The Code

Mike Hammer on skates? Why not? What better training ground for a PI than the NHL where "what we do to each other on the ice would be criminal in any jurisdiction... Even the cleanest body check would be an assault."

Thus Brad Shade, aka Shadow, a former player who had to hock his Stanley Cup ring after his career washed up and his marriage fell apart.

He worked as a snoop for a few years, doing divorce and insurance work before an old teammate offered him a job as a scout for the LA Kings.

The story begins with Brad checking out a hot young prospect playing for Peterborough in the O. The one-line evaluation he sends to the GM on his Blackberry:

I heard the kid fart and it sounded like a harp.

But a team needs more than that before committing big bucks to a potential franchise player. As Brad starts digging, a murder occurs and suddenly things don't look so rosy any more. The suspects are numerous, the draft is getting closer, and Brad's job is on the line.

Still, he hangs onto his sense of humour and cracks wise as he tries to sort it all out. A Zamboni driver is a "Guy Who Turns Right for a Living." Working out at a weight room, he tosses 225 "like a salad." He meets a guy whose "green eyes looked like two basil leaves in a big bowl of tomato soup," and a couple of plainclothesmen "who took the job title too literally."

The chapters are short, the dustjacket is clever, and there are appropriate hard-boiled observations about the game:

I never once did something impulsive on the ice. I picked my spots. And I had no loyalties, no friendships. I would do to an ex-teammate and a friend exactly what I'd do to a total stranger -- in fact, I might have even gone at it harder with guys I had run and drunk with, just because I feared that I might go soft and sentimental. Players and general managers and coaches used to say that I was "greasy," which I took as the highest compliment. If you look at the names engraved on the cup, you'll find a lot of greasy guys. Greasy guys are great to play with but brutal to play against. "Greasy" is whatever it takes with a lot of liberties and lubrication. I still think of myself that way. I couldn't be greasier if I jumped in a deep fryer and started doing the backstroke.

The author has written several non-fiction books about hockey, the most recent of which is The Devil and Bobby Hull.

Finnie Walsh

Bad things happen in this book – a drowning, a severed arm, a jugular nicked by a skate blade, a fight in which an eye is lost. At the heart of it all is Finnie Walsh, decent, patient, loyal, and best friend of the narrator, Paul.

Hockey is the bond that draws them together. Finnie is a gifted goalie and Paul (born on the same day as the last game of the 1972 Summit Series and named after the player who scored the winning goal) is a stay-at-home defenceman.

They grow up playing on the same teams, but their choice of heroes, Bill Barilko and Pelle Lindberg, hints at future misfortune. Against all odds they make it to the NHL, but their pro careers are short. One ends in a surprisingly original on-ice brawl, and the other (less believably) during overtime in the seventh game of a Stanley Cup final.

Hockey, however, occupies less of the book than this brief summary suggests. There are no puck bunnies or locker-room scenes, and the NHL portion takes up only a few pages. It's more about Finnie's relationship with Paul's working-class family, which includes an eccentric father and a daughter with the gift of precognition. Finnie understands them better than Paul does and goes to great lengths to protect them. Finnie's own family is wealthy but consists of a distant father and some brutal older brothers.

What makes the book work is its calm measured tone. The brevity (165 pages) and lean prose make it readable in a single sitting. The book was short-listed for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2000. It has gone through several printings, but the cover of this one is easily the most attractive.

The author’s third novel is the much celebrated The Cellist of Sarajevo.

The Last Season

A strange mixture of hockey and the supernatural featuring NHL enforcer Felix Batterinski, better known as Frankenstein (opposing fans), Monster (his grandmother), and Bats (his friends). He uses stick, fists, and cheap shots to intimidate opponents, and lovingly describes the way he knocked Bobby Orr out of a game -- after Orr had scored on a breakaway.

He wins two Stanley Cups with the Broad Street Bullies, then is traded to the LA Kings who offer him a sweet contract. He thinks he's set for life until he discovers that his agent has bilked him of almost everything. He ends up as a player-coach for a semi-pro team in Finland. The reason they're in last place? "They all have their teeth. All of them, all their teeth."

