sla book review: all roads lead to hockey

all roads lead to hockey

Reviewed by Brett Conway

APRIL 10, 2006 archive

Three summers ago, returning from teaching in Asia and desperate for some Canadian content, I began watching hockey games from the 1970s on a classic sports channel. Players without helmets, with small pads on their shoulders and elbows, would turn and skate and shoot unimpeded around the rinks. Cheap hits seldom happened because, with hair for helmets and cloth for body pads, some hard checks would result in homicides. The more I watched these games, the more old-time hockey, the kind Don Cherry and other promoters of hockey violence spout off about, seemed a myth. With fall, came the last NHL season before the lockout. Watching these games, I saw players slamming into each other to gain precious inches of territory: all were grabbed and held and hooked as they tried to reach the goal line. I wondered what had happened. Why did the fast game I saw on the classic sports channel barely resemble the NHL of the post-Gretzky era? Why did the current NHL look less like the sport played by Guy Lafleur and Bobby Orr on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night and more like the one played by Jerome Bettis and the rest of the Steelers on a Sunday afternoon?

This state of hockey is explored in Bill Boyd's All Roads Lead to Hockey: Reports from Northern Canada to the Mexican Border, a book that profiles seven non-NHL communities. Although Boyd offers no pat solutions to the problems the NHL now faces, the hockey communities profiled from northern Manitoba to Texas, and Michigan and Minnesota to Ontario and Virginia, often do. Throughout the book, we come across people deeply involved and in love with this once Canadian-dominated sport but now troubled that defensive systems have choked off its offensive flow. Alongside this problem, there are other developments: the ever increasing danger on the ice for players but decreasing quality for the fan; the many North American coaches resisting or adopting the coaching strategies of Europeans; and the movement of the center of hockey from Canada to south of the border.

The decline in the quality of NHL play seems to go hand in hand with the increase of hockey equipment - helmets, face-masks, visors. Boyd convincingly shows how the personality of the game has changed as the players' personalities have disappeared beneath molded plastic. Helmets were once not the norm but the exception. A player with a helmet stood out. Bill Hagan who played for the Barrie Flyers when they won the Memorial Cup in 1951 said, "a helmet made you a marked man" (21). Now, it is the player without one drawing the attention. Commenting on the players now, one fan says, "they all look the same" (152) and ex-Toronto Maple Leafs coach John Brophy gives his indictment when he says, "you can't tell one from another. They're like a bunch of robots" (98). Boyd's subjects argue that as equipment increased so too has the on-ice risks as players have endured more and more head and facial injuries. Some link the rise of these injuries to dirty players, protected by rules and equipment both, feeling invulnerable on the ice. As athletic director of Michigan State and the winningest coach in collegiate hockey history, Ron Mason, says of his playing days, "if I'm going to slam this person into the boards I'm going to pay a price for it" (171). In today's NHL, the slammer gets off scot-free. According to John Brophy, the infamous Todd Bertuzzi hit on Steve Moore in Vancouver, Canada was "terrible" but he wonders why no one on Colorado took him on and how he even got off the ice "alive" (117). In the current NHL, violence trumps skill.

If all roads lead to hockey, maybe all roads to hockey reform lead from Europe, where skills are emphasized over grit and where this emphasis has lead to results such as the Europeans sweeping the medals in men's hockey in Turin. Cary Eades, a high school hockey coach in Minnesota, recounts a game against a Ukrainian pee-wee team content to play fire-wagon hockey and to use no set plays. This team thought this style was an early step to developing talent, and they are probably right. The European road to hockey reform is also being paved through the U.S. In Boyd's book, U.S. coaches are receptive to European ideas. In his coaching days, Ron Mason would alternate three hockey styles in scrimmage - he would have his players hit like North Americans, skate freely like Europeans, and play with no helmets like old-timers (162). I bet the last two had more in common with the classic 1970s hockey I saw than the former one. Boyd's book is full of anecdotes, and they come through with color as he allows his subjects tell their stories. But he is not just a Boswell copying down the wisdom of the Johnsons of the hockey world such as Brophy and Mason. He has a subtle literary way about him, capturing general trends through a few specific instances and repetitions. The book opens with a profile of the 1951 Barrie, Ontario team that won the Memorial Cup, the top prize in Major Junior hockey. This team represented the town fully and seemed to have a personal bond with each member of that community. The star of this team, Roly "Chevy" Chevrefils was expected to have a brilliant NHL career, but after a few brief seasons and only one memorable one in the big league, he succumbed to alcohol abuse. Since then, anyone involved with that Barrie team, player or fans, whenever they hear his name, says "poor Chevy" (21). Late in the book, the Michigan State bus pulls out of an arena parking lot to see Red Berensen, NHL great and now coach of the University of Michigan, changing a tire on a bus in the rain. Like the fans responding to a Barrie team over fifty years gone, Michigan State and the University of Michigan - two teams sharing a bond in a hockey rivalry more intense than the "watered down" (163) Canadian one between the Toront Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens - seem to have adopted the fellowship many of us thought only existed between teams north of the border. Observing the coach of the University of Michigan, the coach of MSU says, "Poor Red" (184). And less than an hour later, I, sharing this feeling in a more nationalistic way, finished the book, put it down, and said to myself, "poor Canadian hockey."

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