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Boom Boom: The Life and Times of Bernard Geoffrion

by Bernard Geoffrion and Stan Fischler

The Puck Starts Here: The Origin of Canada’s Great Winter Game Ice Hockey

by Garth Vaughan

On the Edge: Women Making Hockey History

by Elizabeth Etue and Megan K. Williams

Cold War: The Great Canada-Soviet Hockey Series of 1972

by Roy MacSkimming

Young people today slurp down coffee and gobble glazed donuts without knowing that Tim Horton was among the finest National Hockey League defencemen of his generation, so it’s encouraging to see the history of hockey get special attention this fall. All too often, book publishers pay teenage phenomenons to serve up their “memoirs” for pre-pubescent fans. But this year, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, for one, has stepped into the time machine and dug up Bernie Geoffrion, a guy who hung up his skates nearly 20 years ago.

Boom Boom, as he was called, invented the slapshot, played on a team that won the Stanley Cup five years in a row, and became just the second NHL player to score 50 goals in a season. He was on the ice when the Richard Riot broke out at the Montreal Forum, he witnessed the first attempt to start a players’ association, and he watched teammate Jacques Plante introduce the goalie mask to the game. After his retirement, the Boomer went on to coach the Rangers in New York, the expansion Flames in Atlanta, and his hometown Canadiens in Montreal. He even arranged for a young superstar named Bobby Orr to be his daughter’s senior prom date.

With a resumé like that, the Hall of Famer should have some stories to tell. But his autobiography, Boom Boom: The Life and Times of Bernard Geoffrion, makes these great moments in hockey history seem banal. It’s difficult to tell what co-author Stan Fischler did other than transcribe interview tapes and throw in the odd quotation from The Hockey News. Unfortunately, Boom Boom is not a natural storyteller, unlike Don Cherry, who also had Fischler help him tell his life story.

Nor is Garth Vaughan, author of The Puck Starts Here: The Origin of Canada’s Great Winter Game Ice Hockey. A retired surgeon, Vaughan is determined to set the record straight about the birthplace of hockey. It is, he insists, Windsor, Nova Scotia and not Montreal or Kingston, as many claim. In fact, he argues that hockey was played in Windsor around 1800, 75 years before the first official game in Montreal.

His evidence is convincing, but it’s not enough to spin into a book. While he extols the virtues of hockey sticks made by Micmac Indians, early skates from The Starr Manufacturing Company, and the Nova Scotia Box Net, he downplays or ignores developments from other parts of the country. This gives the book the annoying quality of a family history. Organized in short copy blocks and chock full of photos, drawings, and newspaper clippings, The Puck Starts Here is repetitive and reads like a textbook for grade schoolers.

As Vaughan points out, hockey was originally played by both sexes. Sadly, according to On the Edge: Women Making Hockey History, by Elizabeth Etue and Megan K. Williams, the women’s game had all but disappeared by the 1940s. From a tentative rebirth in the 1970s, the game was slow to attract players until body checking was banned in the 1980s. Since 1990 – and the first official women’s world championship – female hockey has grown rapidly, in Canada and in the U.S., Europe, and the Far East.

On the Edge examines the history, the growing pains, and the bright future of the game. Doubtful parents worried about injuries to their daughters, boys’ leagues determined to keep good ice times to themselves, hockey associations unwilling to offer funding or resources, sponsors afraid to back anything new, and girls who don’t know women even play are some of the problems that must still be overcome. But the addition of women’s hockey as an Olympic sport, starting in 1998, should provide a significant boost.

Not surprisingly, Etue and Williams are sympathetic and supportive, but they don’t ignore the unpleasant details (the internal battles at the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association, for example). While the decision to use footnotes – an academic affectation that has no place in a book that hopes to promote the game – is bizarre, On the Edge is a welcome history of an unfairly ignored part of hockey.

The 1972 series between Canada and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, has not been forgotten by anyone old enough to have seen it – especially since writers keep turning out books about it. The latest reminder is Cold War: The Great Canada-Soviet Hockey Series of 1972, by Roy MacSkimming.

Given that Russians now star in the NHL and the United States has become – since this year’s World Cup of Hockey – Canada’s arch rival on ice, it’s easy to forget the political, emotional, and spiritual background of that series. By alternating detailed recountings of the games with chapters on the players and the times, MacSkimming explains that context, though he fails to really capture the gut-wrenching drama anyone who watched the games – and that was just about everyone – experienced.

But the book makes too much of the changes the near defeat precipitated in Canadian hockey. Certainly, the ’72 series forced the NHL and the Canadian hockey system to rethink coaching, training, and physical fitness, but the other North American sports managed to drag themselves into the modern age without almost losing to the Soviets. Worse, MacSkimming glosses over the suggestion that the emphasis on structured development is killing the very creativity that made Canada’s 1972 come-from-behind victory possible. Despite these quibbles, Cold War is a solid history of the series and the state of the game in the early 1970s.

While these four books may vary in quality, each helps keep the memories of hockey’s rich past alive. And, even in a weak book, that’s not a bad thing.

 

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Ryerson

DETAILS

Price: $27.99

Page Count: 320 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-07-552715-4

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 1996-11

Categories: Memoir & Biography

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: Goose Lane

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 206 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-86492-212-4

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: November 1, 1996

Categories: Memoir & Biography

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: Second Story

DETAILS

Price: $18.95

Page Count: 336 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-929005-79-1

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: November 1, 1996

Categories: Memoir & Biography

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: Greystone/Douglas & McIntyre

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 224 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55054-473-X

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: November 1, 1996

Categories: Memoir & Biography