When hockey first started being played in Montreal in the 1870’s, it was a gentleman’s game, very different from the game we play now. Rink dimensions, rules and equipment bore little resemblance to what is in use today. Goalies held their stick off to one side with both hands, wore cricket batsman’s pads and used the same gloves as the forwards, often little more than work gloves with a bit of extra padding.

The evolution of goalie gear was quite slow, and for several decades it consisted mostly of the gradual addition of more and more stuffing material and extra layers of felt padding to help goalies protect themselves against ever harder shots coming from ever bigger and faster forwards.

The Early Blocker

It was called the stick glove, when it was mentioned at all. For the longest time it was just a defenceman’s glove, beefed-up with extra padding added to the back, or wrapped in a layer of felt to soften the blow when the puck accidentally hit the back of your hand instead of your stick. On the plus side, such gloves were very light and allowed total freedom of movement for your hand and wrist.

“Tiny” Thompson's “workglove” blocker in 1928-29: great for paddle-down but very little in the way of protection.

The granddaddy of all modern commercially produced blockers was the Cooper GM12, the “model T” of blockers, much imitated, and affectionately known as the wafer, because it was thick, rectangular and light, the sandwich because it contained slices of foam and plastic between two slices of leather, or the biscuit because its brown face was covered with round holes showing the white material inside, the way some chocolate cookies have holes that let you see the vanilla icing inside.

It standardized the blocker into the generally flat, rigid, rectangular and foam-board-filled affair that most goalies are still using in one or another of its numerous modern incarnations. Lighter and more protective than anything before it, it also gave goalies predictable rebound countrol, a luxury none of the previous roundish blocker designs had ever provided.

There were, however, significant trade-offs resulting from the blocker’s rigidity. Because the bottom of the board, or “boot”, protruded about six inches beyond the goalie’s clenched fist, it interfered with several important moves, not the least of which was the paddle-down manoeuvre.

Picking up a dropped stick also became an adventure that sometimes had the poor goalie stabbing repeatedly at the ice, only to have that cumbersome boot push the stick further and further out of his reach. Spectators found that quite hilarious, goalies much less so.

No need to rub it in, we all have our personal horror stories about such instances, some of them having made the difference between a great save and a “soft” goal.

I had been toying for sometime with the idea that, although the board shouldn’t bend backward if it is to block hard shots in mid-air, it could very well be allowed to bend forward to get out of the way when pushed against the ice.

If it could be done, this would greatly facilitate paddle-down, freezing the puck, picking up your stick, recovering your balance or any other manoeuvre where you wish you could put your fist down on the ice without resistance. The question was how! The idea of taking the X-Acto^® knife to my brand new $300 blocker, without any clear idea of how to reassemble it, was a bit unnerving and led to a lot of procrastination.

The last straw

I finally decided to take the plunge after a game in which I suffered not just one, but two of those horror-story muffed-paddle-down goals, turning a tight 3-2 victory into an agonizing 4-3 defeat. It was the straw that broke the blocker’s back, quite literally. I would just no longer put up with that kind of frustration.

I went home after the game, followed the adage “measure twice, cut once” (I must have measured at least twenty times) threw in a strip of piano hinge, the elastic waistband off an old jockstrap and twenty feet of duct tape, and came up with a satisfactory prototype for a new piece of goalie equipment, an articulated blocker that got out of your way when you went to paddle-down.

The very first time I tried this prototype, I knew right away that this was a significant improvement over current blocker designs, and that a lot of goalies would want to buy such a blocker if a well-designed version were made available. My wife and I decided to apply for patent protection, develop a good design and try to bring it to market, either through licensing to established manufacturers, or making it ourselves.

The PaddleFlex was found to satisfy all the requirements of usefulness, originality and innovativeness, and as a consequence we were granted Canada Patent No. 2,231,846 and U.S. Patent No. 6,085,352.

We then had goalies of all ages and calibres test our prototypes, and the reactions were virtually always the same. Goalies loved the blocker, they thought it offered great advantages no other blocker offered, and they just couldn’t see any downside; you could still do all the things that you did with your old blocker. The only difference was that this one never got in your way.

Montreal Canadien's backup Fred Chabot checking out a third-generation PaddleFlex prototype in a practice session at the Molson Center in February 2000.

Going to market

We offered to license the PaddleFlex patent to five of the largest manufacturers of goalie equipment and they all manifested a fair amount of interest. One of them actually followed up with a concrete monetary offer, but we felt it was insufficient and serious negociation never got off the ground. Whether it was lack of vision, hardball strategy or simply the weight of big-corporation culture, we may never know.

We then quickly activated plan B, which was to manufacture and market the blocker under our own name. We took a booth at the World Hockey Trades Expo in Montreal in January 2000 and drew a very enthusiastic response from dealers and distributors from around the World. This gave us independent confirmation that the PaddleFlex was truly an idea whose time had come.

The market edition of the Martin PaddleFlex.

We then placed an ad in the 2000 London Source Catalogue to put the PaddleFlex on the consumer map and give it an official market presence. We sold all of the small initial production and activated another production batch. We spent most of the next year testing the product and resolving tricky supply and production issues. We have now built up an inventory and the launching of this website marks the beginning of our first concerted marketing effort.

PaddleFlex Testing Tour

As a part of our development strategy, we have set up an event that we call the PaddleFlex Testing Tour. So far, we have recruited twenty goaltenders of various ages, male and female, left- and right-handed, from all over America and have asked them to try different prototypes of the PaddleFlex.
This event has been a tremendous success so far and you will find a sampling of the most typical reactions in the feedback section. There are over three dozen more goalies already registered in the program. Four of them will receive a PaddleFlex to test for a month starting in the first week of September.

Looking to the future

We are now in the process of developing a junior-pro version and a roller-hockey version of the PaddleFlex that we hope to start testing this fall and next spring, respectively.
The rest of this story is still being written as more goalies are starting to adopt the PaddleFlex and share their impressions and anecdotes with us. We hope to count you in their number.

Jean-Louis Martin