A lot can happen in just a short period of time in any facet of life, so you can imagine the twists and turns that have fundamentally altered the history of hockey equipment manufacturing since the early 1990s, when Canstar Sports and its many brands – namely Bauer – dominated the industry.
Canstar is a predecessor company of Roustan Sports Ltd., and to say that it dominated is really an understatement.
An article published in The Globe and Mail in 1992 referred to Canstar as “the Wayne Gretzky of hockey gear.” And although the article also referred to the game of hockey “as Canadian as maple syrup,” this wasn’t entirely a case of a writer simply searching for easy metaphors. (1) Rather, the author used the Gretzky comparison to illustrate how the company, like The Great One himself, had achieved tremendous success at home in Canada before being successfully exported all around the world.
The various Canstar brands – Bauer, Cooper, Micron, Mega, Lange, etc. – generated approximately $80 million worth of sales in the United States and Europe in 1990, representing more than half of the company’s total revenue that year. Significantly, it was devoting two to three percent of its sales to research and development, which the article pointed out was “more than double the Canadian average.” This commitment to innovation and manufacturing, most of which was happening at home in Canada, was expected to help Canstar Sports remain a global industry leader. (2)
It was around this time that Canstar’s historic hockey stick factory in the Hespeler section of Cambridge, Ontario, under the direction of plant manager Ross Huehn and Canstar product manager Larry Koabel, evolved to begin producing high-end wooden Bauer sticks for use by NHL players.
For many years, the factory had produced budget-priced Cooper sticks and Hespeler-branded sticks before that.
The early 1990s marked a change in how things were done, and the marketplace responded.
“We always seemed to have pent-up demand on the stick side (of Canstar), and they kept growing every year,” Koabel, who is now Roustan Sports’ costing and purchasing manager, said in an interview. “And that's what drives the profits is volumes and the stick business. It's all about volumes.”
Roustan Sports still maintains spreadsheets of Bauer’s NHL clientele back in the mid-1990s, and it reads like a Hockey Who’s Who of the era. Bauer produced sticks for players from each of the 26 teams in the league at that time, including superstars like Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Pavel Bure and others. Even Gretzky is on the list, although that was his Easton era, so it’s not clear if he ever used his Bauer sticks in games. (See the sidebar below for a more comprehensive but by no means complete list of players.)
Canstar Sports had something else in common with Gretzky in that its remarkable success made it a target of bigger fish in the comparatively small pond of sports equipment manufacturing, which was going to go through a massive upheaval. Gretzky had to leave the Edmonton Oilers in 1988 due to changing market factors that were going to hinder the Oilers’ ability to keep paying him what he was worth. Likewise, footwear giant Nike became aware of Canstar’s success and decided to make its principals an offer they wouldn’t be able to refuse.
By this time, Canstar president and chief executive officer Gerry Wasserman, the man who was most responsible for its success, had left the company. He began his exit by transitioning first to the position of vice-chairman, replaced as president by Donald MacMartin, but he eventually left Canstar entirely and began running Weider Health and Fitness in Los Angeles – Weider fitness empire co-founders Joe and Ben Weider were, like Wasserman, natives of Montreal. MacMartin did not remain with Canstar long, though, and on Wasserman’s recommendation, he was succeeded in February 1994 by Pierre Boivin.
Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847: Chapter 9 – Canstar Sports 1 As a practice goalie with the Montreal Canadiens in the late 1950s, Gerald Wasserman put his life on the line every time he saw Bernie 'Boom Boom' Geoffrion coming down the wing and winding up for a slap shot.
Boivin is also a Montreal native and, like Wasserman was, he is a career executive with a deep interest in sports. One of his early roles was president of a Montreal-based sporting goods distributor called Norvinca. (3) He was working alongside Wasserman with Weider in California when he was invited to return to Montreal and take the reins of Canstar Sports.
One of his first tasks as the company’s new president was to meet with Nike and negotiate a research-and-development and licensing project that would see the shoe company distributing some of Canstar’s projects. That deal didn’t pan out, but in October 1994, the two firms began talking again. This time, though, the stakes were much higher.
In December, it was announced that Nike would buy Canstar Sports for a whopping $545.8 million. (4)
Nike chairman and co-founder Phil Knight was quoted as saying Canstar’s success in hockey was a major factor in the takeover.