When spit on by a fan during an exhibition game in Sweden, he climbs out of the penalty box and chases the fan all the way out of the arena. Then, celebrating their win after the game in a hotel bar, one of his teammates "hoots in derision" when he pours himself a small drink.

I hold up my hand, silently calling for patience. My mood is strange and I am not quite certain what it is that's making me do this, but instead of going for more alcohol to prove the point, I suddenly find myself pulling at my fly as I stand there. In front of the entire table, I whip it out and slowly pee several more shots into the glass. Then zipping back up, I raise this yellowed sparkling liquid toward the chandeliers, cut off my breath and quickly drain the glass to the bottom.

Felix batters his way through life, both on and off the ice, in part to escape his Polish heritage. He grew up in a shack without electricity or running water, a child of immigrants maligned as DPs and Bohunks. Though crude and foul-mouthed himself, he never gets over his embarrassment at his father's accent.

Worse, his personal life seems cursed, bringing death and misfortune to those he is closest to. Does it have something to do with his malevolent grandmother? The book takes place during the years of the Solidarity movement in Poland, which has implications when his Finnish team travels to Leningrad for a game, and sets up a preposterous ending when he flies back home.

The ending tells us what the author thinks of such rats, er, people, who have so deformed Canada's game -- and that includes not just enforcers like Felix but also coaches, fans and sportswriters:

"We're going to have to do something about all this violence," the late Conn Smythe once said, "or people are going to keep on buying tickets."

Review by Lucas Aykroyd

POSTSCRIPT - A comment from MacGregor in his new book, Wayne Gretzky's Ghost: "Professional hockey players who have read it [The Last Season] love it to a point where at least two have claimed that I modelled Felix on them...."

The Good Body

An inspired blend of hockey and Canlit that makes you wonder why such an obvious combo hasn't been tried before.

Bobby Bonaduce has laboured 20 years in the minors, the high point of his career being a single shift with the Maple Leafs. Or perhaps it's a low point, for in that short span he speared an opponent's spleen, got into three fights, pushed a linesman, spit at a fan, and knocked off a cop's hat.

Now with his career over, he's heading north to reconnect with his son Jason, who is playing hockey for UNB in Fredericton. He bluffs his way into the graduate program for creative writing in the hope that he'll be able to join the team.

This makes for some great comic moments on and off the ice. Bonaduce is predictably disdainful of works like "Lady Windermere's fucking Fan" and at sea in seminars like "Canadian Writers of the British Diaspora," the first hour of which is spent defining "Britain."

The writing has a distinctive rhythm and tone, and offers up some cool observations.

Hockey

...you have the puck and you're lugging a bag of gold to market surrounded by fast bandits.

Canlit

Reading her novel, he'd felt a shovel-the-snow kinship to Atwood, though her tough-shit sharpness made him nervous; and to Davies, though he was a stuffed shirt. But you could tell they'd both shovelled driveways.

Grad school

This was pretty good, gift as a verb, one of the better ones in the new language he'd been learning here. Other verbs he didn't like so much. Dialogue. Let's dialogue. Hell, why not get Sally and trialogue. Eight of us at Murray's lousy party, octaloguing away. He went to the bathroom, to urine.

The ex-wife

Her eyes, her bright eyes. You looked in and saw she was smarter than you but also that this wasn't a bad thing. You could also see how she felt her body to be not quite hers, or not quite her. She could hold her body at arm's length. You could see she respected her body, but also that she saw it to be a kind of playground.

The book is filled with likeable characters save for a roommate with a withered arm. But perhaps Toby and Bobby are intended as doppelgangers, as both are afflicted with a physical disability that gives an ironic twist to the book's title. The image of Bonaduce driving around with a dead Christmas tree on the roof of his car is a telling one. It's clear from the start that the book can only end one way, but funny and sad make for a powerful combination.

