Jimmy Kantzavelos pushes a bin of hockey gear at a deep-cleaning facility in Etobicoke.Yader Guzman/The Globe and Mail
As stenches go, nothing rivals the funk of a beer league hockey player’s gloves after he zips his unwashed gear into a hockey bag and leaves it to fester in a garage for years.
That’s according to Jimmy Kantzavelos, and you should definitely take his word for it.
The 67-year-old is an expert in the dirty business of cleaning sports equipment. A mouse once jumped out at him when he opened an old hockey bag. He and his co-workers have encountered gear so mouldy it disintegrated in their hands. A prospective client recently asked them to salvage a bag of equipment that had been peed on by the family cat. Yet, old hockey gloves still take the cake – or whatever the malodourous opposite of cake would be. “Sometimes,” Kantzavelos said, “they smell worse than 15-year-old sewage.”
At Love Your Gear, equipment spins in a washing machine and a goalie's blocker is steamed down after being treated with 'pink sauce,' a solution for removing puck marks.
As the last days of summer give way to fall, hockey parents and players across Canada are preparing for a new season. For many, those preparations include holding their noses and unzipping hockey bags sealed since April.
If the smell that greets them is too much for a scoop of Tide in a basement washing machine to handle, Kantzavelos and his colleagues at Love Your Gear have the solution inside a 12,000-square-foot warehouse in an industrial park in southwest Toronto. They are willing to divulge most of the tricks of their trade, but not the deepest of their deep-cleaning secrets. Don’t ask what’s in the homemade pink sauce that removes puck marks from goalie pads. They’ll never tell.
Kantzavelos, a Greek immigrant with a trace of an accent and an impish smile, is known as Uncle Jimmy at work because his nephew, Tony Kantzavelos, 56, is Love Your Gear’s founder and owner. The sports-equipment-cleansing business is just one of 11 deep-cleaning enterprises he owns. The others bathe, disinfect and repair items such as wedding dresses, drapes, luggage, rugs, high-end purses, leather goods and shoes.
Although some of the younger Tony’s uncles – including Uncle Jimmy – once owned dry cleaning shops, it was his mother, a skilled dressmaker, who inspired his cleaning and repair empire.
“I grew up in the fashion industry,” Tony Kantzavelos, the owner, said. “I wanted to be in the business, in the fashion aspect. But in Canada, you can’t make any money making pants and shirts, right?” He found a niche restoring vintage leather fashions instead, allowing him to indulge his artistic side. “I wanted to paint leather jackets, restore them, change the color, do footwear, do crazy things.”
Tony Kantzavelos started his business in 2002 as a specialty supplier for dry cleaners. When customers brought in delicate items a corner shop couldn’t handle, such as furs, leather jackets and suede purses, dry cleaners sent them on to Tony. As time went on, he discovered clients liked having a one-stop shop for cleaning and fixing the most finicky of treasures, especially if he was willing to send trucks to pick them up for free.
Now he employs more than 75 people at two locations in Toronto: a rug-cleaning super centre in the northeast (the upper floor is a cavernous drying room that feels like an oven) and a main site in a former machine shop near Kipling Avenue and Dundas Street West, in Etobicoke.
Hockey gear dries next to wedding dresses, which are there to be cleaned before resale or storage.
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Inside the Etobicoke site, hundreds of plastic-wrapped wedding dresses hang from the ceilings. The gowns are there to be cleaned before brides resell them or put them into storage for sentimental safekeeping. One room off the main floor looks like an old-fashioned cobbler shop, with suede and leather shoes waiting to be fixed. Another, at the back, contains three man-sized spray booths for colouring leather.
In the centre of the facility is a series of long metal racks meant for hanging sports equipment to dry. Tony Kantzavelos installed them in early 2020 because the Love Your Gear side of the business was attracting more players from more sports, including lacrosse and football.
“Then the pandemic hit and we got wiped out,” he said. Not only did team sports grind to a halt, so did every event for which clients might need to deep-clean a gown or repair a fancy heel.
The area-rug division, Love Your Rug, saved the day – although Kantzavelos said credit should go to all the pandemic puppies and kittens who weren’t housebroken. “I was so happy that animals were peeing on the rugs,” he said, laughing. “That pulled us through the pandemic.”
Now, pandemic-related supply-chain snarls are boosting Kantzavelos’s business in a surprising way. Major sportswear makers are hiring his company to clean shipping containers full of products that turned mouldy as they sat in port for months longer than expected. The company just finished one job involving 84,000 pairs of running shoes.
How do you clean 84,000 pairs of sneakers? “Very carefully,” said Jim St. Pierre, national sales manager for Love Your Centre, the umbrella company that includes Love Your Gear. He rented a separate facility and hired 14 temporary staff members, who spent more than five weeks opening every shoe box and hand-cleaning every shoe that needed it.
Hockey bags await pickup in the equipment room at Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute in Toronto.
Moezine Hasham is founder of Hockey 4 Youth, the equipment's owner.
One day in late July, St. Pierre was at Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood to pick up nearly 30 bags of hockey equipment from Hockey 4 Youth, a program that provides free equipment, coaching and encouragement to new immigrants.
Moezine Hasham, Hockey 4 Youth’s founder, is a child of Ugandan refugees. He fell in love with the game when a neighbour in Vancouver gave him used hockey gear. At the start of every season, Mr. Hasham gets Hockey 4 Youth’s equipment professionally cleaned before handing it over to new players. (Love Your Gear normally charges $65 a bag or $85 for goalie bags, but it gives the charity a discount.)
As Hasham and Paul Hillman, the head of physical education at Marc Garneau Collegiate, pointed out after loading the bags onto the company’s truck, they take care to air out their equipment regularly during the season. This particular job was not going to be a tough one for Uncle Jimmy.
At Love Your Gear, helmets are wiped down with disinfectant.
The secret to cleaning hockey equipment, it turns out, is a mix of industrial dry-cleaning equipment and personal touches. Uncle Jimmy wiped the dust from each helmet, then placed them on the metal shelves of a Fresh Gear Cyclone ozone sanitizer. An hour later, the helmets emerged disinfected and deodorized. Separately, he loaded a pile of shoulder pads, chest protectors and hockey pants into a front-loading washing machine capable of cleaning 140 pounds of laundry at a time. He swaddled the gear in bath towels and blankets to prevent damage and popped in a scoop of detergent and a three-quarter scoop of sodium percarbonate, an eco-friendly alternative to bleach.
Later, he ran another cycle to deodorize the gear. He could have gone with the heavy-duty skunk-odour-control deodorizer, but the Hockey 4 Youth job called for light artillery, not the big guns.
So Uncle Jimmy selected an apple-scented deodorizer. The gear came out smelling faintly of an apple martini.