Throwing It Back To The TPS Response
Last Week On Throwback Hockey Gear: The CCM X-Ray Bucket
I’ll never forget the first time I walked into a hockey pro shop and saw the TPS Response standing there in the stick rack. I was probably a 1st or 2nd year squirt so obviously I couldn’t just walk in there and purchase one myself. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have any disposable income. The only thing I had in my pockets was about $3.75 from my mom to go buy a pretzel and a Powerade from the snack stand. But the moment I laid eyes on the TPS Response, I knew that I had to have it.
I feel like people my age, not all millennials but very late 80s/very early 90s millennials, had it the best when it came to growing up with hockey gear. Because we had a little bit of everything. When you first started playing, everybody was still going full wooden twigs. Shoutout to the Sher-Wood 5030 Featherlite Coffey curve, possibly the greatest stick ever assembled to this day. But then as you got a little bit older, the 2-piece sticks came were introduced to the world and if you weren’t rocking with a Z-Bubble then you might as well have just retired because nobody on your team was passing you the puck. Then it was only like 2 or 3 years after that, that the one piece composite sticks came into our lives and your entire life was changed forever.
So here I am. Little 10-year-old Jordie wandering into the pro shop after practice and I see this yellow twig staring me in the eyes. It was the first time I ever felt love before. I’d be spending the entire weekend at the rink for a Christmas tournament and just look at it like Ralphie stared at the Red Ryder BB Gun. And you know what? I’d say there was more of a chance to shoot somebody’s eye out with the Response than with a BB gun.
Now I was too young to really care about the technology in the blade. I know that it was designed to allow you to rip a clappy faster than fuck. I’m sure if I was a beer leaguer at the time that I’d be getting off to that. But you can’t even take slapshots in squirts so I was strictly in it for the yellow. I know the yellow Synergy Grip was out around the same time and ultimately guys like Marty St. Louis made that stick more popular than the Response. But I’ll go to my grave saying that the Response will forever remain the GOAT of yellow sticks.
There was nothing better than seeing that flash of yellow as someone ripped a shot about 5 million miles per hour with this bad boy. It was still such a new phenomenon. Something of the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The silver and orange Synergies. The yellow Response. It all added that extra flash that the game was waiting for. We’ll get to some of the other sticks that changed the game over the next few weeks but the TPS Response holds a special place in my heart which is why we had to start off with that one.
P.S. – I’ve gotten a ton of suggestions for other pieces of throwback hockey gear to blog about. You guys have been great with that and feel free to keep sending in more suggestions. I’ll try to get to the majority of them and just know that if I don’t get around to responding, it’s probably because that specific piece of gear has already been submitted a few times before.