practice. “We would practise during the day and in the evening, and there was also time to work out as well,” he says. “It was great for us. We had a fantastic coach in Anders Melinder, who is famous for being innovative. He made everything a challenge.”

As with his predecessor, Berglund, some of Melinder’s innovations were drawn from the remnants of the Soviet system. “I was invited to the sports academy in Russia,” he says. “They showed me Russian practices, so I took a bit from that and bit from this and made my own mix for the players in O-vik. Many of them were drafted into the NHL. That’s become the Swedish model here.”

Ornskoldsvik would play a major role in the two greatest moments in Swedish hockey history: the Olympic gold-medal victories in 1994 and 2006. The first featured Forsberg’s famous shootout goal against Canada in Lillehammer, an image immortalized on a Swedish stamp. At the Turin Olympics in 2006—the Games Canadians like to forget—”Tre Kronor” was powered by Forsberg and the Sedin twins, second-generation Modo players, joint winners of the Guldpucken as SHL MVPs in 1999, and, of course, now stars with the Vancouver Canucks.

Those two Olympic wins are for Swedes what the 1972 Summit Series, the 1976 Canada Cup, and the 2002, 2010 and 2014 gold medals are for Canadians, though, as Naslund dryly points out, the Swedes aren’t quite so overtly obsessive about such things. “Canadians are better at promoting themselves,” he says.

he most surprising part for an outsider seeing the most famous Swedish hockey team up close for the first time is that for all of the great players it has produced, for all of the myth and legend it has generated, for all of that “Heart of Hockey” stuff, Modo hasn’t been all that successful. The team has only won the Le Mat Trophy twice, and has at times in recent history struggled just to remain in the upper echelon of Swedish hockey, narrowly avoiding relegation (the SHL, like European soccer leagues, has a promotion-and-relegation system).

That groundbreaking first championship in 1979 wasn’t followed up for 28 years. There were some great seasons in between, especially when the Sedins were in town, including 1998–99, when Modo won 33 games to finish first in a 50-game regular season, then faltered in the playoffs. Modo played in three of four finals between 1999 and 2002, losing all of them. That mounting frustration made the second Le Mat Trophy in 2007 particularly sweet, a victory that still resonates in the community.

Of the 23 Swedish players on the Modo roster that year, 17 hailed from Ornskoldsvik. After finishing third in the regular season, they were extended to seven games in each of the first two rounds of the playoffs. That set up a matchup in the final with Linkopings HC, with what turned out to be the decisive sixth game on the road. “I remember a lot of the playoffs that year,” says Victor Olofsson, a 19-year-old O-vik native and Buffalo Sabres draft pick who is a member of this year’s Modo squad. “I remember almost every player they had, and I remember game six, when the guy who is now our GM, Per Svartvadet [a former Atlanta Thrasher], came in on a two-on-one and ripped it up in the top shelf for the winning goal. I watched the game at my cousins’ house, and everyone was celebrating and there was champagne.”

When the plane carrying the local heroes returned from Linkoping in the wee hours of the morning, it circled the arena several times before landing (the airport is a long, woody, moose-filled drive from the centre of town), thrilling a crowd estimated at 10,000 that had waited for its return. “It was better that they won on the road,” says Olle Hedman, who works in the mill and is father of Victor, and whose older son, Oscar, was on that 2007 team and is now the captain of Modo. “That way we had two parties. Everyone went to the airport to meet them. We put lights all the way on the road from the airport to here and then we met them at the arena. It was 1 a.m. There were thousands of people. It was great.”

When the players finally found their way to Mammamia, a pizzeria that is a locally famous hockey hangout, 30 bottles of Dom Pérignon were waiting for them, courtesy of Forsberg, who, like Naslund in Vancouver, had been following the games from afar, and, despite his NHL stardom, wished he could have been part of it.

But then, in the immediate aftermath of that famous victory, Modo lost its way. The team’s tried-and-true method had been to identify local talent, nurture it in the hockey gymnasium, give those players opportunities with the Modo junior team and then watch them graduate to the big club. Though the best players were merely passing through on their way to the NHL, they would typically spend two or three seasons at home, and would often come back after their North American careers ended to finish their playing days in Ornskoldsvik. (That’s a recurring theme in the Modo story: They almost all come back to play, and very often to live.) “In a lot of sports, you buy foreign players, but up there they want guys from their own city,” Henrik Sedin says. “People go to games and see their neighbours play. It brings the city together.”

But that organic relationship began to break down following the triumph of 2007. “Something happened after that,” Melinder says. “We started to buy players instead of develop them.” Modo began to act like a big-money club in a league that to this day has no salary cap. That path wasn’t sustainable, and in the end proved disastrous, both financially and competitively.

