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When Fran Rider, now executive director of the Ontario Women's Hockey Association, decided she was interested in playing women's hockey, there wasn't much to choose from.
"It was 1967 and there was no place to play," she recalled today. "I saw an article in The Toronto Telegram about a tournament in Brampton and I went up there. I showed up and that's when I first met Mabel Boyd. She invited me to play on her team and that is how it started for me.
"There were players there who had never skated before but it didn't matter to Mabel. Anyone who had an interest in hockey had a place to play. She got me started and she did that for thousands and thousands of girls of all ages over the years. We owe it all to Mabel. She was one of the pioneers in women's hockey and she really opened up the opportunities for everyone."
Boyd died Monday at age 86. Her life is a reflection of the amazing challenges and amazing strides that women's hockey has made.
Boyd first fell in love with the thrill of patrolling up and down left wing while playing with boys her own age as a kid on Etobicoke Creek, when it could still freeze over.
She told former Mississauga News Sports Editor Mike Toth in his definitive book on the history of local sports, Birth to Millenium, Mississauga's Sports Heritage, that, "when we started, there was nobody to play against. We managed to put a team together and even found a sponsor (St. Lawrence Starch.) We played against teams from Brampton, Barrie, Mimico and Lakeshore."
When Mabel and her family moved to Tomken Rd. at Burnhamthorpe Rd. in 1956 to run their garden nursery business (C.E. Boyd and Sons) Mabel began playing baseball at the old St. Patrick's Church at the southwest corner of Dixie and Dundas.
Ever the organizer of a league she could play in, (nothing thrilled her more than playing) Boyd organized her first team of female baseball players in 1958. Pretty soon, the league was growing and Boyd was organizer, equipment manager, coach, publicity chair and just about everything else you care to name.
Then she turned to hockey, founding the Mississauga Girls' Hockey League in 1967 and mentoring it as it grew from 15 players to 200 teams in the 80s to the burgeoning enterprise it is today.
In the 1990s, Boyd was still invented leagues she could play in: the Women's Master Hockey League for those over 35. When she lined up against Mabel Walker in the Huntsville Honeys tournament, their combined ages totalled 144, not that the Mabels were counting. In her 70s she was on record as the oldest registered hockey player in Canada and she played until she was 74 or 75.
Her niece Michele Offer recalls that she and her sister could never miss a hockey game, because Aunt Mabel was always the one picking them up. "Heaven forbid that you couldn't lift your equipment bag because if you didn't have enough energy to do that, you didn't have enough energy to play," she laughs.
Boyd played hockey with her sister, daughters, and grand-daughters although she didn't get to play with any of her great-granddaughters.
Son Jim, who still lives not far from the Tomken homestead, remembers his mother playing ball with her children all night on the old farm where they lived on Browns Line. "At the end of the night, the dog's teeth would be bleeding because he played backfield behind us kids and a few balls got through us," he laughs.
His mother was as likely to be on the end of the wheelbarrow as her father. She was always physically strong. Boyd spent the last four years of her life at the Mississauga Life Care Centre across from Trillium Health Centre. "When she tied a knot in a bed sheet, the nurses couldn't untie it," says Jim. Her Alzheimer's disease kept her from accepting her induction into the Sports Hall of Fame in person.
When the family moved to Tomken Rd., the ice rink there would be flooded every night and kids would appear from all the streets around to play.
"If my mother ever ran for mayor of Mississauga, the only thing we would all be doing is playing baseball or hockey," jokes Jim. "Nobody would be fixing the roads."
Although she won lots of awards (Mississauga Sports Hall of Fame "builder", 1992 Most Outstanding Contribution to Community Sports, 25 Most Influential People in Mississauga Sports), Boyd is likely to be best remembered for the absolute joy she found in competition.
In Brian McFarlane's book Proud Past, Bright Future, One Hundred Years of Canadian Women's Hockey, Samantha Holmes recalled travelling as a 12-year-old, to the first-ever World Women's Hockey Championships played there.
"She is known as the grandmother of female hockey," says Holmes. "She had just arrived and she was happy to see someone from Mississauga. She asked me if I had my hockey equipment and, when I answered 'Yes,' she said. "I do too. Let's show the folks here in Ottawa how to play the game. Mabel is 68 and has been playing hockey for over 50 years. Also she started the Mississauga Hockey league, so if it wasn't for Mabel, I wouldn't be playing."
Countless others can say the same.
"She truly enjoyed watching other players and seeing them learn new skills," says Rider. "The game was always greater than a win or a loss. It was always about the joy of participation.
"She has left a huge, huge legacy," adds Rider, who followed in Boyd's pioneering footsteps. "She was a role model in women's hockey. And to show how far we've come, now our role models are Olympians."
The funeral service is 1:30 p.m. Friday at Skinner and Middlebrook in Port Credit.