CALGARY, Alberta -- Tory Weber worked the midnight shift monitoring the boiler room in the basement of a posh hotel in Banff National Park. It was a boring job for a college student in his early 20s, but the pay, and the dollar-a-day room and meals, made it hard for him to quit, especially with a new silver Mazda RX7 parked outside.

So Weber put his feet up on the desk, his hands behind his head, and thought, "God, you'd just about have to kill me for me to change my life."

Seconds later, a chunk of concrete fell from the ceiling, which was being remodeled. It severed the hotel's main gas line, just 20 feet from Weber's desk. Natural gas hissed out of the punctured 1-inch steel line near two flame-shooting boilers.

Firefighters said it was pure luck the hotel didn't explode.

For Weber, that second chance was a catalyst to follow a dream hatched in childhood.

Inspired by Spud Gun

A few years before the hotel incident, Weber had an idea that stemmed from another accident. Painful, but not nearly as dangerous. It was a cold February day at his parents' house in Calgary. He stepped into his shoes, which had been sitting on a heat vent, and walked out onto the icy stairs to get the evening newspaper. His warm shoes melted the ice and sent him reeling onto his rear end.

The same thermodynamics class that eventually landed him the boiler room job made Weber ponder the effect his heated shoes had on the ice. Like most men in Canada, Weber had grown up with a stick and a puck and a number of idols in the NHL. As Weber nursed his aching back, the idea struck him: What would happen if hockey players could skate on heated blades?

Tory Weber, inventor of heated ice skates for Thermablade, has pursued the idea of a heated hockey skate for more than 25 years. Paula Lavigne/ESPN

That sort of "aha" moment puts Weber in good company with other would-be inventors. Applications for patents pending with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office relating to sporting equipment number in the thousands. About 6,600 pertain to golf, which includes 1,900 related to golf balls alone. For what seems like a relatively simple device -- a hockey puck -- there are 22 applications alone.

It's a tough market for the backyard inventor, going up against the scientists and engineers with the big-time research departments for companies such as Nike, Callaway and Russell. Some ideas are minor modifications on existing equipment, such as a football glove with a better grip. Others are more novel. Think of antibacterial chalk used in weight rooms, basketball rims that project holographic ads with every swish, and a robot that scurries after stray table tennis balls.

Bringing any invention to market is a challenge. Pioneering a new sporting device comes with the added hurdle of getting it accepted by any of the major leagues or governing bodies that set the rules for each sport. Weber found that out the hard way.

Over 25 years, Weber's idea for a heated hockey blade would propel him to stardom, hobnobbing with hockey legends Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Clarke. And it would drive him to despair, after a decision by the NHL sent him into bankruptcy. And finally, a last-minute salvation came to fruition just a few months ago, with a shot yet again to make the pros.

Weber's idea -- like many others -- was quite rudimentary in its early iterations. He first tried using a blowtorch to heat the blades. One version involved a motorcycle battery and the heating element from a vehicle's rear-window defogger. Weber thought that a new invention would be his ticket to fortune -- just like it had been for E. Joseph Cossman.

Cossman was an inventor who made millions from turning simple, often bizarre ideas into lucrative products. Remember the Spud Gun? Or the Plastic Ant Farm? Weber learned about Cossman from books and cassettes his mother bought to help her and her husband, who was a carpenter, market a line of designer playhouses.

"That's what I really wanted. To invent anything I could, to get out of the lifestyle I was in," Weber said. "In my young, little mind I thought if you invent something, you can get yourself out of a big hole."

Lead-weighted pucks

As a child, the middle brother of three boys, Weber and his family lived in the basement of an unfinished house with no running water in the rural countryside outside Armstrong, then a town of about 2,500 people in south central British Columbia. The boys played hockey on nearby frozen ponds using donated, used equipment. When money got scarce, Weber's stepfather would drive to a nearby grocery store and fish through trash bins for loaves of moldy bread, brown bananas and other discarded food to get the family through the week.

"It wasn't good where we were growing up," Weber said. "I thought if you worked your ass off you could get out of the mess, and that's really what it was."

His first foray into inventing was a weighted hockey puck he tried to develop in the late '80s with the help of his soon-to-be wife, Shawna. Just two months into their courtship, Weber asked Shawna to go on a picnic. He picked her up in the garbage truck he used for his part-time job hauling trash. The truck was loaded with 1,000 pucks, a kettle and 20 pounds of lead fishing weights, pilfered from his grandfather's garage. He got a few weights melted over a raging bonfire before a park ranger kicked them out.

Weber used his retirement savings and credit cards to try to finance the idea. Courtesy Tory Weber

"It was kind of exciting," Shawna said, recalling the fiasco. "I've never been on a date where somebody melted lead before."

Weber had planned to pour lead into the hollowed-out pucks to create a weighted training puck that would help players build muscle. The pucks had a habit of shattering sticks, however, and they got relegated to the Webers' garage, alongside his beer bottle collection. (Several years later, Weber sold the pucks and bottles together for $15 at a flea market.)

But that first failure didn't deter him, because he could always go back to that day in the basement boiler room for inspiration. It was no coincidence that he had just recently begun to accept Christianity -- mostly at his older brother's urging. He even had a Bible hidden in his top desk drawer.

"I just thought, 'OK, God, it's not often that you speak to people this bluntly. I'm so thick I need to have it spelled out to me that way,'" he said. He quit his job at the hotel. In the summer of 1988 he moved back to Calgary with a renewed confidence in God and his own ingenuity.

"That's really where I got the ability to take on these huge, huge projects. I felt I could do anything. As long as God can, I can."

Blades reduce friction

Weber began tinkering with his blade in earnest -- running tests, crafting prototypes and asking for advice. Shawna described how he once froze ice on one of her cookie sheets and rigged up a device to warm the blade using an electrical cord plugged into a kitchen outlet.

"It started on fire," he said, laughing.

Weber then made a crucial ally in retired NHL right winger Rich Sutter, who was buying lumber for an outdoor ice rink from the building supplies store where Weber worked. And Weber talked Sutter into a test ride.

"I got one of those batteries and I taped it onto the side of his blade and put the element on the outside of the blade and asked him to go for a skate," Weber said. "He said, 'Wow, this is something awesome.' He said if you can contain this thing you've got a hit."

But that was the problem; all of the batteries with enough power to heat the blade were too big to conceal inside the skate. It just wasn't feasible to strap a half-pound battery -- about the size of a camcorder battery in the early 1990s -- to the outside of a hockey player's boot.