Tony Voce was the first Philadelphian to sign with the Flyers. His sudden death allowed his family to know he found his purpose.

They told the funeral home that the viewing would last about three hours. More than five hours later, the line of mourners continued to build.

Tony Voce grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and was the first Philadelphian to sign with the Flyers. He won a national championship at Boston College and was with the minor-league Phantoms, who won the Calder Cup in 2005.

He spent six years in professional hockey, and the viewing last July after Voce died of a heart attack at 43 was, predictably, filled with people from his playing days: coaches, teammates, NHL players, and front office executives.

But the mourners from Voce’s second life — the teenagers he coached and mentored — left his family stunned.

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They knew Voce was on the ice every day at the Hollydell Ice Arena, coaching kids at the Washington Township rink often before sunrise. But this — the seemingly never-ending stream of children into the funeral home on Academy Road — felt different.

“The kids just kept coming up,” said Voce’s younger brother, Sean. “Their parents would talk for them because they were bawling and crying. It was amazing, actually. Me and my dad were standing there like, ‘Holy s—.’”

Voce struggled to find his next chapter after retiring in 2010. He worked in insurance and marketing, did financial planning, and even sold meat. Nothing seemed to stick. Hockey had been Voce’s identity since his father brought him, at 5 years old, to a clinic in Bucks County. It was hard to move on.

“When you play hockey, it’s your whole life,” said Barb Basile, Voce’s longtime partner. “It consumes your whole life from age 7 to 18. For Tony, obviously, even longer. When that ends, it’s like, ‘OK, now what?’ I think it’s a thing that happens to a lot of people in this sport when it ends. It’s like, ‘Who am I?’”

He started teaching children full-time in 2021 and soon began working for NHL agent Gerry Buckley. Voce met kids who had the same dream he did when he was playing street hockey in Parkwood.

“It took him almost 10 years to figure out what he really wanted to do,” Sean said. “That’s the worst part. He finally found his knack for what he wanted to do in life. Then he’s taken.”

He helped them get to the right high school, land college scholarships, prepare for professional hockey, and simply build their confidence on the ice while giving himself a needed spark.

“He always cared. Me and him would go out at 6 in the morning and do private lessons when I was in middle school and high school. Every summer, he was running our skate and teaching us all the little things of the game. It [stunk] getting up that early, but I was dedicated to getting better and he was always out there with me.” — University of New Hampshire freshman and Voce’s stepson, Josh Player, who trained with Voce at Hollydell

Tony Voce Sr. was watching Home Improvement on a Tuesday night when the phone rang.

“I said, ‘Who are you?’” Voce said.

It was Charlie Corey, the head coach of Lawrence Academy. He had watched Voce play the previous weekend for the Little Flyers and wanted him to enroll at the boarding school in Massachusetts. Tuition was $26,000.

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No chance, said Voce’s father, who was paying a few thousand dollars to send his son to Archbishop Ryan. Money wasn’t an issue, Corey said. Just come visit, and they’ll figure it out.

Voce took his son years earlier to the Face-Off Circle in Warminster for a clinic. There were five kids and three coaches. The dad knew little about hockey, and his son had never skated. The Voces were only there because one of the fathers’ coworkers said he was bringing his son. So they decided to follow.

The 5-year old skated that night as if he grew up on the ice. He did another clinic and was invited to play on a team with 12-year-olds. The team didn’t have a jersey small enough for Voce, so his father had to buy one. It was never intended to be the start of a professional career. It just happened.

And now, a coach from Massachusetts was interrupting Voce’s TV show because he wanted his son on his team. The rest, the father said, is history. Five years later, Voce Sr. was in the stands in Albany, N.Y., when his son, as a freshman, started the sequence that led to Boston College’s game-winning goal in the 2001 national championship game.

