The glory, if it can be realized, I believe, is in the in-between. We arrive with no consciousness of what it is we are, and we leave, most of us grudgingly, salved only by the memories we’ve earned.

All of the above is a big maybe.

Pete

I think you just clarified for me my own discomforts on the use of strong language in trying to recreate in words, the realities of a time and place. I remember Orwell’s warnings on euphemisms as the slippery slope toward the debasement of language leading ultimately to the masking of evil.

Pete

It appears that the new format gives you room to extend yourself beyond hockey, and that’s great. Your appetite for books is astounding, and most of what you read is in the heavyweight class. Always fun and never less than interesting to see what you have to say. While I’m fully occupied at the moment with the Phillies, I’m already salivating over the coming start of the NHL season. This year, the home team here has added Chris Pronger to its roster.

Pete

Pete

Something you might like, Austin—he has a good-sized section on the news and how we swallow it up as if it’s vital to our day-to-day lives. Like you, he doesn’t really have a solution, but I think you’d still appreciate what he has to say.

This is another good book on the history of the NHL.

Hockey history is indeed fascinating. How many fans can even say they know that the first American team to win the cup was the Seattle Metropolitans? Or this is my favorite, goalies would be assessed a $1.00 fine for leaving their skates to make a save. This history is rich with heroes and renegades more so than any other sport. Even the “bad guys” are celebrated in ice hockey.

Man, that sounds like a fascinating series. If you ever find it again, please let me know.

I immediately found an archived twelve-part series on the future of Canadian hockey. It might even have been by Strachan, but I can’t track the series down.

The series was very perceptive, predicting at that time, that unless Canadian developmental hockey changed, Canadian players would increasingly be marginalized into role players by the ever-increasingly better trained, more highly skilled players coming into the game form the European and even U.S. programs.

What sticks in my mind was the writer’s analysis of the the ratio of practice time to game time in Canada as opposed to Europe and to even some programs in the States. The argument made was that unless the way that skills development was treated in Canada changed, the superstars of the future would be coming from elsewhere.

Pete

You describe perfectly the lesson I’ve been learning (thoroughly!) as I catch up on hockey history and read more and more hockey books. There’s a side of the game that’s captured in factoids on hockey cards and flashback specials on TV. But there are a multitude of other faces to the game that I suspect many average fans know nothing about. And those are the faces that I really want to see.