Hockey Lit

A good companion to this book is a more recent one by Gaston, Midnight Hockey, a non-fiction work in which he mentions his own hockey career.

You can also check out this review by Angie Abdou. Her novel, The Bone Cage, was defended by former NHL enforcer, Georges Laraque, in the CBC's 2011 Canada Reads event.

Two other hockey novels I have enjoyed: King Leary and Salvage Kings, Ya!

Maurice Richard

The dressing-room was his telephone booth, where he donned the red and blue costume of the Habs.

Off ice he was as mild-mannered as Clark Kent, a devoted husband and father, respectful citizen and church-goer.

On ice he was Rocket Richard, a man with a short fuse and blazing eyes, "defender and exemplar of the downtrodden French Canadian through both his brilliant play and the righteous violence of his fists." All he lacked was a cape.

In 1955 he was involved in a stick-swinging incident with Hal Laycoe of the Bruins, in the course of which he punched out a linesman. He was suspended for the final three games of the season and for the playoffs. Enraged fans attacked NHL president Clarence Campbell at the Montreal Forum and a riot ensued. The next day Richard calmed the city with a few words on the radio.

Of the authoritarian Campbell, author Charles Foran writes:

Living and working in Montreal did little to heighten Campbell’s insensitivity. Operating out of the imposing stone Sun Life building, an edifice that, more than any other, represented Anglo financial dominance and smugness, and residing nearby the mentally walled ghetto of Westmount, the league president carried on both his professional duties and private life as a colonial administrator in India or Africa might have done...

The Richard Riot was a manifestation of the simmering dissatisfaction felt by Quebecers, and a precursor to the Quiet Revolution that began in 1960, the same year Richard retired.

Stuff I Didn't Know

How tough Richard was. Early in his career he fought twice with a player on the NY Rangers, "a marginal talent with a background as an amateur boxer." Both times Richard knocked him out with a single punch.

He tried several times to enlist during the War, but was turned down when x-rays showed that breaks in his ankle, leg and wrist -- incurred while playing hockey -- had not healed properly. "The ankle, in particular, was permanently misshapen."

The emergence of “gladatorial hockey” occurred after the War with the return of veterans. "'If you know nothing else about the time I played,' Richard would later say of this period, 'know how violent the game was.'"

One year he led the league in penalties. Fans routinely paid his fines.

His famous jersey number was chosen after the birth of his first child, who weighed nine pounds.

After he retired Richard became so unhappy at the way he was treated by the Canadiens organization that he refused to drink Molson’s beer or allow it to be served in his tavern.

The shocking end of Howie Morenz: leg broken in four places during a game, hospitalized with his leg in traction, began drinking heavily, had a nervous breakdown, and -- still in hospital a month and a half after being admitted -- died of a heart attack. He was 34.

End Thoughts

This slim compact book is more of a sketch than a full-fledged bio, and similar in scope (I assume) to others in the series of "Extraordinary Canadians". No illustrations.

Series editor John Raltson Saul mentions the filming of forthcoming documentaries. Until then a worthwhile substitute is the feature film, The Rocket, with Roy Dupuis as Richard and several NHLers in supporting roles, including Vinnie LeCavalier, Mike Ricci and Sean Avery.

You can also view a four-minute clip from a CBC Fifth Estate documentary about Richard.

Dust jacket painting by Tavis Coburn.

Salvage King, Ya!

A Herky-Jerky Picaresque

The opening quote from "Heart of Darkness" tells you this is not going to be your ordinary hockey story.

The book's protagonist "desired to have Kings meet him...on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things."

Here the "ghastly Nowhere" is the horrific world of pro hockey, and the word "Kings" refers to both the LA Kings and the name of the salvage yard operated by our hero. To cement the connection with "Heart of Darkness," his fiancée is known only as "the Intended."

The second quote, from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," announces a water motif, which is reinforced by the hockey player's ironic name, Drinkwater. He prefers booze. Water is something people drown in, like his grandfather, and a dead California surfer, and the ships and planes that sink beneath the waves before his very eyes.

