Scraping The Ice Fantastic All E Are On Zamboni Driver Cindy Davis When She Hauls Ice At The Spokane Coliseum

Cindy Davis whirls around the Spokane Coliseum on a big red machine, fixing her gaze on the ice and her mind on nothing but smoothing out slushy divots.

She’s learned to block out the insults of “woman driver” and comments about how she looked better in a tux than a Pennzoil racing jacket.

Only the most creative musings of hockey fans - many in various stages of drink, and others too young to imbibe - get past her steely concentration.

“We love you, Zamboni Woman,” a quartet of pubescent boys regularly yells in unison from the railing above the Spokane Chiefs’ bench.

“I think it’s hilarious,” the soft-spoken Davis says.

The 23-year-old Prosser, Wash., native pays her way through Eastern Washington University by driving an ice resurfacer that hockey fans know universally as a Zamboni.

(The city of Spokane owned Zambonis for nearly 40 years before buying a Canadian brand called an Olympia in 1991.)

First, Davis mastered the mechanics of the 3-1/2-ton beast. Then she worked on public relations.

Lesson No. 1, don’t screw up in front of 6,000 rowdy Saturday night hockey fans.

If that fails, there’s lesson No. 2: Look cool and act resourceful.

The part-time job pays $6.25 an hour. It beats flipping burgers or rolling burritos, says Davis, who answered an ice crew ad in the school newspaper.

“I have fun. It’s nice to see little kids wave to me,” says the shy aspiring math teacher who expects to graduate from EWU next winter.

Zamboni drivers don’t just walk in off the street.

They have to separate themselves from several other members of the ice crew with punctuality, dedication and attention to detail.

Most of the time, they’re helping paint the ice, install the nets and scoop up slush during Chiefs’ games.

Driving is the glamour job - eight-minute trips over the ice before the game, between periods and after the contest. The ice must be groomed regularly and expertly to remove deep furrows dug by skates.

“Cindy is a great employee and very well-loved here,” says Dave Gebhardt, her boss.

At 5 a.m. Wednesday, Cindy and four EWU students she knows from Prosser were on the Coliseum floor removing dirt and sawdust that had stuck to the ice during a three-day rodeo. A hockey game was only hours away.

“It’s that small-town mentality. They worked their butts off. If it wasn’t for Cindy, we’d have never made it,” Gebhardt says.

Davis is the fourth woman to drive the Coliseum ice but the first with this much experience. She is in her second full season as the ice driver. Last year, the sponsor was Mr. Tuxedo. This year it’s Lubrication Station.

She’s traded her black tails for a Pennzoil jacket the color of an irradiated canary.

She’s replaced uncertainty with confidence.

Laying a clean sheet of ice is not only an art but an obligation.

One chuckhole can rip a player’s ankle, a knee, a career.

Fortunately for Davis, she trained under a Coliseum legend.

Steve Churchwell, 28, drove the Chiefs’ ice for six years before quitting after the 1992-93 season to teach at Liberty High School in Spangle.

Churchwell was as serious on the ice as a nuclear reactor operator.

Fans won’t let Davis forget.

During Christmas 1993, Davis bought her mother, Eileen Davis of Prosser, a front-row seat at the Dorothy Hamill Ice Capades show.

As Cindy rolled over the ice, a teenage girl seated near Davis’ mother quipped that “the new driver” was no Churchwell.

“I leaned over - because I was afraid she would keep talking and embarrass herself - and said, `That’s my daughter,”’ Eileen says. “She was embarrassed anyway.”

Davis’ first game “scrape” - that’s what they call it in the business - was a nerve-racker in front of a packed, Saturday night house.

She was subbing for Churchwell, but got through it unscathed.

“The scariest thing is you think everyone is watching you,” she says, acknowledging they probably are. “If you make a mistake, you’re afraid everyone will see it.”

They usually do.

During the red-white intrasquad Chiefs’ scrimmage last fall, Davis forgot to warm up the machine, and the propane line froze. Each time she hit the accelerator, the machine died. She had to stay at idling speed.

“It was a dumb mistake,” she says.

It took 20 minutes - three times longer than normal - to scrape the ice, also known in the business as “doing a flood.”

Zamboni and other ice machines use blades to cut thin layers of ice, and augers to chew up the ice and shoot it into a snow tank. The machine replaces the missing layer of ice with fresh water that quickly freezes.

Knowing how low to set the blade or how much water to dump takes skill and repetition.

The driver also must be a mechanic.

Last season, an auger froze and Davis had to take the machine off the ice for several minutes, remove the hydraulic hose and clean out the insides.

“They say you know you’re a good driver when something happens and you handle it,” she says. “That’s when I lost all my nervousness.”