It was a night Calgary Flames fans will never forget.
It’s been over 20 years now since a well-lubricated college kid from Medicine Hat climbed over the glass at Calgary’s Saddledome wearing nothing but a smile, a wristwatch, and a pair of red socks.
It was during the third period of a Flames-Bruins game on October 17, 2002, that Tim Hurlbut stumbled his way into Flames history, landing on the ice with a thud and knocking himself out cold.
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. pic.twitter.com/n5vR3Ohdt8
— Arch (@Archaeologuy) August 17, 2016
“You’d think the (Flames) trainer could help a brother out and give me a beach towel,” says the good-natured Hurlbut, looking back on the occasion. “But no, he brings a goddamned facecloth over. It looked like a teepee on me!”
Hurlbut, at the time a 21-year-old Lethbridge Community College student in golf course management, recalls the infamous day with a laugh. He had been a lifelong Bruins fan and as he was driving to school that day he heard about a deal that just seemed too good to resist. For just $35 you could get a bus ride to the Saddledome, tickets to the Bruins-Flames game that night, and a beer.
“I’m like, f*ck, can’t beat that, so I rolled over to the golf course where my friends were hanging out,” recalls Hurlbut. “They’re all at the driving range so I pull up and say, ‘Boys, we’re going to Calgary for the Bruins game.’”
Tim and his buddies hop on the party bus and by the time they get to the Saddledome they’re feeling no pain. They head to their seats, which are high up in the press level, as the price would indicate, and settle in for the game. Towards the end of the first period, Hurlbut has a stroke of genius… in his mind, at least.
“So we’re sitting up in the nosebleeds and I see this guy with a halo, a broken neck halo, sitting down by the glass. I say, ‘Boys, I’ll be right back, I’m gonna sit in that guy’s seat while he goes for a beer, because that motherf*cker is gonna take forever!’”
“It was a long night”
Much to Hurlbut’s surprise, he was able to walk right past security and watch an entire period of hockey from a front-row seat. But, of course, all good things must come to an end and after the period, the Flames ticket-holder comes back and gives Hurlbut the boot. So as he’s walking back up the aisle, he sees a couple of guys sitting next to some empty seats a few rows back. He asks if it would be ok to sit there and the guys say sure, and even buy him a beer.
We were able to locate one of those guys, who was portrayed as an accountant in subsequent news articles about the event. He was actually a businessman sitting in the corporate seats of the friend who was with him. He picks up the story here.
“About halfway through the third period he (Hurlbut) turns to me and says, ‘How much would you give me if I went over the boards naked?’” the businessman recalls, still to this day, 20 years later, not wanting his name used. The optics of a couple of middle-aged business types involved in a young kid potentially harming both his body and his reputation is still not something he wants to be associated with.
“I tell him I’d give him $100 and I turn to my buddy and he says he’d also give him $100, not thinking he’d ever actually do it. Just having a fun chat at a hockey game. I mean, how would you even get onto the ice?”
That question was about to be answered.
“We said we’d give him $100 each, never thinking he would go over, and then literally in the next few seconds I had his hat on my lap and my buddy had his T-shirt on his lap,” says the accountant.
As Hurlbut made his way down to ice level, he shed his pants, then his underwear and soon he was wearing only a pair of red socks, which would prove to be his undoing. He manages to climb over the glass but as he hits the ice, his feet go flying out from under him. He lands on his back with a thud and smacks his head on the ice, knocking him out cold for several minutes.
As his seat-mate remembers it, people were cheering and enjoying the moment — even some of the Flames and Bruins players could be seen laughing — but when Hurlbut was lying still on the ice, you could sense there was some concern in the building. Paramedics were on the ice by now attending to him, and when he was eventually being stretchered off he was able to make a hand gesture to the crowd, bringing another round of cheers and a sense of relief.
Hurlbut says that he recalls some things relating to those fateful moments, while others he has pieced together from friends who were there or media reports.
“I remember going over the glass, the (penalty) box guy coming at me, and the next thing I know I woke up at the hospital,” says Hurlbut. “It was a long night.”
He spent that night at Foothills Hospital and was discharged at 7 am the next morning. He recalls having a massive headache: “Can’t even put a sentence together, got a concussion, don’t know what to do.” This being the early days of cellphones, communication was not what it is these days. Hurlbut hops in a cab and heads to the house of a friend who lives on the outskirts of Calgary, where he is able to get a couple of hours sleep. When he wakes up, he realizes he has a few issues to deal with, not the least of which is to let his fiancé know where he is and what happened to him, so he decides to take another cab back to Foothills Hospital. As fate would have it, one of his friends who was at the game with him just happens to pull up in a cab at the same time, trying to find out what happened to Tim and where he was.
“We just looked at each other and said, ‘F*ck of a night, wasn’t it?’”
They managed to get to the bus station and got on a bus back to Medicine Hat.
