PETERBOROUGH, Ontario — The Rev. John Perdue is only 33, so he does not remember much from the heyday of the Flying Fathers, a troupe of hockey-playing Catholic priests who played comedy-filled charity games beginning in 1964.
The Flying Fathers were the Harlem Globetrotters of hockey — touring North America and Europe, compiling more than 900 wins and only a handful of losses, and raising an estimated $4 million. They assessed penalties for skipping Mass on Sunday or “acting like a Protestant.” They brought out a horse, Penance, who was outfitted in goalie pads and trained to kneel reverently.
Sister Mary Shooter would put on a display of skating and puck handling, then throw off her habit to reveal her true identity: the Rev. Les Costello, who won a Stanley Cup with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1948 at age 20 before retiring two years later to enter the priesthood.
By the early 1980s, Hollywood even took notice and tried to make a movie about the Flying Fathers for which Wayne Gretzky auditioned.
After the team’s 25th anniversary, in 1989, a number of Fathers retired and, although the team played until 2009, its aura dimmed.
Now Father Perdue, the vocations director for the Peterborough diocese and a former two-time junior hockey champion, is trying to bring it back.
“When I was a young boy, they were very big,” he said. “Everybody in the Catholic world knew about the Flying Fathers.”
He has organized a new team of Flying Fathers and a tour, with three benefit games this week in Ontario and Quebec. If successful, this tour could be the start of something bigger.
That is a tall order. Priests do not enjoy the same popularity they did when the original Flying Fathers played, in large part because of sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. Spectators may not be receptive to priests doing comedy routines.
The new Flying Fathers know they can’t escape the shadow.
“The church needs a good news story,” Father Perdue said. “There are many reasons why this is a beautiful thing to do.”
The Rev. Kris Schmidt, 32, from Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, said, “The church, now more than ever, needs to see priests as human, and I think it’s a great way that this bridge can be formed.”
Some are not so sure the Flying Fathers can be relevant again.
“I think the glory days are over, but they may as well try,” said the Rev. Pat Blake, 84, the longest-serving member of the original team, who played for more than 40 years.
Father Perdue said encouraging more men to enter the priesthood was part of his motivation for reviving the Flying Fathers. When the number of seminarians declined in the original team’s waning years, it recruited police officers and firefighters to fill out the roster.
Talent-wise, no one on the new team is like Father Costello, who played 21 N.H.L. games. He died in 2002, several days after hitting his head on the ice during a Flying Fathers game.
The current players, who range in age from their 20s to their 50s, expect to be as skilled as a good high school team. Some grew up playing competitive junior hockey, and the Rev. John MacPherson, 55, reached the varsity level at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Another, the Rev. Tavis Goski, 29, spent summers as a skating instructor. Many of the priests have stayed sharp by playing in weekly pickup games.
The priests have been recruited from across the country; with everyone so spread out, they have not practiced together.
Father MacPherson, from Kentville, Nova Scotia, who played with the Flying Fathers from 1988 to 2008, said that missing practice was never a problem.
“They practiced once back in the 1970s and lost the next game,” he said. “So they said, ‘The heck with that, we’re not doing that again.’ They just trust in their coach: God.”
In the days leading up to the tour, Father Perdue mapped out a script. Sister Mary Shooter, also known as the Flying Nun, makes a cameo in her flowing habit and scores on a penalty shot. She is played with gusto by a real-life nun: Sister Mary Catherine Perdue, who is Father Perdue’s sister. The tour has also introduced a Flying Monk, played by Father Perdue.
The Flying Fathers are not straying from the original script — “an unusual mix of religion, hockey and comedy,” said the Rev. Tim Shea, 70, who played his first game in 1969.
According to a new book, “Holy Hockey: The Story of Canada’s Flying Fathers,” by Frank Cosentino, church leaders did not support the idea of the team in the early 1960s, believing that such showmanship was unbecoming of a priest. Eventually, Bishop Alexander Carter of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, was won over.
The original Flying Fathers were founded by the Rev. Brian McKee and played their first benefit game on Feb. 20, 1964, beating a team from North Bay, Ontario, radio and television stations, 13-4, in front of a crowd of 3,126.
The Flying Fathers won the rematch in 1965, 16-6, and the official paid attendance was 5,030, the largest crowd for a hockey game in North Bay to that date, according to Cosentino’s book.
The Flying Fathers began traveling across Canada, the United States and Europe, playing 25 to 30 games a season. By the early 1980s, “Real People” broadcast the story of priests playing hockey on American television.
Cosentino wrote that several movie studios, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, had showed interest in turning the story into a film. Gretzky auditioned, but his screen test did not go well, and ultimately a conflict over the priests’ portrayal doomed the project.
The team’s second act has been years in the making. Father Perdue began organizing a game between seminarians and a group of hockey players in the Peterborough area, northeast of Toronto. By the winter of 2017, that game had become the Father Costello Classic, named after the Flying Fathers’ star.
A member of the organizing committee for the classic suggested that priests should play in the game instead of seminarians.
“Oh, boy, are we really going to do this?” Father Perdue remembered thinking at the time. “There was this giant legacy that we would be stepping into. I said, ‘Guys, if we’re going to have a team of hockey-playing priests, you can’t do this and not invoke the legacy of the Flying Fathers.’”
Father Perdue called Frank Quinn, a retired police officer and former general manager of the original team.
With the organizing committee meeting in progress, Quinn, 75, came bursting through the door wearing a Flying Fathers jersey, a Flying Fathers jacket and a Flying Fathers hat.
Quinn got approval from former players and managers to use the name Flying Fathers, and the first test case was a benefit game in Ennismore, Ontario, in January 2018.
The Flying Fathers won, beating a local high school team, 13-6, but six of those goals came on a “touchdown” after a football made its way into the net.
The 650-seat arena in Ennismore was full. Among the crowd was the Rev. Vaughan Quinn, 85, a former Flying Fathers goalie but no relation to Frank, wearing an original team jacket. In his day, he would lie on top of the goal performing a juggling routine while play was in the other end.
“He literally had tears in his eyes,” said Barrie Schultz, 48, who has taken over as general manager of the Flying Fathers, “because he couldn’t believe this was happening again.”