Blindness is another motif. Drinkwater has a bad eye. His uncle wears an eyepatch. A player loses an eye to one of Drinkwater's shots on goal. A dead horse flies past in a tornado, eyes open. A shark is shot in the eye. "Out vile jelly," thinks Drinkwater. He sees but cannot resist the violence, hypocrisy, and decadence of pro hockey. He's unruly on and off the ice. He snorts cocaine, takes Antabuse to control his drinking, shuttles back and forth between the three women in his life, his Intended, his ex-wife, and a waitress known only as X.

The GM has a huge face, part meat, part vegetable. Count your fingers after shaking hands with him. This man wouldn't give you the parsley off his plate, he wouldn't give a worm to a blind robin, he'd sell a blind man a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

But it's not just pro hockey. The game's ills are society's ills, and violence is everywhere. An ETA bomb blows up Drinkwater's packsack. His dentist commits murder. A bullet hole in his car signals the death of a young boy in a Disneyland parking lot. A Coast Guard ship capsizes, planes keep crashing around him -- a jetliner at LAX, a floatplane cartwheeling across a California inlet, another slamming into the lake in front of his house. He grabs a body but loses his grip. He swims down among the dead.

Drug use is epidemic. Everyone is using or selling. Farmboys, jocks at the local gymn. Coke snorted out of the Stanley Cup, off a model's belly. One of Drinkwater's friends wants him to smuggle in a small boatload. Bodies of addicts turn up in the lake in front of his house. Alberta is a giant quivering nostril. The whole planet is freebasing.

A Hockey Everyman

Drinkwater's played for the Pats, Broncos, Mudcats, Screaming Eagles, and LA Kings. He's played for Billings, Billington, and the Birmingham Bulls, for Kansas City and Salt Lake City, for Adirondack in the AHL, Peoria and Flint in the IHL. He's played the hookworm league, and semi-pro in Seattle, and for $100 a game in Saskatchewan. He's won the K-Mart Player of the Game in Omaha.

His face has been carved up by Bobby Clarke and Billy Smith. He's driven around with Gretzky in a gold Italian sport car. He's played poker with Harold Snepsts, lent smokes to Eddie Mio, sat drinking in the same bar as Chelios and Ludwig, Chris Nilan and John Kordic. He's been coached by Bep Guidolin, defended by Don Cherry.

He wears a knee brace and is "held together with velcro and tape." He keeps breaking his fingers and nose. He's punched a fan and a ref. He's been concussed, knifed in the thigh, defrauded by his agent. He's played the game since before helmets were mandatory.

The forward with Phoenix, an Oiler draft pick, comes at me, using me for a screen, and powers a slapshot right past my midsection. His shot breaks our goalie's stick. I ice the puck up high, ring the glass to get a whistle, to let Dobozy the redhead goalie pick out a new stick. "He broke my stick," Dobozy complains, sounding offended, "my good stick." "There, there, don't cry." I'm just glad the Phoenix guy didn't maim me with his slapshot, a howitzer, a cannon blasting by my gonads. He rang one off our goalie's mask; out cold. 120 MPH. Now: imagine that it's another game in Podunk that means nothing and it's YOUR head, your face on the line. The pruneface scouts at the end of the arena jot down the following brainstorm: "LACKS DESIRE." Fuck them. As if they have the market on desire.

Structure

Jarman is primarily a short story writer, and this, his only novel, is packaged in non-linear chunks. There's no complete game, season or conventional plot. It's all in pieces, like Drinkwater himself. Everything is flattened out, past and present and future rolled into one.

Because of the structure, most readers would not notice if a few of the 58 chapters were sent to the penalty box. They have titles like Kingdom Fucking Come, Sexual Nebraska, Hoarse Latitudes, The Land of No Odometers. Excerpts have appeared in 28 journals and one anthology.

Jarman's latest collection, My White Planet, contains an account of playing hockey in New Brunswick. It's called "A Nation Plays Chopsticks." Any hockey anthology without it is incomplete.