“Canstar’s dominance in the elite ice skate market is unsurpassed, with more than 70 percent of NHL players wearing Canstar skates,” Knight said in an article published by the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. The article said Canstar would “remain an autonomous unit in the Nike’s worldwide empire,” but noted in reference to the company’s hockey stick factory in Hespeler and the Bauer skate and equipment plant in nearby Galt that it was “still uncertain what impact, if any, the deal might have on the Cambridge operations.” (5)
Nike was adamant that Canstar would keep running as it had, “without any change to its structure, operations, management or personnel.” Boivin certainly seemed convinced, assuring a Montreal Gazette reporter at the time of the sale that he could “take that to the letter... We’ll be fully autonomous and a stand-alone company. When it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” (6)
But he was singing the exact opposite tune less than three years later, after Nike had begun to dismantle the Canstar Sports empire piece by piece.
“I’m an adherent of the philosophy, ‘If it’s not broken, break it.’ The time to reinvent is when things are going well, not when your business is struggling,” Boivin, now the president and CEO of what had been renamed Bauer Inc., told The Financial Post Magazine in June 1997, by which time the business was indeed struggling.
“The reality was that we had peaked with our internal competencies and financial capabilities. We felt that Nike would liberate us and give us the opportunity to advance to the next level,” Boivin said. (7) There was no elaboration of what he meant by “liberate,” and there was no explanation in this burst of corporate jargon for his apparent change of heart.
It may have come from the same place that others, like Larry Koabel, had resisted going to. Soon after the sale was completed, Koabel was sent to Nike corporate headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Koabel was a successful product manager working in the marketing department in Canstar’s Mississauga office after having begun his career at the hockey stick factory in 1974, when it was owned and operated by Cooper Canada. He had long been accustomed to working in environments where he was encouraged and trusted to perform his various duties in ways that made sense to him, based on his experience and his knowledge.
Now it was made clear that Canstar employees would be expected to do things differently – the so-called Nike way – even though Nike executives had no comparable experience or knowledge in the fields where people like Koabel excelled. He saw the visit to Beaverton for what it was.
“They sent me to be reprogrammed,” he said. “I knew when I walked out of there, there wasn’t going to be one factory that was going to survive. These people were in no way going to do anything good for hockey.”
Koabel made his exit soon after, as overtures to move to Montreal didn’t interest him, nor did other opportunities to stay with what remained of Canstar as it transitioned to Bauer Inc. and eliminated Canstar’s other brand names, including legendary Cooper. (The company would soon be renamed again to Nike Bauer Hockey Inc.)
“Nike, they were so far out to lunch when it came to hockey. It was ridiculous. And their attitude was just, you couldn’t tell them anything, because they were Nike,” he said, adding that Boivin didn’t help matters as a chief executive because, while he did have a sports background, he was really not a hockey guy. “Boivin didn’t know as much about hockey as he did about the ski business.”
It was in January 1997 when Nike announced that Bauer was “underperforming” and would be “repositioned.” A Montreal Gazette reporter noted that Nike had a history of outsourcing its production to Asia and wondered if Bauer would be following that path. Boivin managed to answer that question with “no” and “never say never” in the same interview.
“We have an ongoing responsibility to make sure that we’re globally competitive,” he said. “But the bottom line is that there are no plans for layoffs.” (8)
If anyone believed that statement, they were in for an unpleasant surprise when it was announced only three months later that the skate and equipment plant in the Galt section of Cambridge would begin to wind down its operations, putting more than 400 people out of work. The plan then was for Canadian skate and equipment production to be consolidated at the company’s factory in Saint-Jerome, Quebec, but it was made clear that no jobs would be added at that facility. A spokesperson confirmed the obvious, that outsourcing would be the outcome, claiming it was “because of very competitive pricing” by rival manufacturers already operating overseas. (9)
Another reporter, quoting a disgruntled worker who was losing his job in Cambridge, alleged that, “Nike never had any interest in preserving Bauer’s operations. All it wanted was the legendary Bauer name and access to the company’s technical expertise, so it could teach workers in Asia how to make hockey skates.” (10)
That point of view would have been hard to refute when, within four years, the Saint-Jerome factory had also been gutted, and the Nike Bauer head office in Montreal was closed and moved across the US border to Greenland, New Hampshire. Only a skeleton crew was being maintained in research and development in Saint-Jerome so that the company could continue to qualify for tax credits from the province of Quebec. (11)
As Chris Zimmerman tells the story, there’s more to it than that.
