David Ayres Was a Hockey Hero. Now He’s Making a Movie His Own Way

David Ayres was hitting the lowest point of his life — the lowest point, really, of any life. Having endured a kidney transplant and all the medical issues that come with it at 27, he was, several years later, feeling he had no reason to live, nothing motivating him to even get out of bed in the morning. 

Ayres had once been a promising hockey goalie. But the medical issues ended all that without even a whiff of the minors, and now the Ontario native, living on added but borrowed time, wondered why he should even go on. He met with a friend and explained his situation; she encouraged him to get help and maybe even a job in a rink? He had long been versed in matters of ice maintenance. This way, he could be around the game he loved and perhaps even get in a little scrimmaging on the side. He took a job as an equipment and operations person, ending up at a rink in Calgary.

So began a journey that would bring the workaday maintenance man from a modest Toronto suburb back from the brink — and, eventually, to a place where he became the oldest goalie to win an NHL regular-season game, the only goalie to come out of the stands to win an NHL game, and to one of the most unusual folk heroes modern sports has ever known.

Along the way Ayres has also become both a Hollywood cautionary tale and an inspirational example, a man once broought aboard by Disney and CAA who nonetheless demonstrates (he hopes) the power of going your own indie way. And has done so with the kind of diffidence that can only come from a lifetime in the sports backwaters.

“I have to admit I didn’t imagine a lot of it playing out this way,” Ayres says with an everyman shrug, “I just wanted to be on the ice.” He didn’t realize how slippery that would make things.

**

The night of February 22, 2020 was not, as sports dates go, one that anyone might’ve expected historians to pen chapters about. The NFL season was three weeks finished; MLB’s opening day was four weeks away (and eventually thwarted by COVID); the lineup of NBA and NHL games was unremarkable. Eleven hockey games were played that night, two of them going to shootouts. 

The contest between the Carolina Hurricanes and Toronto Maple Leafs at Scotia Bank Arena in downtown Toronto was not one of them. The box-score shows the Canes winning 6-3, a routine victory in a humdrum part of the calendar.

But peer a little deeper and you’ll see the winning goalie was one David Ayres, a 42-year-old ice-maintenance man for the Maple Leafs’ minor-league affiliate Marlies three kilometers west on Lakeshore Boulevard, a 42-year-old who had never been in an NHL game before that night — a 42-year-old who had bought some snacks and was hanging out in the stands when the game began.

Thanks to the Emergency Backup Goalie rule that has both teams retaining the same neutral player in case of multiple injuries — think the “official quarterback” from childhood touch-football games — Ayres was technically capable of playing that night. (Early in the morning, before his official operations job began with the Marlies, he would often practice with the team as a scrimmage goalie.) 

More than that — thanks to the so-called “EBUG” rule, Ayres was technically capable that night of playing for the visiting team. So when both Canes goalies went down to injury in the game’s first 30 minutes with the club up 3-1, Ayres got a text that he might want to hurry down to the locker room.

And that’s how the 42-year-old sometime-Zamboni driver ended up in front of 18,000 of his hometown fans, as a member of the hometown organization — playing against his hometown team. He had been wearing a Leafs T-shirt to show that hometown support. He didn’t even take it off — he just pulled over it the Hurricanes jersey he was hastily handed.

After rushing onto the ice, Ayres gave up goals on each of the first two shots — who wouldn’t? But then he made one save, then another, and another. Somehow, in the period-plus of hockey that followed, Ayres stopped all eight of the next shots, against All-Stars like Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner. “I don’t think they took it easy on me,” Ayres recalls of those players. “Maybe they could’ve taken a step or two in but only a few times.” 

The Hurricanes, meanwhile, scored three goals. And when the final horn sounded, Ayres had the win, the first-ever in the decades-long history of EBUG goalies. With both Canes and Leafs players mobbing him, it was probably the only time in sports history both the winning and losing team were exultant. Ayres had achieved his dream: he had played and won in the NHL. And won the adoration of a continent in the process.

**

One byproduct in our attention-competitive world of doing something extraordinary as an ordinary person is that it tends to attract Hollywood people. Lots and lots of Hollywood people.

In the days after his improbable win, Ayres got calls from and took impromptu meetings with representatives of no fewer than 27 production companies — all electrified by his story, all swearing they and they alone could do it justice. Ayres listened to them all patiently, then decided to go with James Corden and his production company Fulwell 73. 

Corden had called Ayres shortly after the game just to congratulate the goalie — the host and performer saw a little of his own story as a humble middle-class son of a Bible salesman who’d put in the hard work and was touched by fate. Corden was one of the few not pitching him on a movie, just telling the ice-maintenance man he thought what he did was pretty cool. “It just seemed genuine, which I really liked,” Ayres says. 

Ayres soon signed with an agency, CAA, and made a development deal with Disney, with Corden’s company producing. He was on his way to a new Hollywood career. In the outside world COVID raged and Ayres, put out of a job by the shutdown of all professional hockey, had to take remote work as a refrigeration salesman — he knew ice, after all. But on Zoom calls and in his mind, he was on his way to becoming the next Rudy.