Early in the 2009–10 season, with Modo facing the real possibility of relegation, two old warriors volunteered to return to the fray. Both Forsberg, who had yet to fully surrender to the foot injuries that prematurely ended his career, and Naslund, who had retired, suited up for their old team, without pay. For the local fans, it was a thrilling encore, as the local heroes pushed Modo out of the relegation zone and fell just short of leading the team to the playoffs.

Since then, both Forsberg and Naslund have maintained an active relationship with the club. Naslund, who returned to live in Ornskoldsvik after his playing days, served as Modo’s general manager for three and a half years and continues in an advisory capacity. Forsberg lives in Stockholm now, but returns to O-vik for most of Modo’s home games and is listed as the team’s assistant general manager. He and his father, Kent, were also investors in the construction of the Fjallraven Center.

Today, Modo is trying to return to its previous methods, nurturing and developing its own young players, even if that means enduring considerable growing pains, as appears to be the case this season. But it’s not as simple as it once was. When Melinder established his hockey gymnasium, it was one of only three in all of Sweden. These days, every club has one, while the local government in Ornskoldsvik cut off extra funding some years ago. The club’s old benefactor, the pulp mill, employs a fraction of the number of people it once did, and is controlled by an Indian-based multinational with no local ties. “When I came into the league, we wouldn’t have had a team without the mill,” Forsberg says. “If we won, everyone was happy on Monday. If we lost, everyone would be mad. They really helped out. Back in the day, players had to work there as well. But now it’s tough, because it’s not local ownership anymore. They don’t help out as much as they used to.”

Charlotte Gustavsson, Modo’s new CEO, is an interesting story in her own right. Her last job before coming here was running a television service in Ghana. She is the only woman to helm a major professional hockey club on either side of the ocean. (She is also fighting her way back from breast cancer: “If the secret of Ornskoldsvik was really something special in the water,” she jokes, “I don’t think I would be battling cancer right now.”)

Her concerns now are the concerns of sports executives everywhere. How to put more bums in the seats in an era when all the games are on television, when even in O-vik there are plenty of entertainment options other than hockey, thanks to the wired world. How to extract more money from those fans once they’re in the building. How to enhance the game experience for kids, to make sure that a new generation will remain just as devoted to the home team as their parents and grandparents have been. Even in the Heart of Hockey, you can’t take any of that for granted. And all the while, she has to keep her eye on the bottom line of a club that is essentially community owned, with 2,000 members paying the equivalent of $30 a year each for the privilege. “We need to get organized,” she says. “We need to do cost-cutting to return to a profitable level. We need to start building the product, make it more entertaining, make it profitable, and then put that profit into the team budget. Right now, we have one of the lower-level payrolls in the SHL.”

What they need, mostly, is for the magic to return. “We need another championship,” Gustavsson says. “It’s been too long.”

It may well happen one of these days, because kids growing up in Ornskoldsvik can still look to the NHL and find their role models. They can still follow the Sedins in Vancouver and imagine the day when they’ll come home to live and to finish their careers, and maybe lift Modo to another Le Mat Trophy. They can watch Victor Hedman in Tampa—at least they can when he comes back from a broken hand—and see one of the game’s rising stars, who was inspiring Norris Trophy talk earlier this season and is just beginning to reach his enormous potential. When they’re playing those pickup games on the local outdoor rinks that still take place every night in the winter, they can dream of playing for Modo, of playing for the national team, of playing in the best hockey league in the world, the same dreams other small-town kids in another hockey country have been dreaming since the sport’s invention.

Don Cherry might not understand Swedes, but surely he can understand that.

he Saturday-night game is winding down, and for the local heroes, it hasn’t been pretty. Modo falls lifelessly to Vaxjo, 5–0, and all those photos, all the memorabilia that line the walls of the concourse, reminders of glory days and great players past, seem like a cruel commentary on the current state of the club. Even the ultras in the cheering section begin to run out of gas in the third period. Their disappointment veers towards anger.

And then, a few days after the game, the Toronto Maple Leafs announce that they are sending William Nylander, their highly touted first-round draft pick in 2014, to Modo rather than back to junior hockey or to the American Hockey League. They think it would be a better fit.

Nylander’s father is Michael, who played for a bunch of teams in the NHL. William is not an O-vik boy by any stretch. He was born in Calgary while his dad was playing hockey there, then spent his formative years in Stockholm.

But, as if scripted, in his first game in a Modo uniform, Nylander centres the first line and scores the winning goal in a 2–1 victory over Linkopings.

He must be drinking the water. He must be breathing the air.