Zimmerman, now the St. Louis Blues’ president and CEO of business operations, had joined Nike in 1995 as the company’s advertising director for North America. He remembers that Nike had taken notice of the booming inline skate market, which Wasserman had cultivated as he built Canstar into an industry giant. Nike was still very much a footwear and apparel company but saw inline skates as a natural progression in footwear. Unfortunately, they were late to the game and did not foresee that the roller-blading boom was, in reality, a fad that had played out.
“I think about a week or two after Nike bought Bauer, that market started a decade-long crash,” Zimmerman said in an interview.
“When Nike bought Canstar, they didn't really buy it for the hockey business. They bought it for the roller blade business,” Mark Duggan, another Nike executive of the era, said in a separate interview. “Nike wanted to get into that business because it was something that everybody had told them – you need to get into this business because it’s so big. At one point, I think Rollerblade, the company, was worth almost a billion dollars, so it couldn't be ignored.”
In retrospect, Koabel’s memory of being sent to Oregon to be “reprogrammed,” as he put it, bears out because it appears that Nike was still trying to figure out its own strategy at the same time. It was trying to build revenue in products and in a market it didn’t understand as well as it should have.
“The hockey part of it was important, but it wasn't the priority as I understand it,” Duggan said. “And the business model that Canstar had was not necessarily the same business model that Nike was familiar with, meaning that Canstar owned a lot of factories. Nike doesn't really own factories – they lease them, or they contract exclusively with factories.
“It was an interesting acquisition. The problem became that the roller blade business died quickly. I mean, it went from, I want to say it was a $200 million business with Bauer, and it ended up being worth about $15 million when Zimmerman took over. So it went from a significant revenue to almost, what's going on here?”
In retrospect, then, it’s understandable that Bauer was “underperforming” by 1997 as far as Nike was concerned. Boivin, having overseen the beginning of the end of the good times, left the company in 1999 to become president of the Montreal Canadiens. His replacement didn’t last, and Zimmerman eventually stepped in to become president and chief executive officer of what was soon renamed Nike Bauer, with the parent company putting its stamp – or, more accurately, its swoosh – on its subsidiary.
Unlike Boivin, Zimmerman was a hockey guy, with serious credentials. A native of Waccabuc, New York, he had played hockey since childhood and was good enough to play four years of NCAA Div. I at the University of Vermont, where he earned a BA in economics. He then served as an assistant hockey coach at Babson College, a Div. II program, while studying for his MBA. In fact, being given the opportunity to coach at the end of his playing days was what drew him to Babson, where the coach was future New York Islanders bench boss Steve Stirling.
“I would say I was mostly a third-line kind of guy, working up and down and nothing flashy, but trying to maximize whatever talent I had,” Zimmerman said when asked to describe himself as a player. He is credited with having played 123 games with the Vermont Catamounts between 1977 and 1981, scoring a total of 22 goals and 60 points.
“I had an amazing experience, and then I got to coach. I had done a lot of hockey camps and had a passion for coaching, and so when I went to get an MBA, I spoke to them about working as an assistant coach, and I did that at Babson for two years.”
Zimmerman worked in the advertising business in New York City for a decade before joining Nike as its North American director of advertising in 1995, just after the deal closed to buy Canstar. He took over Nike’s golf business in 2000, and then in 2003, he was invited to head up the Nike Bauer division. The hockey equipment industry was continuing its transformation, as other shoe and apparel companies were moving into sport and creating an even more crowded marketplace alongside the traditional players.
Earl Takefman, the former president and chief operating officer of Charan, had quickly found his way back into the world of hockey after that company sold off what had been Cooper Canada and imploded. In 1990, he became the co-chief executive officer of SLM International Inc., a Montreal-based firm that acted as a holding company, similar to Canstar Sports’ predecessor, Warrington Products. One of the firms it had acquired was Sport Maska Inc., which – small world – owned CCM after snatching it away from Jack Cooper and Cooper Canada in the early 1980s.
Unfortunately, Takefman hadn’t learned much about hockey equipment manufacturing in the interim, and SLM International went bankrupt in 1995.
Enter Gerry Wasserman, the turnaround expert who, after leaving Canstar Sports and successfully operating Weider Health and Fitness in California, was living in retirement in Malibu. Wellspring Associates LLC took control of SLM and, in late 1996, enticed Wasserman to come aboard as the new chairman, CEO and president.