Open Net

In 1977 George Plimpton put on the pads for the Bruins in a pre-season game against the Flyers. He was 50 years old and could barely skate.

The team welcomed him by cutting the bottom out of his underpants and applying a smelly substance to the rest of his clothes.

As coach, Don Cherry serves up lots of colourful quotes, especially when talking about hockey legend Eddie Shore, who once called a meeting with players and their wives and ordered them to cut out the sex.

He would tie his goaltenders to the crossbar to keep them from going down, and make them practice alone in an empty arena, without a puck. He told a player who was in a slump to part his hair on the other side of his head.

Other observations recorded by Plimpton:

Phil Esposito on Gilles Gratton: "The craziest player we ever had. Spaced out. One night he wouldn't play because the moon was in the wrong part of the sky."

Don Cherry on Boom-Boom Geoffrion: "He referred to himself by his nickname. In a restaurant, he'd announce, 'Boom-Boom is pleased. Boom-Boom likes this chicken.'"

John Wensink on Keith Magnuson: "The poor man. He ran into one punch after another."

What Bobby Orr's knee looked like: "A bag of handkerchiefs."

And my favourite, from a fan: "It's hard to throw an octopus with pinpoint accuracy."

A fast, entertaining read.

King Leary

The title suggests tragedy, and indeed lives are ruined and the book ends in blood and death, but the allusion to King Lear is somewhat misleading, for the book was awarded the 1988 Leacock Medal for Humour.

The title is more firmly a reference to Francis Michael Clancy, to whom the book is dedicated, and whose life and nickname (King Clancy) provided a rough template for the character of Percy Leary, a slightly-built professional hockey player known for his speed and grit. Like Clancy, Leary played for Ottawa, was involved in a game during which he played all positions (including goal), and ended up in management with Toronto.

Yet according to the author, King Leary is not about hockey. It's "ultimately about winter, that thing that defines us most eloquently as Canadians." This sentiment is reflected in the epigraph from A Winter's Tale:

A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.

The book's humour comes from Leary himself, who has a distinctive grammatically-challenged way of expressing himself: "I amn't sure," he says, and "my peepers is shut." People are "mooks" and "goomers." Toronto's team is the "Maple Leaves."

One of the best things about the book are the magical hockey-playing monks -- the epigraph's "sprites and goblins." And there are plenty of great lines:

Mrs. Ames gives us a look that could crack nuts. His eyes looked like stones left over from digging a grave. I twist him around so good his socks end up on different feet. I was so full of ginger I could make a horse sneeze at thirty paces.

Tretiak: The Legend

I've wanted to read this book by Tretiak for a long time, and was particularly interested in getting a Soviet perspective on Canadian hockey. However, the English version of this book appeared in 1987 when the Soviet Union was still intact, so in many places the book reads like propaganda. Advice given by coaches is often trite or couched in language that reeks of ideology.

When the Soviet team fell behind in a game against the Canadiens, "the coaches suggested that our players skate faster and be more accurate with their passing."

In another game they said, "Lock up your opponents in their zone, force the goalie to make mistakes, fool the defensemen, and most importantly, show your character."

I assume the book was vetted by Soviet censors, making it impossible to know how accurately it reflects Tretiak's views. I have no doubt he is patriotic, so it is possible his words are genuine.

After retiring, he became a political worker with the Central Red Army Sports Club. And though he dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion that Soviet athletes were engaged in subversive indoctrination, he also says:

Athletes are, in fact, on the main line of the ideological fight of two social systems. Our athletes have to prove constantly that they are not only the strongest and most talented, but, more importantly, they must let the world know that behind them is the strength of Communist ideals, the all-triumphant truth of Soviet morality.

Hockey Thuggery

A number of Tretiak's complaints while playing in North America are similar to those made by Dryden, Esposito, and others while in Moscow during the 1972 Summit Series -- complaints about food, officiating, and accommodation. But Tretiak's harshest words are reserved for the "gladiator psychology" of NHLers.