“Tony made the play. Sometimes you can’t time capsule who a person is in a screenshot, but that shift pretty much did it,” Boston College teammate Brett Peterson said. “He’s on a line with two first-round picks, two guys destined for the NHL. He gets the puck in nothing but a pressure situation and essentially says, ‘Everybody, follow me.’ I was so confident when they hit the ice because I knew he would make something happen. We were always in safe hands with Tony.”

Voce took the puck out of the zone, drew defenders, and passed it to Chuck Kobasew, who found Krys Kolanos for the overtime winner. Voce met his father after the game and said the overtime period was the first time he was nervous on the ice. It was hard to tell.

“It was a huge deal,” said Peterson, now the assistant GM of the Florida Panthers. “I still remember the next morning, me, Tony, and Justin Dziama in our warmup suits smoking cigars out in front of our dorm. I have a picture, and Tony is in the middle, as he always was.”

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Voce had the second-highest goal total in the country as a senior in 2004 and was a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award, the Heisman Trophy of college hockey.

That summer, Voce’s father was on the beach in Wildwood, waiting for his son to sign with an NHL team. Voce called his dad and said it was the Flyers. Everyone on the beach roared. TV news cameras came to their house in Parkwood. Voce was back home.

“He was just very honest. He would just tell it to you straight and exactly how he was thinking. The first time he saw me play in a game was at a tryout, and I got off the ice and he was like, ‘Oh my God. You have no idea how to play hockey.’ He taught me that it was OK to be a person who’s growing, and it’s OK to mess up. The reason he was respected by these kids, even when he was criticizing them and giving them feedback, is because he made them understand it’s OK not to be perfect. I always felt that belief he had in me.” — 15-year-old Giuliana Pizzichillo, who trained with Voce at Hollydell

It had been about a week since the Phantoms won the championship in 2005 when Matt McLaughlin walked into Chickie’s & Pete’s on Roosevelt Boulevard to grab a beer after work. There was Voce.

“He’s sitting there at the big round table by himself with the Calder Cup,” said McLaughlin, one of Voce’s childhood friends. “I said, ‘Dude, what are you doing here?’ It was almost like he hadn’t showered in a week and was still celebrating that they won.”

The Calder Cup — the trophy given each year to the American Hockey League champ — stayed with Voce that summer since he was the local player on the team. It was “basically like his Calder Cup,” McLaughlin said.

Voce left his rowhouse in Parkwood when he was 15 to play hockey in Massachusetts. But he was always the kid from the neighborhood.

“Growing up in the Northeast, everyone kind of knows each other,” McLaughlin said. “But everyone really knew Tony. People were just drawn to him.”

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He wore a Reen’s Deli shirt, hung at Chickie’s, and had a crew of friends who waited outside Knight’s Tavern to fill two “cheese buses” for his first game with the Phantoms at the Spectrum.

So it was no surprise that the Calder Cup ended up one night in the swimming pool of McLaughlin’s Parkwood backyard. The cup sat on a raft in the pool while the buddies toasted their friend who won it all on the same ice where the Flyers played.

“We were drinking and partying,” McLaughlin said. “Somebody took it out of the pool and lit fireworks out of it. There were black stains in there from the fireworks. The following season, they had the cup on display at the games and the stains were still inside it. You couldn’t get them off. His coach went off on him.”

Voce scored 50 goals in his first two seasons with the Phantoms, but his time in Philly ended during his third season after he started a fight with head coach Kjell Samuelsson.

Voce wasn’t happy with his playing time, a scuffle ensued, and the local guy was sent to Grand Rapids, Mich. That was Voce: a straight shooter, even with his coach. The two later settled their differences.

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“Sometimes you can’t keep your mouth shut, and that was him, obviously,” McLaughlin said. “We all said, ‘He said what to his coach?’ But that was Tony. He didn’t care who you were. He was always going to say what’s on his mind.”

Voce played every night in Philly with a cheering section at the Spectrum. His family and friends traveled to Massachusetts for years to watch Voce in high school and college. Now they just needed to head down I-95 to see the first Philly kid the Flyers ever signed.

