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The Top 100 Nhl Players of All Time

by Steve Dryden, ed.

Hockey’s Golden Era: Stars of the Original Six

by Mike Leonetti

Shooting Stars: Photographs from the Portnoy Collection at the Hockey Hall of Fame

by Andrew Podnieks

Etched in Ice: A Tribute to Hockey’s Defining Moments

by Michael McKinley

To Canadians in the 1930s and 1940s listening to Foster Hewitt call the play-by-play, hockey must have seemed invented for radio. As families huddled around their consoles, the chaotic beauty of the game came alive in their minds. Later, as the nation watched the game in grainy black and white – and then later in brilliant colour – hockey proved to be the ideal television sport. The speed and emotion, the grace and brutality danced on the cathode ray tubes.

And yet, no medium can capture the essence of the game as simply or as powerfully as photography. The famous photo of Paul Henderson and Yvan Cournoyer in ecstasy with 34 seconds left in the 1972 Summit Series, for example, or the one showing Bobby Orr flying through the air after scoring the Stanley Cup winning goal in 1970, captured magic moments.

This power makes the temptation to create books of hockey photography hard to resist. But as this year’s crop illustrates, it’s not always an easy task to pull off.

Hockey’s Golden Era: Stars of the Original Six is a collection of photos by Harold Barkley from the 1950s and 1960s – a time that was as much a golden age for hockey photography as for the game itself. Few goalies wore masks and fewer skaters wore helmets, so photographers were able to capture the emotion on players’ faces in a way that is no longer possible.

But Barkley also had a technical advantage. Since the lighting in arenas was insufficient for colour film, he set up electronic strobes atop the glass and synchronized them to flash with his shutter. This gave his photos a depth, sharpness, and clarity unmatched by contemporary photographers who rely on the ambient lighting in today’s arenas.

Alas, the great shots are weakened by the weak text in Hockey’s Golden Era. The book is divided into six parts, one for each of the Original Six teams. Along with a short introduction for each franchise, author Mike Leonetti offers brief profiles of several of the better-known players. But the writing is pedestrian, the research distressingly superficial, and the book has too many sloppy errors. The introduction to the section on the New York Rangers ends with: “However, the Rangers have not sipped from the Stanley Cup since 1940!” Don’t tell that to Mark Messier, who led the team to Cup victory in a thrilling seven-game final over the Vancouver Canucks in 1994. Leonetti would have been far wiser to write short captions and let the photos speak for themselves.

At $60, Shooting Stars: Photographs from the Portnoy Collection at the Hockey Hall of Fame, has a price tag three times that of Hockey’s Golden Era. For the extra money, a hockey fan gets lush seventies-era photos by Lewis Portnoy displayed one to a page and a more imaginative approach to the text. Building on the strobe lighting techniques used by Barkley and others, Portnoy experimented with different locations for the strobes (above the net, for example). He also used a zoom lens to bring the action and emotion even closer. Each plate comes with its own vignette on the facing page. Sometimes it works well: a shot of the Philadelphia Flyers on their bench, apparently watching a fight, is the entrée to a story about a fight-filled game in 1976 between the Flyers and the Toronto Maple Leafs that led Ontario’s attorney general to lay charges against four players. Other times, the link is too tenuous: a picture of goaltender Cesare Maniago sits beside the story of Bill Masterton, who died following an on-ice head injury. The fact that Maniago was on the ice at the time is, apparently, a strong enough connection for author Andrew Podnieks.

That’s a quibble, perhaps, but the book is hurt by the awkward writing and the inclusion of too much information. The tale of Dave Keon and his gentlemanly play, for example, includes a list of all 49 of the penalties he drew during his long career. And the story of the birth of the Washington franchise includes 41 names that lost to Capitals as the team’s nickname.

Far more successful is Etched in Ice: A Tribute to Hockey’s Defining Moments by Michael McKinley. Though they aren’t all action shots, the numerous photos – including some shot by Portnoy – support the text rather than the other way around.
McKinley has selected 25 moments in the history of the game. These include the 25-day trek the Dawson City Nuggets took from the Yukon to Ottawa to challenge the Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup, Howie Morenz’s death from a broken leg, Team USA’s Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Winter Olympics, and the trading of Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988.

The writing is strong and clear and the structure of the book means it’s more than just a collection of fine photographs. In fact, it works well as a history of the game, though McKinley might have opted for longer, more detailed write-ups on his 25 defining moments.

The Top 100 NHL Players of All Time is not really a book of photography. Instead, it is a repackaging of The Hockey News’s selection of the top 50 players of all time, released earlier this year in a special issue to mark the weekly newspaper’s 50th anniversary. The book version adds players 51 to 100 as well as speculation on some young NHLers who will make the next top 100 list.

Though the pictures that accompany the profiles do not try to match the photography found in the other three books, The Top 100 Players of All Time succeeds because the profiles are well researched and well told. Every one of these players has a compelling story. It’s also a surprisingly solid ranking. Any list is bound to spark debate and this one is no different: some people will (with good reason) forever argue that Bobby Orr deserves to be number one rather than Wayne Gretzky; others will point out that Patrick Roy should be ahead of Ken Dryden or that it’s a crime that their favourite player isn’t on the list. But the truth is the 50 experts – including coaches, general managers, reporters, and historians – invited by The Hockey News to do the voting did such a fine job that the debate was not as spirited or as long-lasting as it might have been.

 

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $29.99

Page Count: 160 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7710-4175-6

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 1998-11

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Sports, Health & Self-help

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: Firefly Books

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 160 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55209-318-2

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: November 1, 1998

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

Tags: , ,

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

DETAILS

Price: $60

Page Count: 176 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-385-25800-3

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: November 1, 1998

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

Reviewer: Tim Falconer

Publisher: Greystone Books

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 138 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55054-654-6

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: November 1, 1998

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Sports, Health & Self-help