Meet the ‘rink rat’ who kept Matthews Arena running
Bill “Smitty” Smith, the longtime fixer behind Matthews Arena, prepares for its closure after decades of keeping the rink, rafters and teams going.
There isn’t a task that Bill “Smitty” Smith, longtime athletic facilities supervisor for Northeastern University, wouldn’t take on.
Like the time he found himself hanging from the rafters at Matthews Arena.
A goal camera had been accidentally unplugged when the building was rigged for a concert, and Smith needed to fix it before the next night’s hockey game. So he headed up to the rafters, gripping the railing and trying not to look down.
“I’m afraid of heights but that day I had no choice,” he said. “I had to do what I had to do.”
He was shaking in his boots, Smith said, but he slowly walked out to the middle of the steel beam and plugged the camera back in.
When Matthews Arena closes its doors to the public on Monday, Smith will go down in history as the last person to walk its rafters.
“He’s the luckiest man on the planet. He does things on ladders in here. … It’s the most unsafe thing you can possibly do. For some reason, he does it every time — not a single issue,” Jason Trott, a lead on the athletic facilities team, said about his supervisor.
Smith, 68, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, started working at Northeastern almost 35 years ago as a custodian at Willis Hall. His introduction to the Matthews Arena came during a big basketball game against Duke University, when he helped pick up chairs and take apart the floor.
A year later, he moved to Matthews as a carpenter, a trade he learned in construction, where he also got his nickname “Smitty,” just as his father did before him.
Since then, Smith has met U.S. presidents, hockey and Hollywood stars, watched concerts and amateur “Fight to Educate” boxing nights and attended countless hockey and basketball games.
“There are a lot of regulars who know me,” he said.
Although Smith now oversees all Northeastern athletic facilities, including Parsons Field, the Dedham track, Cabot Cage, the pool and Carter Field, he still calls himself and his team “rink rats” because of the time they spend at Matthews.
“He kind of is the glue that keeps everybody together,” Trott said. “He will stand next to you and do all the hard work with you every time. So it’s not like you need to be scared of something new, because he will get it done with you.”
Smith learned everything about his job by doing it. One of his favorite memories and a lifelong lesson came during a “Surge Night,” a hockey game against Boston University sponsored by Coca-Cola, which was promoting its citrus-flavored soft drink. When Northeastern beat BU, fans threw hundreds of bottles of Surge onto the ice.
“Oh, my God, the ice was yellow, and my face just dropped to the floor,” Smith recollected.
His boss at the time didn’t flinch and told him, “Smitty, it’s only ice. We can fix anything.”
“So when there’s something wrong out there, that’s what I say to the guys,” Smith said. “It’s ice, you can fix it.”
He loves driving the Zamboni, the ice resurfacing and smoothing machine, and misses painting the ice the most.
“People at the university didn’t even know we did this,” he said. “We just gave it up two years ago because I’m getting too old.”
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Another task that Smith is proud of is converting the ice to a basketball parquet and back — a giant puzzle of 560 four-by-eight sheets of fiberglass subfloor. Smith’s personal record: picking up the floor in one hour and 45 minutes on the day Matthews hosted two back-to-back basketball and hockey games.
“He’s a great conductor,” said Bo Stewart, assistant director of athletic facilities operations and service. “It’s like conducting an orchestra. You could have seven or eight teams going at once, and one person is coordinating all that.”
Stewart, who came to Northeastern three and a half years ago, quickly admired Smith’s skill, passion and dedication.
“I loved him immediately,” Stewart said. “They don’t make [people] like him anymore, not in this business. And there’s a lot of things that we are able to do because of a personality like his.”
Employees even joke, he said, “Do you have a little Smitty in you?”
“If they’re saying that, it’s like, ‘I just want to fix it. I just got to go and fix it,’” Stewart said.
After Matthews closes down, Smith’s team will take care of Boch Ice Center in Dedham, where Northeastern hockey teams will be practicing as well as take over managing the Marino Center and Cabot full time.
Despite previously planning to retire at 65, Smith now wants to stay long enough to see the new multi-functional athletic building open.
“I want to be here for that,” he said. “But I don’t want to be the old guy who used to know what’s going on.”