“I didn’t even need a ticket,” McLaughlin said. “I had ‘The Voce Family lanyard,’ and I went up the tunnel and we’d have our sweatshirts packed with beers. I didn’t miss one game. It was pretty surreal. Knowing how hard he worked it, we were so happy and proud.”

The friends were on the ice after Voce’s Phantoms won the cup and celebrated in a private room with Bobby Clarke. It was a dream, Sean said.

“He was so dedicated. He never took a day off. He was always at the rink or watching video. He just loved hockey. He also cared about the things you were doing off the ice. It wasn’t just about being a good hockey player. He cared that you were a good person.” — 15-year-old Bo Christini, who trained with Voce at Hollydell

Voce told Basile that he struggled for years to think about the future. He didn’t set long-term goals as his focus simply was on today. Coaching hockey changed everything.

“For the first time in his life, he was excited about his future,” Basile said. “He struggled with what he wanted to do with his life. The last year or two, he kind of came into his own.”

A month before he died, Voce wrote out a three-year plan for personal and professional goals. He wanted to grow his hockey business, travel with Basile, and watch his daughters Mia, Raya, and Gianna grow up. Life was good.

And then Voce had chest pain one night and said in the morning that it felt like there was something stuck in his throat.

Basile drove him to the hospital, but he had a heart attack on the ride there. Basile called 911, and a man pulled over as Basile waited for the ambulance.

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“A good Samaritan pulled over and helped me,” Basile said. “He was praying and hugging me. He helped me so much, and I wanted to find him and thank him after that, but there’s no mention of him anywhere in the police reports or anything. It’s crazy. I just want to find that man.”

Basile and Voce’s family and friends launched the Tony Voce Memorial Fund two months after he died. Voce was gone, but his work would not be lost. The foundation aims to make hockey financially accessible.

The group held free clinics this year at Hollydell and will host a camp this summer organized by Voce’s friends who work in the NHL. They’ll celebrate Voce on June 11 with a “tribute game” at Hollydell featuring the kids Voce trained who now are in college and junior hockey against the guys he played with.

The money raised will be for the foundation, which aims to sponsor a player or two per year. The foundation wants to help kids navigate the often challenging hockey world with financial aid and informational resources. It is the type of foundation a kid from Parkwood could have used 25 years ago.

“There’s not a day that has gone by that he hasn’t been in my mind at some point. It was really difficult this past season to go through it and not have him there. But in a way, he was there even more than he was before. On the bench, he was always on my mind. It was like I had a ‘Tony Angel’ over my shoulder when I was playing. I would always ask him for help or advice if I absolutely didn’t know how to play hockey again. I was like, ‘Help.’” — Pizzichillo

Tony Voce called his father every other night, often chatting for a half hour about the kids he was working with. There was the goalie Voce was trying to tell college coaches to believe in, the teenage girl who Voce knew had the potential to play in college, and the kids he trained in Jersey who moved on to junior hockey.

Tony Voce Sr. knew about all of them. But he never knew how the kids felt about his son until the line kept growing that night last summer.

“Usually, people just walk by and shake your hand,” Voce’s father said. “Everyone stopped and told me a story about what Tony did for their kid. I had no idea about the impact he was making. I knew he was always with these kids, but to have an impact like this is a whole different animal. The impression he made on these kids was unbelievable. You just don’t know. You didn’t know the impact he was having. I knew him as my son.”

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Voce’s death was a gut punch — “It really [stinks] that he’s not here,” his father said — but his family learned in that funeral home that Voce had found his way.

“We thought we were just going to pay our respects and see his family. To see all the support and his whole history laid out like that. We just never had any idea. He was just ‘Coach Tony.’ I saw his oldest daughter, and I just thanked her so much for sharing her father with all of us. I just hope the family knows how much we appreciate everything that he did. He had a job to do here on this earth, and I think by coaching these kids and being so involved the way he was in this hockey world, I think he fulfilled that.” — Pizzichillo‘s mother, Ashley