The Colorado Springs Backskate Bandits: A tale of hockey, heists, and chaos

In the early 1950s, Colorado Springs became home to a short-lived but unforgettable semi-pro hockey team called the Pikes Peak Ice Kings. The team, cobbled together by an ambitious local businessman named Frank “Skates” Malone, was meant to bring some frozen flair to a city more accustomed to rodeos and hiking. For five wild years, the Ice Kings entertained the locals, but their legacy would be defined less by their performance on the ice and more by their off-ice activities.

The Rise of the Ice Kings

The Ice Kings played out of the Garden Ice Arena, a drafty barn of a rink with terrible acoustics and a Zamboni that often doubled as a snowplow during the day. The team was a ragtag mix of former college players, failed NHL hopefuls, and even a couple of lumberjacks who’d never skated before but liked the idea of hitting people for a living.

While the team wasn’t great—they lost more games than they won—fans loved their scrappy attitude. The highlight of any game was their star forward, Jimmy “Cannon” McGraw, who could shoot a puck at 100 mph but couldn’t aim it to save his life. Cannon once knocked out a referee, three spectators, and a concession stand worker with stray shots in a single game.

Despite the enthusiasm, the Ice Kings faced two major problems:

1. Chronic Injuries: With little to no protective gear and a culture that celebrated brawling over finesse, the team was plagued by broken bones, missing teeth, and enough concussions to make them forget their own plays.
2. Terrible Pay: Players made barely enough to afford rent, let alone cover medical bills. Most of them held day jobs as butchers, mechanics, or bartenders to make ends meet.

The Heist Plan Begins

By their third season, frustration over the lack of pay reached a boiling point. Team enforcer Reggie “The Wall” Kowalski, known for his fists as much as his love of true crime novels, suggested a wild idea during a post-game beer session: bank robbery.

“Think about it,” Reggie slurred, waving his broken hockey stick for emphasis. “We already wear masks. We’re fast on skates. And we’ve got Cannon to shoot pucks through security cameras if we need to!”

The rest of the team laughed it off at first, but as paychecks dwindled and medical bills piled up, the plan started to sound more like a solution. By the end of the season, six players—led by Reggie—formed the Backskate Bandits, a secret side hustle that would go down in Colorado Springs lore.

The Heists

The Backskate Bandits’ first job was a local credit union on Tejon Street. The plan was simple: Reggie would distract the staff with his charm while goalie Tommy “Pads” O’Leary stood guard at the door, looking intimidating in full gear. Meanwhile, Cannon would use his puck-shooting skills to smash open a safe (this didn’t work, but thankfully the safe was unlocked).

Over the next two years, the Backskate Bandits pulled off a string of increasingly audacious heists, always wearing their hockey masks and leaving behind calling cards: pucks with the words “Goal for the Ice Kings” scrawled on them. Their most infamous heist involved robbing a bank near the Broadmoor Hotel while still wearing their jerseys from a game earlier that evening. Witnesses reported seeing “a bunch of sweaty guys in skates and helmets sprinting into the woods.”

The Downfall

The end came during the Ice Kings’ fifth season. The team was already struggling—half the roster was injured, attendance was down, and Frank Malone was on the verge of bankruptcy. But the final blow came when a rookie player, unaware of the heist side gig, accidentally spilled the beans to his girlfriend, who promptly told her father… who happened to be a detective with the Colorado Springs Police Department.

The cops pieced it together quickly. “It wasn’t hard,” said the lead investigator in a later interview. “They literally left hockey pucks at every scene and kept bragging about how fast they were. Also, why were they still wearing jerseys?”

During what would be their final game, police stormed the Garden Ice Arena and arrested half the team in the locker room. The other half tried to flee by skating out the back door but were foiled when Cannon accidentally fired a puck into the engine of their getaway car.

The Aftermath

With most of the players behind bars, the Pikes Peak Ice Kings folded a week later. The Garden Ice Arena was turned into a storage facility, and Frank “Skates” Malone fled town under the guise of a “scouting trip.” Local kids took over the rink, playing games they dubbed “Cops vs. Robbers Hockey.”

As for the Backskate Bandits, their legend lives on. While Reggie “The Wall” Kowalski and his crew served time, they became folk heroes in Colorado Springs, inspiring a series of bad movies and a minor-league team in the 1980s named the Colorado Springs Backskate Bandits.

Today, you can still find pucks from their heists for sale at local antique shops—each one a frozen reminder of the time hockey, crime, and chaos collided in Colorado Springs.