Steve Greeley compares the Southie Men's Hockey League to Harvard University. They're both, he says, next to impossible to get into.
And Greeley, 27, is a good hockey player with some impressive accomplishments. He played for legendary coach Jack Parker for four years at Boston University. He won a couple of Beanpots. He played professionally in Germany and the East Coast Hockey League. And he's a scout for the National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings.
By the standards of the Southie league, where Greeley is in his rookie season, his resume is average.
NHL veterans. Olympians. NCAA champions. The league is stacked with talent.
Tucked quietly between the Saturday morning youth hockey games and public skating in the afternoon at the Murphy Memorial Rink, the Southie league - which began more than 30 years ago with a bunch of local guys who tossed sticks to choose teams - has morphed into what the players think is perhaps the premier men's hockey league in the Northeast.
While it may be sponsored by a bar (the Boston Beer Garden), the Southie league is anything but the typical "beer league" where hockey dinosaurs go to graze. To get into the draft - yes, they have a draft each year for a spot on one of the five teams - you've got to have serious credentials on the ice. Only three or four slots open each year, and the only way in is to have an established player vouch that you can play at that level.
This year's rookie class includes Greeley; Ted Crowley, who played in the NHL and the 1994 Olympics; Dorchester's famously feisty Brendan Walsh, who earned an NCAA championship at the University of Maine and more than 1,300 penalty minutes during his six years in the minors; and Brian Carthas, a Southie kid who starred at Boston Latin School and Princeton University, and played professionally in Europe.
The hockey life is famously grueling. It demands a lot, and demands it early. To be any good, you need to learn to skate around the time you learn to walk. Childhoods are spent asleep in minivans that smell like Dunkin' Donuts on the way to 6 a.m. practices. By the time you reach high school, it's a year-round sport - town teams in the fall and spring; winters competing for your school; summers at hockey camps and playing in the all-star leagues that are havens for college scouts.
For the elite, the goal is the Division 1 scholarship. But once you get there, the pressure is just starting. Now you're auditioning for the big time - the pros. The very best go on to the NHL; the merely very good will spend a couple of years in the minor leagues fighting for their jobs and their teeth. Eventually, age or injury or reality set in, and it's time to move on.
In the Southie league, most of the players have climbed to the highest rungs on the ladder. Boston's neighborhoods - particularly Southie and Dorchester - have deep hockey talent pools that have produced many outstanding skaters. These players are the Southie league's core, and they've maintained its elite status by bringing friends from college and pro teams with them.
But having been to the top, why do they come back? Why do they put the skates back on and come down to this little league in the Murphy Rink just off Castle Island, knowing it's just going to make them sore for work on Monday?
Their answers are uniform: They miss the camaraderie, and they need the competition. And with the pressure off, many say the game is as fun as it's ever been.
"My last couple of years of pro hockey was a grind," said a former Boston Bruin, Joe Hulbig. "It was very businesslike. But then I came here, and it was just laughs. But at the same time, you have to be ready to play. No one's trying to put anyone through the boards, but no one wants to lose, either."
"But more than anything, it's a day away from family and life, to just be able to do something you love doing."
That break - from the wives and the kids and the mortgage - is not so easy to pull off. The games are at 11 a.m. and noon Saturdays, not exactly the best time for a grown man to be able to sneak off with the fellas.
"I think some guys have to write it into their nuptials to be able to get here every week," Crowley joked.
"But I think the wives understand that this is something we need. You do something your whole life, and just because you get a little older, it's not a switch you can turn off. The passion for a good game is always going to be there."
How good is the competition? Crowley thinks you could put together a team from the best players in the league that could hold its own against the best college teams - skillwise, at least.
"As far as legs and heart-rate, it wouldn't even be close. They'd be all over us," said the 37-year-old former Olympian. "But they'll all be here someday."
For the younger players, the guys who still have a little bit of legs left, they say one of the best parts of the league is being able to play with and against all the older guys they grew up watching and admiring. The name that all the younger guys bring up is Chris O'Sullivan.
A 33-year-old from Dorchester, O'Sullivan is a magician with the puck. He played parts of a few seasons in the NHL as an attacking defenseman, but really thrives in the loose style of the men's league, where the ban on checking opens up the game to players able to improvise.
"He's got these crazy skills, and he just embarrasses people," said Craig Paster, 27, a goalie who played for the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "I look forward to coming here every week just to be able to play against guys like that."
Greeley, the rookie, said that aside from the competition and being around the guys, what he likes best is just walking into the locker room and seeing all the different hockey bags from all the rival schools.
"You see CM, BC High, Thayer, St. Sebastian's, Boston Latin, UMass, BU, BC, Merrimack, UNH," he said. "Everyone has come full circle now, and we're all back playing together."
But it isn't all chummy-chummy. This is hockey, after all. Greeley said the teams will usually get dressed in the same locker room before the game, and then change afterward in separate locker rooms. There are five teams and only four playoff spots, and no one wants the embarrassment of being left out. And when the playoffs start, "a no-checking league becomes a checking league," according to John Butterworth, who has been in the Southie league for 13 years.
Do they ever drop the gloves? "We're good for one big dust-up a year," said Ryan Cox, a former University of Vermont player who also serves as the league's commissioner.
"And that's fine. It's part of the game. It's part of competing. And when it's over, we all go to the Beer Garden and have a beer and make a day out of it. Or a night out of it, for the people who can get away with it."
