If there’s anyone on the Clemson club ice hockey team who understands the power of a legacy, it’s Patrick “Furny” O’Brien.
The Westchester, New York native initially decided he wanted to play hockey while watching a New York Rangers game with his father. He pointed at the television and said, “I want to do that,” to which his dad replied, “Alright, let’s do it.”
“I played for the Scarsdale Raiders, which was my hometown team,” O’Brien said in an interview with The Tiger. “From the second I stepped on the ice, I loved it. Just going to like public skates, and then playing for a team, it’s always been a break. I love playing hockey.”
After experiencing some success in high school, namely, winning his high school league during his junior year, it was finally time for O’Brien to think about the future.
“I toured (Clemson) during Covid. It was one of the only schools I toured,” he said. “It was a larger engineering school, and I could go into engineering undecided. So, for my freshman year, I could figure out what type of engineering I wanted to be.
“And I also knew I kind of wanted to go South. I definitely liked the warmer weather compared to being up in New York.”
For O’Brien, going to Clemson seemed to be a no-brainer, especially after he discovered the club ice hockey program. However, a minor setback during his gap year led him to take a longer hiatus than he initially planned.
“I knew they had a club team. I had filled out their online prospect form, and then I broke my leg during my gap year,” O’Brien explained. “I couldn’t play my freshman year. So, as a sophomore, that was probably the first table I went up to at Tiger Prowl. I was like, ‘Okay, I want to play hockey now.’ I was bored and needed a group to join.”
Since then, O’Brien has become an integral part of the Clemson club hockey family.
“I’ve become really close friends with the kids I’m graduating with and who I joined with. Since my sophomore year, I have spent a lot more time with them. They’ve just become my great friends,” he said. “Honestly, we do everything together. We tailgate, we play hockey … There’s always something going on.”
While he’s sad to move on from Clemson, O’Brien is confident that the friends he made along the way will remain permanent fixtures in his life post-grad.
“I hope they’re not just remembering me. I’ll stay in contact with and get to talk to all of them,” O’Brien told The Tiger. “But I’d say I’d like to be remembered as a good friend, a good teammate and just a happy person to be around most of the time.”
While the civil engineering major can only hope his legacy will accurately reflect his personality and contributions to the program, he is certain that it will also include his memorable nickname: Furny.
“I was a sophomore, and I wasn’t with them,” O’Brien explained. “They’d gotten back from a night out … I think they said I was built like a refrigerator. So (my nickname) went from ‘Patty O’ to ‘Patio Furniture.’ I think I scored a goal, so it got switched from a fridge to a furnace, like I was heating up. And then I got nicknamed ‘Furny.’ And I have not been able to drop the nickname. Most of their phone contacts have me as ‘Furnace.’”
After graduation, O’Brien plans to move to Greenville, South Carolina, to work for a wastewater company.
