A double review with A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey
by Stephen J. Harper
Simon & Schuster Canada, Toronto, 2013
384 pages, illus., $34.99 hardcover
If you’ve ever watched the annual twelve-hour-plus Hockey Day in Canada special broadcast by the CBC, you quickly became aware of how much hockey is fetishized in Canada. These days, there’s never really a break from the once-winter-only sport — the Los Angeles Kings won the latest Stanley Cup on June 13, the annual National Hockey League draft happened on June 27, and free agency occurred, fittingly, on Canada Day. Pre-season games were set to begin in September. As part of that fetish, writers continue to tackle the subject of hockey history.
D’Arcy Jenish and Stephen J. Harper have written two of the latest books on the subject, The NHL: A Centennial History and A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey. The two dovetail nicely, with Harper’s book ending right about where Jenish’s begins. Harper writes about the disorganized beginnings of hockey more than one hundred years ago. His focus, as the subtitle asserts, is about Toronto’s forgotten pre-Leafs teams and the men who made them happen.
It’s a difficult thing to review a book by the prime minister without being constantly aware of who has written it. When one reads sentences like, “What links the Toronto of the early 1900s to that of the early 2000s is the experience of change and growth,” it conjures Craig Lauzon’s television comedy impression (on the Royal Canadian Air Farce) of Harper as a being bit stiff. That’s slightly reinforced by things such as Harper’s reinterpretation of a well-known phrase to read, “when the stuff hits the fan” (my italics). While I’m still trying to process the image of the prime minister surfing findagrave.com for his research, Harper does get away from sentences like that once the book gets going.
There is some irony in A Great Game. Harper says of early hockey boss John Ross Robertson that his “contributions came with a price: his breathtaking proclivity to control.” (Ahem.) But, elsewhere, Harper writes with curiosity and a tempered enthusiasm and does seem to find the material genuinely evocative.
Harper’s focus is the amateur-professional schism that obsessed hockeyists at the turn of the last century. The world of hockey at the time was a very messy one, with professional and amateur leagues, junior and senior teams. There’s a liquid quality to early twentieth-century hockey that makes the World Hockey Association (the NHL’s now-defunct 1970s rival) look like a model of consistency, with players jumping teams, leagues, and countries, and even using assumed names on remote teams to make an extra buck. It’s tricky to write about something like professional sports with relatively few visual historical resources. Thank God for old newspapers, their archivists, and microfiche companies, as well as the army of nearly anonymous writers who covered the sport.
Jenish’s The NHL has much the same focus — the backroom workings of organized hockey. But Jenish is working with a longer timeline, stretching from the First World War era to the present day. And with the setting being more recent there’s more material for him to work with — some of it literally rescued from the trash. Parts of Jenish’s book are very, as the term goes, “inside baseball” (detail-oriented).
In The NHL Jenish attempts to cover all of the league’s history — but, with a league that seems to have survived despite itself, there’s almost too much ground to cover. And events like the 1972 Canada-Soviet Union series merit almost as many pages as the struggles of the expansion California Golden Seals.
What’s especially interesting is reading about relatively recent hockey history in a historical context. In the 1970s — a time when many of us grew up watching and celebrating the sport — hockey was in a precarious, watered-down state. For a young fan of the Winnipeg Jets and Montreal Canadiens, it was easy to miss the bad news coming from the backrooms of both the WHA and the NHL. Jenish’s book may make a hockey fan realize how much they didn’t know about the sport.
In terms of tone, Jenish is a bit of a stay-at-home defenceman. He generally plays it safe, reminding us, especially in the chapter devoted to Alan Eagleson’s malfeasance, to remain critical but to not pile on — since, Jenish points out, Eagleson did much to strengthen the league, despite his transgressions.
Both books are peppered with teases. Why were the Cincinnati Stingers first expected to go from the WHA to the NHL, and then not, Mr. Jenish? Can you tell me more about Jack Ulrich, the first prominent deaf (and mute) hockey player, Mr. Harper? Of course, one couldn’t possibly cover all the interesting angles without filling a thousand pages, and the wealth of these kinds of (necessarily) unexploited ideas is a measure of how evocative both books are.
Both The NHL and A Great Game are for serious fans only. If there’s someone out there who never collected hockey cards, or who has never ironically named their fantasy hockey team something like “The Renfrew Creamery Kings,” then these two books would probably mean nothing to them. For the rest of us, though, they’ll fit nicely on the bookshelf, next to our hoarded game programs.
— Jim Chliboyko (Read bio)
Freelance writer in Winnipeg.