“I wouldn’t have come out of retirement for any other company,” he told the Montreal Gazette. “I think I know a little bit about hockey, and they convinced me this is an opportunity to resurrect a company that was truly in dire straits.” (12)
Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847: Chapter 10 – Canstar Sports 2The business world mostly remembers the early 1990s as a difficult time due to a significant recession in North America that lasted for more than two years, but the sporting goods industry in Canada was a sector of the economy that surprisingly thrived during that time.
As he had done with Warrington Products/Canstar Sports, Wasserman oversaw SLM’s transformation into a new entity called The Hockey Company, and its brands eventually included not only CCM but also Canadien, Jofa, Titan and Koho.
By the time Wasserman exited the company and retired permanently, it billed itself as the world’s largest manufacturer of hockey equipment and had an exclusive licence to make and sell jerseys for all 30 NHL teams at the time. (13)
The Hockey Company had three manufacturing centers around the world, the largest being in Montreal, and approximately 1,000 of its 1,300 employees worked in Canada. It claimed that its share of the global hockey market was 30 percent, compared to Bauer’s 19 percent, and that at least 99 percent of NHL players were using its equipment. (14)
But, as with Canstar, The Hockey Company’s success made it a target for acquisition.
It went public in June 2003, and Reebok, following Nike’s lead from a few years earlier, came forward with an offer that was too good to turn down. In April 2004, it bought The Hockey Company for $436 million. (15)
Unlike Nike, however, Reebok committed to Canada by moving its Canadian head office to a new headquarters in Montreal and maintaining research and development and some manufacturing there. That’s still largely the case even though there have been a few ownership and name changes over the years, beginning in 2005 when Reebok itself was acquired by Adidas. The hockey sector of the business was first renamed Reebok Hockey, then Reebok-CCM in 2007, and then simply CCM in 2016. It has been owned by two different private equity firms since 2017. The manufacturing of hockey equipment has mostly left Canada, but CCM’s head office remains in Montreal, in a new headquarters building.
Other new players in the industry included yet another footwear company, New Balance, and its subsidiary Warrior Hockey (now Warrior Sports), which right from the beginning manufactured composite sticks, made of carbon fiber, resin and foam.
Easton had entered the pro market in the 1980s with its aluminum-shafted sticks – Brad Park is believed to have been the first NHLer to use them – and then made a huge splash in 1990 by convincing Wayne Gretzky to drop his wooden Titans and play with them, joining other all-stars like Brett Hull, Brian Leetch and Scott Stevens. (16) Easton eventually started building its own composite stick, the well-received Easton Synergy. Even Canstar Sports had dipped its toes in the water as far back as 1994 with its own composites, produced at a factory near Ottawa. (17)
This early experimentation was apparently not successful and, as Zimmerman notes, Nike Bauer’s business when he took over in 2003 “was not strong.” The company lagged behind Easton and CCM in general, he said, “and the stick business, they just didn’t have a meaningful composite stick offering, and the wood stick market had crumbled.
“We had to make some significant changes... Nike had lost over $100 million (on Nike Bauer) by the time I joined the business.”
Players of all ages and abilities were finding that they could shoot faster and more accurately with lighter composites than with wooden sticks, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t as durable and cost significantly more.
The writing was on the wall as far as wooden sticks were concerned. There would always be a market for them, but it wasn’t going to be as it was before. The NHL clientele that plant manager Ross Huehn and product manager Larry Koabel had carefully cultivated in Hespeler was shifting away from them.
The first real sign of trouble was a shutdown of the factory that lasted seven weeks in the summer of 2003 due to unexpected lower demand for sticks. Production had only just begun again when it was announced in early October that the plant would close for good no later than March 2004. The decision had been made at Nike Bauer headquarters in New Hampshire, but Zimmerman, much to his credit, showed up to deliver the bad news in person.
“It wasn’t really a discretionary decision,” he says now. “It was really one that had to happen along with other facility reductions or closures.”
Zimmerman might have been heartened by what he didn’t know at the time. He would definitely have been surprised to know then that not only would the business still operate in 2025, but he would also still be connected to it.
Even though Nike Bauer was closing the doors, the Hespeler hockey stick factory still had almost two decades of life left in it, thanks to the employees who put their hearts into every stick they made. They were the key to saving the wooden hockey stick business and paving the way for its revitalization at its current home, Roustan Sports Ltd. in Brantford. The next chapter will tell how they did it.
The historic hockey stick factory in the Hespeler section of Cambridge, Ontario, was in its heyday in the 1990s, when it manufactured Bauer sticks and blades for players from every NHL team. According to records maintained by Roustan Sports Ltd., this is a sample of just some of the skaters and goalies – among them numerous Stanley Cup champions and more than a dozen future Hockey Hall of Famers – who received sticks and/or blades from the Hespeler plant.