The dirty tricks, punches, threats to the referees, and after-the-whistle hits were all tactics that the Canadians demonstrated without any trace of shame. They employ their tested weapon -- dishonest, dirty hockey. [They have] malicious, twisted faces, foaming at the mouth.

Tretiak overstates his case, but there is some truth in what he says. In The Game, Ken Dryden provides a careful analysis of the differences between the Russian and the Canadian styles. Because Russian hockey developed differently, it was able to avoid the limitations of the North American game, where (Dryden says) "violence had been allowed to make sense."

Compliments

Tretiak has many gracious things to say about us. He's particularly complimentary about Bobby Hull: "The legends about him are told for a reason. What a shot!"

Gerry Cheevers is "fearless, skillful and calm."

Bobby Clarke: "To look at him, you'd swear that Bobby was a wanted murderer, but once you got to know him, you realized what a very friendly and kind fellow he was."

Phil Esposito: "...his superb ability to control the puck, his powerful game in front of the net, and his astounding intuition were, as always, distinct Esposito trademarks."

He refers to the Montreal Forum as "a great hockey citadel" and suggests that Russians "could learn from the Canadiens everything that concerns respect for fans and players."

Trivia

Tretiak, like all the Russians, did an incredible amount of dryland training. This included having someone hit tennis balls at him with a racket. During games he watched the eyes of incoming players so intently that he was accused of hypnotizing them.

Before the first game of the Summit Series, Jacques Plante made a surprise visit to give him tips on how to play the Canadian forwards.

He was fascinated by Gerry Cheevers, who smoked a cigar before games, and had a clause in his contract permitting him to drink beer between periods.

He addresses Ken Dryden directly, responding to comments made in Dryden's first book, Face-Off at the Summit. "You're right, Ken. We all had the same feelings..."

The Stanley Cup: "a huge, paunchy, glittering trophy that looks like a Russian samovar."

Retirement

"Vladik" retired in 1984, stating that he never wanted to play in the NHL. "It wouldn't suit me, as an officer and Soviet citizen..." This may or may not be the truth.

The Wikipedia entry on him indicates he may have retired because he was not allowed to go to the NHL, and also because he no longer wanted to play for Tikhonov. It was Tikhonov who pulled Tretiak during an Olympic match against the Americans in Lake Placid (the "Miracle on Ice"), after Tretiak had let in a weak goal at the end of the first period.

In 1987 there was a reunion of the Summit Series players. Tretiak writes:

Now there was no trace of the old antagonism. We had become wise and kind. We looked at one another's aging faces and couldn't hold back the laughter, thinking about what bullies we had been in 1972.

Tretiak is one of the most admired and respected hockey players in the world. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989.

The following year he became the goaltending coach for the Chicago Blackhawks. Among those he tutored are Ed Belfour, Martin Brodeur, and Dominic Hasek. Any goalie wearing number 20 does so as a tribute to Tretiak.

In 2006 he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General.

He runs the Vladislav Tretiak Elite School of Goaltending in Toronto.

The translation is by Sam and Maria Budman.

The Game

You know what people say about goalies -- they're "different." Ken Dryden certainly is. Imagine the way his teammates saw him. Aloof and introspective, brainy (he's got a law degree!), unusually tall for a player in the 1970s (at 6'4" he was taller than just about everyone else in the league).

He's the only person to win the Conn Smythe trophy (as playoff MVP) before winning the Calder (rookie of the year). After playing two full seasons with the Canadiens, he rejected the contract he was offered and sat out a year. (Players just didn't do that then.) He abruptly retired after a short but brilliant career (seven and a half seasons), during which he backstopped the team to six championships.

He went on to become an Member of Parliament, and made a bid for the leadership of the Liberal party. Think of it, a goalie as PM!

Like its author, The Game is "different." One might have expected a book that recaps at least some of those Stanley Cup wins. But no, it's structured around a week near the end of his final season, when he's made his decision to retire, and takes us through several routine league games.

