Facing off in pool

On the bottom of the pool, where snorkelers holding their breath and brandishing 13-inch hockey sticks slap a 3-pound puck around, the great equalizer is oxygen. In underwater hockey, everyone must come up for air.

Without it, even the Great Gretzky becomes just another blowhard.

Can burning lungs be worth scoring a goal or gulping chlorinated water? Judging from some athletes competing in an eight-hour round-robin tournament held recently at UMass-Lowell, breathing seems to be overrated.

''The main difference is in the head," says Martin Tanguay, a muscular forward from Montreal who also plays ice hockey. ''In ice hockey if you have a breakaway -- OK, you can be tired, but you will do what you need to do to get to the goal and try to score. But in underwater hockey when you receive a pass and get a chance to do a breakaway and feel like you don't have breath anymore, you have to go up."

Sounds reasonable. But that is not Tanguay's approach.

''Do you go up or are you mentally tough enough to stay down and try to score?" he says. ''I try to score. Always. To me that makes the difference between a good player and a weak player."

Tanguay's Montreal team won the tournament, scoring 50 goals in shutouts of Connecticut, Framingham (a club team), UMass-Lowell, and MIT. Then the Canadians withstood a challenge from ''an All-Star" team of players from the four New England teams, winning, 6-0.

For their efforts, the Montreal players won a not-so-prestigious set of beer glasses presented at a banquet held at a Lowell brewery restaurant. They used the opportunity to sell a risque underwater hockey calendar for $15 to help fund a trip to the 2006 World Championships in Sheffield, England in mid-August.

The Stanley Cup, this ain't.

British divers, seeking to beat their winter boredom, invented underwater hockey in 1954. They called the game Octopush (because there were eight players on a team) and played it to stay in shape. Now it's played in 31 countries and in 55 clubs throughout the United States.

Underwater hockey is played 6 on 6 with four substitutes. The goal is to pass the bright orange plastic-covered puck into the opposing team's 9-foot goal (called a gully). Players wear snorkel equipment, fins, water polo hats, ear guards, mouthpieces, and a garden glove with caulking smeared on it so their knuckles don't get scraped bloody on the swimming pool floor. One team uses a black stick, the other white.

''That's the only way you can tell the difference between teammate and opponent," says Blaise Gassend of MIT.

Besides being what underwater hockey aficionados call a ''supreme anaerobic" game, timing and intuition are also important. Players must time their dives to intercept an opponent or receive a pass from a teammate who needs to surface for air. It's a sink-and- swim proposition.

Knowing when to dive and when to hover near the surface to conserve energy is the key to success.

''If I see two people fighting for the puck, I figure out where and when they'll be running out of air," says Michael Gregory, an MIT staff supervisor.

An end-to-end, Bobby Orr-like rush is as rare as a kick returner scoring a touchdown.

''Unlike soccer and basketball, where one good player can dominate, here everybody has to breathe," says Chris Lewis, who runs the underwater hockey tourist website (which lists club games around the world). ''That means team play is enhanced; otherwise you have turnovers. A player who is individually skilled can actually hinder a team.

The other main difference from ice hockey is there is no goalie.

''We don't leave someone behind as a goalie because it's a bit like basketball," says Montreal's Sebastien Falardeau. ''We can't shoot from so far away so the defensive guys can come and support the action."

The submerged action is supposed to be a noncontact sport, but to be caught in front of the goal feels like the spin cycle of a washing machine. Underwater the only sound heard is the tapping of sticks on the bottom, a call to pass the puck.

''There's a lot of accidental contact," says Falardeau. ''When someone curls [reverses] in your face, you know the feet are coming. That's not a foul, but you know it's part of the game. You cannot cross-check someone, you're only supposed to play the puck."

Tanguay says fighting is extremely rare.

''You receive a lot of elbows and knees in the face and sometimes a fight can happen, but not as much as ice hockey," he said. ''Here, there's no place for dirty players. In ice hockey it's a five-minute penalty. In underwater hockey, you get thrown out of the game."

When Montreal is in the water, the players are like sharks smelling blood. Part of their success is because they are able to maneuver the puck on its side to make it go farther. Forget slap shots; a wrist shot only advances the puck a few feet. ''There's a technique to it," says Falardeau. ''A combination of two moves. You try to roll the puck and then flip it so it travels long. Maybe 6 feet, 7 feet."

Although the 20-minute games are entertaining, they are unwatchable from poolside. For spectators, the action looks like fish bait being chased by predators. The only way fans know that a goal is scored is when the submerged referee's arms rise out of the water in the traditional touchdown position.

''I was at US Nationals [at the University of Minnesota] and they had long poles with cameras on them and they actually broadcast it on Jumbotrons," says Kelly Shultz. ''You could actually see what was going on." Shultz, a Penn State student who played for MIT, wasn't intimidated playing against the men.

