An oversized, steely-eyed, screaming, spitting, cussing kid.

"Come on," he hollered from the sidelines, banging his wooden hockey stick against the white metal partition dividing the frozen surface of the rink from a painted cement floor slick with ice melt and spit.

"Come on!" he exhorted. "Stick 'em! Stick 'em!"

Yesterday was Day 2 of the 2004 Hawaiian Classic Oldtimers Hockey Tournament at Ice Palace in Stadium Mall, the second day for aging hockey players from Hawai'i, the Mainland and Canada to bang pads, masks and sticks in a contest of serious fun.

This year's tournament features 12 teams — four from Hawai'i — divided into three levels of competition. The B.O.M.B. — "Best of a Mediocre Bunch" — will play for the top-level Waikiki Division championship today at 8:30 a.m.

The Hawai'i teams are made up mostly of participants from Ice Palace's adult hockey league, which plays two seasons a year. Many are transplants from hockey hotbeds in the East, Midwest and Canada, a few are Hawai'i-born residents who picked up the game at the rink. About a quarter of league participants are in the military.

The league, and the tournament, is restricted to "old-timers" age 30 or older (the oldest participants are in their 70s).

"These are guys that have to get up and go to work the next morning," said Ice Palace general manager John Beck.

Indeed, Webb had a contracting job to complete yesterday morning before the game. He made it to the rink in plenty of time and, once the puck was dropped, his concentration was absolute.

"Back, back, back," Webb yelled as Yukon's front line converged on B.O.M.B. goalie Pierre Asselin.

Bob Weigel of The B.O.M.B. pulls off his jersey after a 6-0 win over the Yukon Oldtimers. The B.O.M.B. play for a championship today at 8:30 a.m.

"Yes!" Webb screamed. "Yes!"

And then it was Webb's turn.

With 23 seconds left in the first period, Webb found a seam in the defense and zipped the puck in for the first score of the game.

The B.O.M.B. added two more goals in the second period as play got increasingly physical. A goal by Yukon was wiped out by an offsides penalty, riling a few Oldtimers.

Still, despite a near-scuffle toward the end of the period, cool heads prevailed all around.

"The main thing is that everybody just wants to have fun," Webb said later. "Hockey has always been about sportsmanship. Everybody wants to win, but we leave it on the ice."

To that end, the tournament follows the Ice Palace's adult league rules in prohibiting hard checks, slap shots and fighting. In fact, anyone involved in a fight is automatically bounced from the tournament.

Here, the only things that get reality checked to the walls are those familiar assumptions about the way aging athletes find their fun in Hawai'i.

When Webb first moved to the Islands, he left his hockey equipment behind, thinking he had played his last game.

"When I found out about this place, I called my friends and said, 'Send my gear down; I found ice in Hawai'i,' " he said.

Asselin, the goalie, had a similar experience. Before he made his decision to leave Quebec to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Hawai'i, he had to get used to the idea of no more hockey.

"Even though I never played competitively, I take hockey very seriously," he said. "It was something I debated about before coming, and I was really disappointed at first."

But like the 140 or so other hockey lovers in the Ice Palace league, Asselin eventually found his home-away-from-home ice.

And, small though it may be, Hawai'i's hockey scene features some impressive talent. Several participants played hockey in college, a few on professional farm teams.

"It's better than you'd think," said B.O.M.B. player Anthony Sabatini, who came to Hawai'i from Minnesota in 1994.

In it's 19-year history, the tournament has welcomed teams from as far away as Germany, Austria, Sweden, Czechoslovakia New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Australia.

Beck said the annual tournament takes advantage of March and April, when many rinks on the Mainland and in Canada are closed, to lure teams.

"A lot of them come to play a few games then go to the beach or go golfing," he said.

Players with The B.O.M.B. cool down after their big win. The B.O.M.B. belong to a league for players 30 and older — some are in their 70s.

"This tournament is a great excuse to get out of town for a few weeks," said Cardiacs coach Martin Everett, 45. "It was (14 degrees) with snow on the ground when we left."

The Cardiacs — a name that references "the fact that we're old and we can go into cardiac arrest at any time," according to Everett — are typical of the snowbird teams that come to the tournament each year.

"We try to plan a trip every April when the work slows down," said Lee Hartman, 38, who works at one of Fort St. John's many oil and gas businesses.

The mood, if not the air, in the Cardiacs' locker room was light as the team prepared for its contest against the Richmond Seagulls. The rink's in-house classic rock rotation pulsed through the cracks in the wall, bass-heavy echoes of Eric Clapton and Queen and AC/DC vibrating as Hartman and a few others indulged a couple of pre-game Budweisers.

"It's like sumo," Hartman said, tipping his can. "We have to keep our weight up."

The Cardiacs have 20 players on their regular roster. Those who could afford the airfare and the time away from work (the team plans to go to Maui for nine days after the tournament is done) made the trip. They added a couple of local players, including Gary Costa of Wai'anae, to fill out the roster.

Costa, 37, had been away from the game for a dozen years when he spotted a flier calling for free-agent players. Without the benefit of a single practice, he scored one goal and assisted on another to help the Cardiacs beat the Hawaiian Hockey Club the previous day.

"So far, so good," Costa said, watching from the safe side of the protective plexiglass as the B.O.M.B. closed out their game against Yukon. "My legs are stiff but they're still holding up."

In the rink, the B.O.M.B. broke open the game with three scores in two minutes. As the clock ticked down to the end of the third period, Webb, huffing from an extended shift, finally allowed himself to sit back on the plastic bench fastened to the wall, his voice quieted for the first time that afternoon.

Across the ice, Beck, the rink manager, nodded approvingly at the genial smiles on both benches.

"Hockey is one of the few sports you can play into your 80s," he said. "You can only play football for a certain amount of time. Baseball turns into softball when you get older.

"But hockey," he said, "is still hockey."