The book is a couch on which Dryden analyzes himself, his teammates, and the state of the game. He reflects on practices and warmups, pregame chatter ("Gotta play it, might as well win it") and dressing-room gibes ("Hey, you're the guy Plager scored on from the parking lot...").

He muses upon officiating ("like doing spot-checks on New Year's Eve"), and the "NHL theory of violence," and how Gretzky and the Soviets contributed to obstruction and the "dump-and-chase" style.

But he's best when fixing his gaze on those around him: the prankster Lapointe, Shutt "a perfect Shakespearian fool," Phil Esposito a "volume shooter," Don Cherry coaching the Bruins with "a tiny permanent grin on his face, like a ten-year-old kid holding a stink bomb behind his back."

And the brilliant but unlikeable Scotty Bowman whose playing career ended during a breakaway, his skull fractured by the stick of Jean-Guy Talbot, who was chasing him. How ironic that Bowman later coached Talbot, or that a typical pregame harangue by Bowman went like this:

...and that Woods, is there some reason we can't touch that guy? Is there? For crissake, I see Lupien pattin' him on the ass. And Mondou, sniffin' around, 'Hiya Woodsie. How are ya, Woodsie?' You're not playin' with him.

And Dryden's analysis of Larry Robinson:

More skillful with each year, doing more things, stretching himself wider, he has stretched himself thinner. Working hard, he is making more good plays; but, overextending himself, his stride now chopping, his invincibility in question, he is making more bad plays as well. The numbers are still hugely in his favour, but now it is a game of numbers, concrete and measurable, as for everyone else. By exchanging a game he dominated for a larger, more demanding one he cannot dominate, Robinson is no longer a presence.

The Game is earnest and rambling, often insightful, sometimes windy. It's been hailed as the best book about hockey ever written, and is lauded on the back cover by no less a personage than Mordecai Richler. It's one of only two hockey books listed in Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Books of All Time. (The other is Game Misconduct by Russ Conway, about Alan Eagleson.)

First published in 1993, it was reissued in 2003 as a "20th Anniversary Edition" with an additional chapter. The cover photo and most of the 16 pages of photos were taken by Denis Brodeur, father of another famous goalie. One of them shows Dryden sitting in the dressing room with a serene look on his face, cradling the Stanley Cup like a teddy bear.

Midnight Hockey

No one in Canada is better at the combined tasks of writing and hockey than Bill Gaston. Not Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje. Certainly not David Adams Richards, whose memoir Hockey Dreams is subtitled Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play.

Gaston on the other hand can play -- Junior hockey for the Vancouver Centennials, university hockey for the UBC Thunderbirds, and pro in Europe for a year. He's had his nose split open by Steve Shutt, and his bell rung by Denis Potvin.

He's also been short-listed for the Giller, the G-G, the Ethel Wilson Award; and he's won the Timothy Findley Award and the CBC/Canadian Literary Award.

In other words he's a ringer, a guy who can go top shelf with a puck or a well-crafted sentence.

The book's title refers to the late-night time slots that rec and oldtimer hockey games are given, the earlier times being reserved for kids. In hockey terms an "oldtimer" is someone who's reached the lofty age of 35.

Gaston has played a lot of rec and oldtimer hockey. Some of the teams he's played for are the Stinkhorns, the Old Goats, the Hurry-Kings. The names of these and other teams -- the Fogduckers, the Vasectomites, the Well Hungarians, the Flapping Dondalingers -- provide a clue to the nature of the book.

Humour is paramount. I laughed until tears ran down my face.

Sure, it's guy humour, but even my wife laughed when I read bits to her. But then she's a good sport. We spent our honeymoon in Florida, along with everyone else on my team. We were playing in a tournament.

Hockey has an almost mystical status in this land. The instinct to throw one's arms in the air after scoring a goal is something that Canadians are born with. But there's much more to hockey than scoring and winning. There's the camaraderie off the ice, the dressing room goofiness, the beer, the road trips, the nicknames, the goalies ("men from a distant galaxie").