''The water sort of equalizes people," she contends. ''Someone bigger, heftier, they can maybe barrel their way through and the petite one might be able to turn quicker."

To complicate matters, some pools are sloped, requiring playing deep-to-shallow ends and then switching at halftime.

Every two years a world championship is held, and the reigning champion is New Zealand, although the United States won the gold medal in the Masters category in 2004 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Tim Burke of Squantum was on that team. He would have loved to compete against Montreal in the recent tournament, but he serves in the Army Reserve on weekends. ''I couldn't exactly tell them, 'I can't show up, I've got to chase a plastic-covered puck around the bottom of a swimming pool,' " says the 1996 Underwater Hockey athlete of the year.

Underwater hockey gets no respect from the public, either. ''Some people who never saw the sport say, 'Oh, I took basket weaving in college and got an A,' " said Burke. ''But for people in the know, they say, 'Wow, you beat the best teams in the world, that's quite an achievement.'

Burke objects to criticism that the underwater game is slow as molasses. ''With fins on you can be faster than many Olympic swimmers," he says.

''It's the equivalent of playing full-court basketball while holding your breath."

He tries to limit his dives to a maximum of 20-second bursts.

''I've got a timer set in my mind with the realization that if you exceed that time, you're gonna pay for it sooner or later," he explains. ''You won't be able to go the limit."

The obscurity of the sport also has led to some bizarre incidents.

In 2002, the sport received a black eye when a group of women claiming to be the Moldovan Underwater Hockey team received visas for the 2002 Women's Championships held in Calgary, Alberta. During the opening ceremonies, Canadian officials played the Moldovan national anthem and flashed the Moldovan flag on the big screen at Calgary Stadium.

But Moldova, the poorest nation in Europe, has no underwater hockey team. The so-called players never showed; they were too busy seeking asylum. ''It was a scam," said Margaret Francis, the chair of underwater hockey's world championship.

But Lewis says underwater hockey is growing. His website records 100 hits a day from all over the world.

''There's a lot more in Australia than the US," says Lewis. ''Most people who play have retired from another sport. There's even one high school team in Ohio." There are underwater hockey clubs in unlikely places such as Namibia and Zimbabwe, Turkey and Poland, Colombia and Croatia.

The Montreal team says underwater hockey players have a special bond.

''If you travel a lot and you look at the Internet, it's always, yeah, yeah, come over. That's cool," says Falardeau.

The secret to the Canadians' success is ''practice, practice, practice," says Falardeau. ''Sometimes 10 hours a week. We have a club for young guys that gets started at 12 years old. We play 2-3 times a week for sure and more than that."

In the UMass-Lowell tournament, MIT, which has an eager but inexperienced team, thought it was a moral victory to hold Montreal to just nine goals. It had three women playing on its squad.

The rest of the tournament was more evenly matched. Players stayed all day playing game after game, eating bananas and candy bars and sports drinks for energy, and sometimes napping on the bleachers.

MIT's Jason LaPenta said his team is lucky to squeeze out an hour a week to play pickup games. ''MIT is a pretty difficult place to be," he says. ''It's a little bit demanding. A lot of us don't have a lot of time to exercise, unfortunately."

LaPenta is a Masters student working on microfabricating passive transponders for three-dimensional tracking. ''When I get to play I love it," he says. ''It just takes away all the stress."

Jihye Seo, a Harvard physics graduate student, plays because she believes the aerobic workout will improve her singing voice. She enjoys the game but not the contact. ''It's really rough," she says. ''I got kicked all the time."

Gassend is a PhD student working in the MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory. ''I was always bored in a swimming pool," he says. ''Underwater hockey is all about conserving energy. It's a really good exercise of willpower."

For him, winning isn't everything. ''It doesn't make a difference," Gassend acknowledges.

Tanguay thinks his team could beat the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens in the pool.

''They won't even touch the puck," he predicts. ''They're not good swimmers, you have to be a good swimmer comfortable with a mask and fins in the water. It's not for everybody, breathing a snorkel."

Eric Matez of Framingham is a schoolteacher who has been playing for 15 years.

''I'm 47," he says. ''You can play when you get older because the only common denominator is holding your breath. It's a hard sport to get good at. In these tournaments if they steal the puck you better get out of the way quick, you're going to get kicked in the face. When I first started playing, I didn't wear headgear and I got kicked in the ear and my eardrum popped. I have nerve damage and ringing. Thirty percent of my eardrum got damaged. They had to take skin from the back of my ear and sew it on."

Was it worth it?

Matez didn't hesitate.

''Oh, yeah," he says.

For more underwater hockey photos from Stan Grossfeld, go to www.boston.com/sports