Unfortunately another byproduct of attracting Hollywood in our media-competitive world is that everyone in it thinks they know the best way to tell your story. Though assured early on he would be an integral part of the movie — he could even be in front of the camera shooting hockey scenes — Ayres was not consulted on the script, did not talk to any writers and, indeed, after a while had trouble hearing from his agents. “I don’t wish anyone anything bad but it all started to leave a bad taste in my mouth,” he says.

What little he did hear didn’t fill him with hope. Disney seemed interested in turning his story into a comedy. Sounded fun — except Ayres didn’t feel particularly comedic about what happened. He had overcome a kidney transplant (his mother had donated it), depression, a divorce and a whole lot of early mornings and late nights in arena-operations jobs. Most devastatingly was the cancer-related death of his father — a train conductor who when he was younger quit his job to be close to his family, and also Ayres’ closest friend and coach — not too long before the big night. Getting onto the ice wasn’t a light tale — it was a testament to the power of grit. Ayres loved Rudy and Invincible and Miracle. They put a smile on your face, sure, but only after leaving a lump in your throat. And Disney was disregarding all of that. 

“I do a lot of inspirational speeches and I always tell people it’s not the hockey — sports just happens to be my path,” he says. “The real message is that just because something bad happens in your life you can’t give up on what you want; you have to find the strength to keep going even when you’re fragile. Hope in fragile times, that’s what it’s about.”

Disney also wanted a big female romantic lead at the arena that night. But though Ayres had been married in 2020 and his wife was at the game, he subsequently underwent a bitter divorce and didn’t want his ex-wife represented in the movie.

Ayres had landed the golden ticket — how many people working ordinary jobs find the country’s most famous studio wanting to make a movie about them? — only to learn he deeply didn’t want the prize.

When the Disney option lapsed a few years later, Ayres decided not to shop it anew. Instead, he chose to do something very different: hire a writer who’d never had a produced screenplay in his life.

**

Jim Tamburino is not someone, if your Hollywood project is hitting the skids, you’d normally bring on to get it back on track. The Long Island fortysomething has worked an assortment of entertainment-world odd-jobs without getting a movie made, while also focusing on other pursuits like a hockey fundraiser near his hometown. 

But he has a passion for the sport and, as is evident from even a short conversation with him, a knack for envisioning a dramatic cinematic story. He had a vision for this movie — it would begin that 2020 night, flash back to Ayres’ dark depressive days and culminate back on the ice in Toronto. More important, he understood the tone the subject wanted: hopeful but serious.

“It felt to me right away like a story about someone who just works really hard not knowing it would work out, but that’s OK because he just loved what he did,” says Tamburino. That vibe was captured by a scene after the game that Tamburino includes in his script: a bunch of Ayres’ friends want to take him out to celebrate the moment. But as he loads his equipment back in his truck, he declines — he has to be at the arena for practice and work early the next morning.

So back and forth the pair went, draft after draft, hammering out issues both structural and specific, Ayres doing it on breaks from his new job as a freight-train conductor between Ontario and New York. (He does still play, at 48, in an Ontario senior league.) The script, he says, kept improving, before it eventually became a potent, tidy look at one man and the obstacles he overcame — the obstacles, through his various forms of ordinariness, Ayres hopes everyone could overcome. Oh, and through the magical-thinking of screenwriting, the woman with Ayres at the game was now his kidney-donating mother. This was a chance to do the fairy-tale over, and even better.

Which brings the story to the present day. Before Ayres had a weak script and a lot of interest. Now he has what he says is a strong script and no interest. But this is the Zamboni Goalie, and that kind of thing doesn’t bow him. He has brought on two entertainment-world figures, an indie director named Dennis Latos and an indie producer named David Schuster, as producers. Neither has a ton of big-time credits either. But Ayres has been with the big-time. He didn’t like the big-time. So he and Tamburino are going another route. They’re hoping this producing pair can raise some money for an indie project. (Schuster says in an email that “There are some hockey greats associated with pro hockey and the NHL, names like Maurice Richard, Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky.” Ayres, with very different stat lines but a similar spirit, can he hopes now join them, he says.)

Ayres and Tamburino have ideas on who else could be involved. The have talked to David Boreanaz as a possible director; the hyphenate is a Flyers super-fan and feels the game in his bones. Actors have not been consulted, but the duo like Wyatt Russell, who not only starred in Goon: Last of the Enforcers but played goalie in Europe, and so would understand both movement and the mindset. They feel like Hollywood gave up on them. But they’ve not given up on a movie. 

There’s something fitting about the film odyssey they’re on. After all, the story itself is about not doing things the easy way.

“I think about that a lot,” Ayres says. “How a movie about my journey is as hard and winding as the journey itself. But that’s OK. I mean, I have to learn my own lesson, right? I have to believe it will work out, no matter how dark it seems, no matter how many years it takes.”

Meanwhile he and Tamburino go over the script again and again. The latest draft follows the same flashback structure, though now with a twist: it doesn’t end that night of the game. It ends with Ayres as a train conductor, fulfilling the dream his late father never saw through. As he always said, it was never about the hockey.