“I’m sitting there with the world’s worst hangover and there’s a guy sitting there reading a newspaper with me on the f*cking front page!” Hurlbut remembers. “And I’m smelling like death… you can imagine how I smelled. Then you have to stop at every goddamned town on the way home on Greyhound.”
Hurlbut quickly became a media sensation. In today’s terminology, he definitely went viral. His exposure was getting a ton of exposure, and not only in the local papers. News outlets from the CBC to NBC, ESPN to the Bleacher Report, the Globe and Mail and several other newspapers around the world were all picking up stories on the red-socked streaker who knocked himself out cold at a Flames game. Sports Illustrated did a two-page spread on him (no pun intended) and he was offered guest spots on The View and the Mike Bullard Show, which he declined at the suggestion of his lawyer.
“I’m 100% glad I did it”
But there would be a price to pay for his antics. Once he smoothed things over with his fiancé, who has since become his wife, there would also be the legal issues to deal with. Hurlbut said he was initially looking at the possibility of a five-year sentence and a $10,000 fine for interfering with public property. Luckily for him, however, his dad knew a high-profile attorney who took the case pro bono and was able to get the charges reduced to public drunkenness.
Hurlbut ended up being fined $2,500 and had to perform 35 hours of community service while also taking a course on the evils of alcohol abuse. On top of that, he also had to pay for the ambulance costs and took a good old-fashioned tongue lashing from Judge Cheryl Daniel, who failed to see the humour in the situation, telling Hurlbut he had made a “pathetic spectacle of yourself splayed naked on the ice for six minutes until you were covered.”
Most importantly for Hurlbut, however, he avoided all criminal charges so he has no record as a result of his moment of madness. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s safe to say that the guy who ended up flat on his back naked at an NHL game has very much landed on his feet.
Tim’s a mortgage broker now (submitted)
“I’m a mortgage broker and I’m also a mortgage lender, active in the finance industry,” explains Hurlbut when asked what he’s been up to for the past 20-plus years. “I’m also a developer. I’m building three homes in Medicine Hat right now. I’m refurbishing a $1.7 million downtown property, creating four B and Bs. I’m refurbishing downtown (Medicine Hat) because everybody whines and complains about it so I said f*ck you all, I’m doing it myself.”
When asked why he decided to strip off and hop the glass that night, Hurlbut says the money would have been nice—the guy sitting next to Tim who agreed to put up the cash said he felt some guilt over what happened and later anonymously mailed Tim’s mom $200 in cash — but more than that, it was just how he liked to have fun back then.
“I just liked to streak,” he explains. “I used to walk out of pubs naked all the time, just for a joke.
“When you’re hung like me, you gotta show it off,” he adds with a laugh. “It’s what I did back in the day… I just liked to party. One of my favourites was to go into the bathroom at the bar and walk out naked. Can’t do that stuff nowadays.”
When asked if his infamy has ever caused any issues in his business dealings, he said that happened just once but in general it has been very good for business and most people are delighted to find out he’s the world famous Calgary streaker.
“I’m 100% glad I did it,” says Hurlbut. “So many good opportunities have come from what could have been something bad. I’ve had one person ever who got up and walked out because of who I was when we were discussing a mortgage. They asked if I was the Calgary streaker and I said yup, and they said we can’t work with you. That was one of maybe 400 mortgages.”
He says people often ask him about that October night in 2002 and he has no problem telling the story. In fact, it led to one encounter he’ll never forget. While at a wedding in Mexico a few years back, Tim, a big hockey fan, got word that Brooks Laich, a former centre with the Washington Capitals and Toronto Maple Leafs, would also be attending the wedding. Hurlbut was excited at the prospect of meeting a longtime NHL veteran like Laich. He saw him but before he could get a word out, Laich said, “Tim, heard all about you and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
When reflecting on all that went down back in that fateful period, Hurlbut, now a dad with two kids of his own, says he only really has two regrets. He did not appreciate the way the media treated his mother at the time, with newspaper reporters calling her constantly for comments and one radio station calling her live on-air at 7 am to ask what she thought of her son’s antics and his upcoming court case.
The other thing that bothered him is something most guys can relate to. There was an iconic photo that went out, picked up by media outlets throughout the world. It shows Hurlbut climbing over the glass wearing only his red socks. In the photo, the stanchion that joins the two pieces of plexiglass appears to be obscuring his manhood, which allowed the photo to be widely published.
“Now I’m not bragging, ok, but it’s bigger than that slot that held that piece of glass, it’s bigger than an inch,” he says, before mentioning there may have been some tweaking going on in the dark room. “They photo-shopped it so they could put it on the front page of the newspaper, at least that’s what I heard.”
Despite his fears of being known as Tiny Tim, Hurlbut is able to look back on it all philosophically.
“Was it a bad situation? Yeah. But can you turn a bad situation into a good situation? Yeah, that’s on you.”
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