It is a shockingly young age, 23, to be a dinosaur.
And yet, the way things are going, he may soon be the last link we have to the tree branch.
Jason Spezza, you see, still uses wooden hockey sticks.
He showed up at practice yesterday with five of them, five wooden Sher-Wood sticks, all as carefully taped as freshly diapered babies, all nursed into the just-so position with blowtorch, rasp, file, sandpaper and prayer.
He carried them out as if he were a gardener about to stake tomato plants, not a hockey star soon to begin the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Other members of the Ottawa Senators took to the ice with their space-age-material composites, each player's stick a perfect computer-designed, engineered and manufactured match of the others with his name stencilled high on the handle. They carried along a spare only in case the one being used might snap, which happens in the National Hockey League about as often as draft beer is ordered in bars.
Spezza didn't have five sticks on the bench in case of breakage. He almost never breaks one. He wanted them there to check their personalities, to get a sense of which stick might hold that goal he'd love to score on Thursday evening, which ones felt exactly right when feeding the passes he hopes will help his Senators defeat the New Jersey Devils.
"It's all about the feel," he said.
"Wood is different - I like the way the puck dies on the stick when you take it."
There is, he says, a very different sensation between feeling a puck on a wooden stick and a composite stick, and while he giggles at the suggested comparison between prophylactic and no prophylactic, he also nods enthusiastically.
And yet, he is the only Senator still using a wooden stick, one of less than a dozen NHL players still sticking with the old standard.
Spezza is very fussy about his sticks. He has been known to pick through a fresh delivery of two dozen - each stick specially designed for him and manufactured to a mould - and yet not find a single one precisely to his liking.
In this, he is hardly unique.
Former Boston Bruins great Raymond Bourque was so fanatical about his sticks that there are tales of him working through a full gross - 144 - of his signature pattern sticks before deciding not a single one was worthy of taking out onto the ice.
The composite sticks, on the other hand, are almost always acceptable to the players, so detailed is the computer engineering. Because Spezza is becoming a big name to youngsters - the promised land of hockey stick sales - virtually every manufacturer has come to him promising to produce a composite stick every bit as good as the Sher-Woods he spends hours nursing to life.
He lets them all try; so far, none has lived up to promise.
Other players love their composites, which run, at the high end, about 10 times the price of $30 wooden sticks at the local sporting goods store.
While Jason Spezza might feel the puck knocks against them like they are made of tin, other players see the shockingly light yet firm sticks as hockey's equivalent of the big-headed golf driver, with pucks exploding off the blade when they shoot.
Often, of course, the stick itself explodes - a story that has become increasingly familiar during dramatic playoff games.
Spezza's teammate, Mike Fisher, said he finds he gets shots away much quicker and has been a believer the past seven seasons. He laughed at Spezza's reluctance to change: "I don't know how he uses that stick. It's about twice the weight of mine."
General managers despise the newer sticks for their costs, sending team stick expenditures soaring by hundreds of thousands of dollars over the old wooden stick budgets. Some admit to cringing when they see a player giving away one of the modern sticks to a fan.
Coaches have other reasons for disliking them.
"They drive me crazy," Senators coach Bryan Murray said.
Coaches regularly see their players breaking sticks at critical times. They believe, and almost everyone in hockey is talking about this lately, that far more shots are now missing the net that should be hitting the net, just because players have become more seduced by power than accuracy.
"In my opinion," said Murray, who carries a wooden stick in practices, "there are only five guys from a team who can benefit."
By next season, however, there may be only five guys in the entire NHL not using them.
And Jason Spezza, at least for the moment, figures to be one of them.
*****
Sticking around
Until a Montreal company began manufacturing hockey sticks in the late 1880s, most players made their own. A player would cut down an alder or hickory sapling, cut out three-foot sections of trunk with branches attached, and file the wood into the desired shape. These first sticks had short handles and small, rounded blades, much like field-hockey sticks. Stick development was slow and evolutionary. First the blades grew longer and squarer, allowing better control of the puck. Then, the shaft grew longer so that players lost the hunched-over stance of early games. However, the stick was still fashioned from a single piece of wood, which made it heavy and made the thin blades prone to splitting. In 1928, the Hilborn Company, a stick manufacturer in Montreal, produced what is acknowledged by some to be the first two-piece hockey stick. The new design, with separate pieces for the blade and shaft, freed stick makers from having to find appropriately shaped lumber and allowed blades to be replaced when they cracked. In the late 1960s, blades took their largest jump in shape change when they began to take on a curve. The next change came in the 1970s, primarily as a response to increased competition for wood supplies, when companies began to experiment with lamination as a way to use less and varied types of wood.
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