For me, this was the perfect book to start off the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge -- and not just because it's such a darn good read. Once, as part of Canada Book Day, me and Bill took part in a progressive short story that travelled through each province and territory, with each writer tacking on a section. Sorta like the flip side of the Canadian Book Challenge.

Synchronicity or what?

King of Russia

A Year in the Russian Super League

Dave King coached Canada’s national team for nine years, followed by stints with Calgary, Columbus and Montreal in the NHL. Later while coaching in Europe he was courted by Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the Russian Super League, which includes such fabled teams as Central Red Army and Moscow Dynamo.

In taking the job King became the first Canadian to coach in the league, and led Metallurg to their most successful season ever. They finished first overall with only five regular season losses in 51 games. They also won the Spengler Cup, a five-team mid-season tournament played in Davos, Switzerland. However, they fared less well in the league playoffs. They were hit with a lot of injuries and went out in the semi-finals, losing 3 games to 1, all their losses being in overtime.

Nineteen-year-old Evgeny Malkin was the star of the team, and King has a lot of good things to say about him. When the team played in Finland for the Tampere Cup, Malkin did “such dazzling things with the puck that the fans just stood up and applauded.” But it’s not just his natural skills that make him a great player. “Sometimes Russian players can be extremely dour. Malkin smiles all the time. He seems to enjoy practice. He loves to compete. He plays the game with tempo. He’s unselfish.” Eric Lindros played for King as a nineteen-year-old, and King ranks Malkin ahead of Lindros at that age.

At the start of the season King thinks the team needs more grit, and convinces the management to bring in a couple of warhorses, ex-Leafs Dmitri Yushkevich and Igor Korolev. It was a smart move, as both players made major contributions to the team. King is particularly complimentary about Yushkevich, who with a bad knee is “as close to a one-legged player as you can get.” His great heart makes up for this deficiency. During one game he's hit in the face with a puck. King says:

I didn’t think I’d see him for a while, but the next day, who’s there at practice? It’s Yushkevich -– and he looked like hell. If little kids on the street had seen him they would have run the other way. He looked like a character in a horror movie, with all those scars of his and now his face all lopsided.

Likewise Korolev. In the playoffs he’s cut by a skate and receives 23 stitches. “It was so bad that our doctor was practically throwing up.” Korolev refuses to stay out of the game and comes back “with a great big patch over his eye, blood all over his sweater and his face.”

Observations about Russian Hockey

Before the season begins a Russian Orthodox priest enters the dressing room and sprinkles the players with holy water.

Not only must teams travel vast distances for league play, but Metallurg's pre-season training took place in the Swiss Alps, and included an exhibition tournament in Finland, while mid-season dry-land training was located in Dubai.

For top-level players the Russian Super League is as lucrative as the NHL. Yet on some teams players went unpaid for months.

The amount of physical training is phenomenal. King says:

I’m no doctor, but we don’t have nearly as many groin strains here [as in the NHL] and I’m wondering if that has something to do with the tremendous strength the Russian players develop in their quadriceps... To a man, the leg strength of a Russian player will amaze you. The quadriceps muscles, which deliver so much power to the stride, are huge on virtually every one of them. Right from the time they turn eight or nine years old, they do an immense amount of work to build up their leg strength.

Also the whole approach to coaching is different:

The players rarely complain or give you any emotional reaction... I blame it on the fact that, starting at young age, coaches confront players one-on-one on the bench, in the dressing-room, or on the ice, scolding them harshly for mistakes. They rarely do it privately, so in order to cope the players simply don’t react. They absorb the comments and show their strength to their teammates by wearing a blank expression. I’ve seen grown men coaching young ten- or eleven-year-olds go nose-to-nose with a youngster, ranting and raving almost incoherently -– and the young player simply takes the medicine...

King decided to stay for the 2006-2007 season, but many of his top players had moved on, including Yushkevich and Malkin, who is now with the Pittsburgh Penguins. After just eight games King was fired. His record was 3-4-1.