It’s in Richard Ford’s luminescent novel The Sportswriter that his unhero, Frank Bascombe, dismisses hockey as “an uninteresting game played by Canadians.” I’ve grown somehow fond of the easy superiority of those six words, the way they get together to reduce our game to the status of some kind of regional medical complaint, a minor sleeping sickness, maybe, so boring as to lack even symptoms.

It’s easy these days – maybe even stylish – to laze around in cynicism, muttering about the stickwork, the neutral-zone trap, the fact that Columbus, Ohio, has an NHL team and Saskatoon doesn’t. But I still get a little lifting sensation in my stomach seeing Pavel Bure sift through defencemen with the puck under his spell. And as recently as April I was brought out of a chair by the inexplicable physics of Patrick Roy. I still believe, too, that hockey remains a game whose many tempers and narratives somehow contain this country.

That’s not to say that hockey as we know it now is the best it’s ever been. Do I wish I could have witnessed Cyclone Taylor at full blow? Or seen, firsthand, the glare in Rocket Richard’s eyes? I do. All the more so now that I’ve read Michael McKinley’s agreeable new book, Putting a Roof on Winter. This is a book that does seem, it’s true, to reach for a greater purpose than it grasps. And certainly the subtitle – Hockey’s Rise from Sport to Spectacle – promises more of a sociological current than McKinley ever taps. But what he does do is let the history flow, and in so doing he tells some marvellous stories.

A Vancouver screenwriter and journalist who’s the author already of several fine hockey picture books, McKinley starts us in Montreal, circa 1875, offering up James Creighton as The Man Who Invented Hockey. Not that the game wasn’t already being played elsewhere, it’s just that it was Creighton who, as a 25-year-old engineering graduate, got a group of rugby football mates together and organized the first indoor hockey game.

After Creighton, McKinley goes in among the early – and, in most cases, undercelebrated – engines of the game, patrons
and players and millionaire owners with names like Sir Arthur Frederick Stanley, One-Eyed Frank McGee, and Senator Michael O’Brien. When McKinley gets to the First World War, he does a nice job pairing up the stories of the game’s tragic aristocrat, Hobey Baker (who died at the age of 25, just before he was due to ship out from France), and one of its most influential early architects, the durable and always scrappy Conn Smythe.

There’s not much from professional hockey’s first 100 years that McKinley misses: he deftly sketches out the beginnings of the NHL, gives us the marvellous Patrick brothers, the sad history of Howie Morenz, irascible Jack Adams, gentlemanly Jean Beliveau. We get Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe and Bobby Orr and the last time, so long ago now, that the Leafs were winning Stanley Cups. When he gets to 1972 he takes us through the Summit Series (of course: did anything else happen that year?) and then he leaves off, as if to say that’s when hockey, the real, live, true stuff, stopped.

McKinley’s sources all seem to be secondary, which is fine: he still manages to get the goods and even come through with such surprises as the legend (new to me) of Charlie Conacher’s enormous penis. McKinley also makes very good use of contemporary newspaper accounts, many of them long-buried. His prose can get a little breathless, and now and then it purples, too. He writes, for instance, of the Hobey Baker and “his devotion to his mistress, air combat;” he gives us, a little later, a Montreal crowd that “rose in laudation.”

As for the material, he leaves a little room for quibbles, so here are a couple: why limit us to intermittent mentions of women’s hockey, when teams like the Preston Rivulettes (featuring the talents of Nellie Ranscombe and Marm Schmuck) seem to invite a closer accounting? Missing, too, is one of the punchlines from the amazing story of Eddie Shore and Ace Bailey. One December night in 1933, Boston’s Shore knocked Toronto’s Bailey to the ice, where he hit his head so hard that the Bruins’ doctor was ready to call for a priest. Bailey survived, but Shore almost didn’t. With a pistol in his coat, Bailey’s father took the train to Boston to kill the man who’d nearly killed his son. On Conn Smythe’s orders, a Boston policeman intercepted him, got him drunk, got the gun. What McKinley doesn’t mention is that, a couple of weeks later, the policeman is said to have mailed the gun back to Bailey’s father in Toronto.

Putting a Roof on Winter isn’t going to find readers beyond the hockey world. The audience that awaits it is probably made up of people more or less like me, authenticated fans who can talk about the physics of Patrick Roy and only be half-kidding. And yet it is a book that Frank Bascombe could learn from. He could sit down there in Haddam, New Jersey, and soak it in, the comedy and tragedy and money and cold and blood and speed, the whole messy, beautiful lot. I’d send him a copy in a minute, but I don’t know that he’d get it.