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Having covered the last two Olympics and every World Championship since 2000, Lucas Aykroyd is one of the world's leading ice hockey experts.
Here the Canadian journalist picks five books every hockey fan must have. Click to view Top 5 Hockey Books.
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Best In-Depth Read (The Game, Ken Dryden) |
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 If you want the inside scoop on hockey, who's better qualified to provide it than a six-time Stanley Cup champion, five-time winner of the NHL's best goalie award, and student of history, law and politics? The man in question is Ken Dryden, and the answer is: "Nobody".
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Structurally, The Game centers on a snapshot of life with the Montreal Canadiens during the 1978-79 NHL season, as the famous Canadian club marched toward its fourth consecutive title. This was Dryden's final pro season, and the book was published in 1983 when he was 36 years old, enabling the author to analyze events with the clarity and perspective that a little distance provides.
Granted, not every anecdote carries profound weight. All the reader can do is guffaw when All-Star defenseman Guy Lapointe substitutes sour cream for ice cream as a prank at a team meal, for instance.
But Dryden poignantly conveys the premature sense of mortality that afflicts elite athletes who have earned their living from their physical talents and concentrated on nothing but upcoming games for decades: "Boy wonder, emerging star, middle-age problem, ageing veteran, all in ten short years, and now in his thirties and still a young man, he feels too old to start again".
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Hockey for Thinkers |
 The observant, intellectual goalie also describes how the camaraderie of the dressing room builds strong team bonds between hockey players, but still leaves them with only a superficial understanding of one another's backgrounds and personalities. Dryden uses star forward Guy Lafleur as an example: "I have known Lafleur for nearly eight years. In that time, I have been to his home only once, for a team party; he has never been to mine. We have never been roommates on the road; we have never talked for more than a few coincidental moments at a stretch."
Playing with numerous Francophone team-mates and living in Montreal, Quebec's largest city, gave Dryden a front-row view of the rising political tensions that fueled the French-Canadian separatist movement of the 1970s. He vividly recounts the divisions among the crowd at the Montreal Forum on the night of November 15, 1976, when the Parti Quebecois won a majority of seats in the Quebec legislature for the first time, setting the stage for a 1980 referendum on whether the province would leave Canada or stay in the confederation. He also notes that similar divisions didn't affect his hockey team to any significant degree, mostly because they had more in common as privileged pro athletes than differences as native speakers of English or French.
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A Fighting Chance |
Dryden's theories on hockey are cogent and well-elaborated. Citing Sigmund Freud and Desmond Morris, he argues that the NHL's tolerance of fist-fighting is misguided in terms of being a safety valve to prevent worse violence: "What matters is that fighting degrades, turning sport into a dubious spectacle, bringing into question hockey's very legitimacy, confining it forever to the fringes of sports respectability."
But he also freely admits that within the context of the culture of intimidation fostered by the Philadelphia Flyers, Stanley Cup champions for 1974 and 1975, the Canadiens had to resort to a certain amount of violence to gain respect and space for their more freewheeling game. He singles out a huge bodycheck delivered by Montreal defenseman Larry Robinson on Flyers forward Gary Dornhoefer, one which actually dented the boards in the Montreal Forum, as a real turning point in the 1976 Stanley Cup finals.
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 Fans of international football will take an interest in Dryden's comparison of the stagnation of Canadian hockey in the 1950s, 60s and 70s with a similar trend in English football. An afterword in the 20th anniversary edition (published in 2003) details the impact that the relentless, artistic, high-tempo Soviet hockey style would ultimately have on the game worldwide.
The Game truly rewards multiple readings. It's no wonder this title has sold more than 100,000 copies and cracked the Top Ten in Sports Illustrated's 2002 list of the Top 100 Sports Books of all time.
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To buy this product try one of these retailers. They are competitively priced and reliable:
Amazon.co.uk - The UK arm of the world’s biggest book store
Amazon.com - The US arm of the world’s biggest book store
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