The publishing world and the hockey world have conspired to really fill my plate. As for the former, my TBR stack is really getting out of control. I have four books from the library, two of which are a combined 1,000 pages, and all of which I really want to read. I have three more books on hold there. There’s two books I’m slated to read and review which also approach 1,000 pages. And then there’s the two reviews I really should write within the next week.

While the book piles are overflowing, it’s also the best time of year for hockey fans. The NCAA Division I regionals start this afternoon and run through Sunday (it took a great effort to resist buying a ticket for the West Regional in St. Paul.) The Frozen Four is in two weeks and, about the same time, the USHL playoffs start. The week after the Frozen Four the NHL playoffs start. Throw in work and the other demands of the real world and I just don’t know where to find the time to revel in these opportunities while they’re here.

Of course, if that’s what I have in life to bellyache about, I shouldn’t be complaining. Still (he whines), it’s hard to read and watch hockey at the same time.

Norman Lewis, How to Read Better and Faster

Granted, that’s about half what an NBA finals game drew the night before and is unlikely to land the game in the week’s top 10 shows. Still, the fact is it the game was airing on a Friday night, did not involve a team from a major media market like New York or L.A. (unlike the NBA) and pulled in 2.5 million more viewers than the second and third place shows.

For a niche sport, that’s a helluva showing!

Pittsburgh Penguin forward Max Talbot
on scoring both his team’s goals in Game 7

The book is a mix of a historical look at hockey in Valley’s home town of Rye, N.H., and a paean to the sport. It is stronger as the latter.

Valley’s memoir takes its name from that of the town’s amateur hockey team, the Seahawks. Formed following World War II, the team began as largely a collection of World War II vets. Despite the town’s small size — about 1,500 people — the team not only made it to the semifinals of the New Hampshire Class B championship in 1950, it made it to the semifinals and the championship game of the New England Senior “B” championship in 1950 and 1951, respectively. Although it did not win the title, the team lost in the 1950 semifinals only after six overtimes. Valley was recruited as the Seahawks goalie in 1959 at age 14 and played in the team’s last two years of existence.

This was an era of hockey much different than today. Valley, for example, not only wore no face mask, he wore a baseball catcher’s chest protector and fashioned his catching glove out of a first baseman’s mitt. But it wasn’t just the players’ equipment. The outdoor rinks didn’t have a maintenance crew — except for the players themselves. In the pre-Zamboni days, the team would go to the rink in the morning, shovel off the snow and then flood the rink with a thin layer of water. After a day at their jobs, they would return to the rink for practice or a game. At the end, they would scrape the ice with shovels and hand plows and again flood the surface. Game schedules were equally as demanding. During one stretch in 1951, the Seahawks played 21 games in 19 days — all outdoors.

Valley would continue playing goalie while attending the U.S. Naval Academy. Of course, back then the Academy had no rink or organized team. And the times dictated there was little hope of NHL glory for all but a minuscule number of players. From 1942 until 1967, the NHL had a grand total of six teams, made up largely of Canadians. Yet it was injury, not lack of opportunity, that would force Valley to ultimately hang up his pads. Some of the best portions of his story are recounting how watching part of an alumni game during a visit to the Naval Academy in the late 1990s led him to overcome those problems and go back to playing goalie, something he does to this day — all for love of the game.

When Valley uses the Seahawks to portray Rye as a typical New England hockey town of its era, the book seems to struggle. It tends to be reminiscent of the locally-written histories found in virtually every village and town in the country. Such works recount names and events and reprint pictures that, generally, don’t mean a heck of a lot to anyone not familiar with the people or the places. Seahawk falls into some of the worst traps of those histories, with a roster of all those who played for the Seahawks, a list of all its opponents and more than 40 pages of reprinted newspaper articles about the team’s games. Additionally, Valley tends to be a bit repetitive, something you wouldn’t normally expect in a work with only about 90 pages of text.

While Seahawk leaves no doubt that ice hockey was part and parcel of New England life, it is most effective in showing the lengths to men will go for such a demanding sport simply because the love the game.

Bruce Valley, Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Goalie

In celebration, I thought I’d combine two addictions: hockey and books. Here’s a list of essential hockey books with the ones I’ve read in bold and comments on some of them. Several are out of print.

1. The Game, Ken Dryden. Many consider this 1983 book by the Stanley Cup-winning goalie the top hockey book of all time. I didn’t think it did well with age.
2. Net Worth: Exploding the Myths of Pro Hockey, David Cruise and Alison Griffiths.
3. The Age of Longing, Richard Wright. The only novel on the list.
4. The Red Machine: The Soviet Quest to Dominate Canada’s Game, Lawrence Martin. In looking around in connection with writing this post, I discovered this book is currently selling for $250 at one online used book provider.
5. Searching for Bobby Orr, Stephen Brunt. This has been on my “wish list” for quite a while.
6. Thunder and Lightning: A No B.S. Hockey Memoir, Phil Esposito.
7. Tropic of Hockey, Dave Bidini. An enjoyable travelogue of hockey in places like China, Dubai and Transylvania.
8. Open Net, George Plimpton. Paper Lion on ice, with Plimpton participating in training camp for the Boston Bruins as an “amateur goalie.”
9. Zamboni Rodeo: Chasing Hockey Dreams from Austin to Albuquerque, Jason Cohen. A look at life in minor league hockey, focusing on the Austin (Tex.) Ice Bats that I’ve been pining after for quite a while. By coincidence, the Ice Bats announced in June they would not be playing this year because it couldn’t find an “acceptable venue.”
10. Original Six: True Stories from Hockey’s Classic Era, Paul Quarrington (ed.).
11. Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport, Laura Robinson. This examination of Canadian junior hockey also has been on my wish list for quite a while.

My only real complaint about hockey season? It cuts into reading time.

Goalie Martin Brodeur, quoted in Right On The Numbers