John Buchleitner's blue eyes dart back and forth behind thin-framed glasses as he watches the black puck zoom across the rink. He grits his teeth, revealing a missing tooth, and clears the puck with one swift movement of his stick, passing it to a teammate.
Beneath his hockey pads, Buchleitner's joints ache and his knee twinges from the pain of an old hockey-related injury. His ease on the ice, although slower and more deliberate than the pros, masks his greatest athletic disadvantage: his years.
"Age slows you down a lot," says Buchleitner, 72, a Severna Park resident, who admits that playing hockey helps slow the natural aging process, but doesn't allow him to escape it. "You're definitely slower, but your mind thinks you're fast."
Buchleitner is captain of the Gerihatricks, a Laurel-based senior hockey team founded in 2000 that comprises a dozen or so ripened players who refuse to go sour. The team is the brainchild of recreational hockey veteran Billy Wellington, who continues to whiz around the rink at 87.
"I don't embarrass easily," says Wellington, of Silver Spring, who jokes that he has been playing hockey since "conception." Wellington, like many of the players, learned the sport by playing pond hockey as a kid.
As the name implies, good-natured jokes are commonplace when the Gerihatricks occupy the locker rooms of the Gardens Ice House in Laurel. There the team and other "recreational" hockey veterans - a handful of whom are former Washington Capitals players - command the ice every Wednesday morning from 10:30 to noon.
Lately they've been spending their time on the ice practicing rigorously, preparing for the Sixth Annual Gerihatricks Tournament next month. It's a competition they plan and run themselves, and it attracts teams from as far away as Michigan and Minnesota who pay $1,000 each for three days (March 20-22) on the ice.
And, ever the gentlemen, the Gerihatricks plan to keep the players' wives busy, too: they'll get pampered with manicures as their husbands slap sticks.
Serious tournament training aside, the guys don't let competition get the best of their humor.
One player reminisces of his dreams to be a Zamboni driver, another jokes of his burgeoning physical ailments, and the rest trade jabs for being on the wrong side of 60.
"Somebody passed me the puck, and it was way in front of me and I didn't get it," Buchleitner recounts through spurts of laughter, "and the goalie said, 'You're even slower than you thought you were!' "
