*attributed to either Doug or Bob McKenzie
It would appear that literacy and hockey seem to be mutually exclusive terms. Any review of the literature devoted to what The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnick called “the only game in the world, ice hockey,” reveals a paucity of “real” books.
It’s been repeated for almost two decades that the only “real” book on the game is “The Game” by Ken Dryden. I did stumble across an excellent collection of short stories, “Hockey Sur Glace,” by Peter LaSalle. Both books appeared way back in 1989.
There’s a new anthology I’ve yet to read, but probably will read, titled “The Greatest Hockey Stories Ever Told.” But aside from the inclusion of Alec Wilkinson’s terrific New Yorker profile of Mike Richter, the collection seems short-handed in literary terms.
What’s got me doing this “how come” bit is; how come what could arguably be the smartest game in the world has no body of writing that reflects the absolute wonder of what goes on out on the ice? We’re talking about the only team sport in the world, other than polo, that goes faster than a man can run, a game that combines the savagery of football, the grace of ballet and the complexity of quantum mechanics. You’d think the shelves would be groaning with learned explications. Vast forests have been destroyed to flatter the vanity of people who like baseball, “a great game,” as Barry Melrose once put it, “for the people who can’t play hockey.” I’m told there are even some scholarly books about golf.
These musing have arisen from my current reading of Stephen Brunt’s 2007 “Searching For Bobby Orr,” a fan’s book, but a critical and well-written fan’s book, one that happens to contain some first-rate descriptions of the mechanics of how the game unfolds. Unfortunately, pages 176 – 181, a wonderful account of a 1970 Orr short-handed goal against the Red Wings, is probably the best illustration of why nobody wants to write about hockey, or for that matter read about it. As a hockey exceptionalist, I loved every word on those five pages of dense text on the Orr goal, but it took all of that writing to try to begin to do justice to a near-miraculous sequence of events that unfolded in less than ten seconds.
Based upon a praiseful footnote in Stephen Brunt’s Bobby Orr book, I will seek out and read the late Peter Gzowski’s, “The Game of Our Lives,” an account of the 1980-81 Edmonton Oilers season and an attempt “to describe and define the genius of Wayne Gretzky.
But the great hockey novel continues to wait. “Our Game,” as Mr. Gretzky calls it, deserves better. Where is the hockey knowledgeable literary genius who will do for hockey what Budd Schulberg did for boxing, what Hemingway did for bullfighting or Malamud for baseball. If such lesser athletic endeavors could generate enough grist for thousands and thousands of freshman English papers, then how come there’s not at least one endowed chair of Hockey Literature at one of the community colleges in Manitoba? How come, eh?
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