It should be noted that the players listed here did not necessarily use their Bauer sticks in games and may have ordered them for promotional or other purposes. For instance, it’s well known that Wayne Gretzky mainly used Easton sticks during the last decade of his playing career.
*Daniel Alfredsson, Ottawa Senators
*Ed Belfour, Chicago Blackhawks
Rod Brind’Amour, Philadelphia Flyers
*Pavel Bure, Vancouver Canucks
Wendel Clark, Toronto Maple Leafs
Eric Desjardins, Montreal Canadiens
Shane Doan, Winnipeg Jets
Adam Foote, Colorado Avalanche
*Grant Fuhr, St. Louis Blues
*Doug Gilmour, Toronto Maple Leafs
Adam Graves, New York Rangers
Travis Green, New York Islanders
*Wayne Gretzky, Los Angeles Kings
Bill Guerin, New Jersey Devils
Derian Hatcher, Dallas Stars
Kevin Hatcher, Dallas Stars
*Dale Hawerchuk, Philadelphia Flyers
Kelly Hrudey, Los Angeles Kings
Curtis Joseph, Toronto Maple Leafs
Kenny Jonsson, New York Islanders
Ed Jovanovski, Florida Panthers
Sami Kapanen, Hartford Whalers
Nikolai Khabibulin, Winnipeg Jets
Saku Koivu, Montreal Canadiens
*Mario Lemieux, Pittsburgh Penguins
Trevor Linden, Vancouver Canucks
*Eric Lindros, Philadelphia Flyers
Kirk Maltby, Detroit Red Wings
Markus Naslund, Vancouver Canucks
Michael Peca, Buffalo Sabres
*Chris Pronger, St. Louis Blues
Mike Richter, New York Rangers
*Denis Savard, Chicago Blackhawks
Ryan Smyth, Edmonton Oilers
*Scott Stevens, New Jersey Devils
*Mats Sundin, Toronto Maple Leafs
Darryl Sydor, Dallas Stars
Tim Thomas, Boston Bruins
Rick Tocchet, Los Angeles Kings
*Mike Vernon, Detroit Red Wings
Peter Zezel, St. Louis Blues
* - Honored Member of the Hockey Hall of Fame
Jonathon Jackson is a hockey historian based in Guelph, Ontario.
Follow along as we post new chapters of Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847 on TheHockeyNews.com.
Read the previous chapter: Chapter 10 – Canstar Sports 2
(1) Harvey Enchin, “Canstar pirouettes across the big pond,” The Globe and Mail, February 10, 1992.
(2) Enchin, “Canstar pirouettes.”
(3) Pat Hickey, “Habs fill Corey’s post,” Montreal Gazette, August 28, 1999.
(4) Francois Shalom, “Nike to buy Canstar for $545.8 million,” Montreal Gazette, December 15, 1994.
(5) Tom Nunn, “Nike to buy top area sports gear company,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, December 15, 1994.
(6) Shalom, “Nike to buy Canstar.”
(7) Shona McKay, “Marriages of convenience,” The Financial Post Magazine, June 28, 1997.
(8) Francois Shalom, “Changes are afoot at skatemaker Bauer,” Montreal Gazette, January 11, 1997.
(9) Carol Goodwin, “400 lose jobs at Bauer,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, April 11, 1997; François Shalom, “Nike just does it to Cambridge plant,” Montreal Gazette, April 12, 1997.
(10) John Heinzl, “Nike’s hockey plans put Bauer on thin ice,” The Globe and Mail, July 2, 1997.
(11) Francois Shalom, “Olympic great Boucher among turfed workers,” Montreal Gazette, June 6, 2001.
(12) Francois Shalom, “CCM is back in the game,” Montreal Gazette, February 17, 1997.
(13) “Hockey Co. snags NHL deal,” Montreal Gazette, June 1, 2000; “The Hockey Co. gets financing,” Montreal Gazette, February 20, 2001.
(14) David Bruser, “Reebok laces up CCM deal,” Toronto Star, April 9, 2004.
(15) David Bruser, “Reebok laces up CCM deal.”
(16) Don Campbell, “Aluminum sticks, Gretzky approved,” Ottawa Citizen, February 3, 1991.
(17) Oscar Rojo, “New hockey stick packs a lot, Canstar Sports says,” Toronto Star, June 10, 1994.
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