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As the first season of what everyone is calling the “new NHL” draws to a close, it may be an appropriate time for a look at professional hockey’s recent past.
Ken Dryden’s The Game has been hailed as the best hockey book ever written and included in Sports Illustrated‘s list of the top 100 best sports books of all time. While an interesting and insightful look at NHL hockey, its age may now hamper those accolades.
For those unfamiliar with him, Dryden played goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, a true hockey dynasty. During Dryden’s eight seasons with the Canadiens in the 1970s, the team won the Stanley Cup six times. Dryden does not fit the stereotype of a hockey player. He “retired” for one season to finish his law degree. He is currently a member of the Canadian Parliament. As that background would suggest, The Game is both thoughtful and articulate.
The problem lies in its age. Last year, the paperback edition of the 20th anniversary edition of the book was released. With the original book having been published in 1983, timeframes can be confusing. Written in a type of diary format covering one week, Dryden covers so much ground it’s often difficult to figure out exactly what year he is talking about. His references to recent Stanley Cup victories, players and games makes it that much more difficult. At the time The Game was initially published, these events would be relatively fresh in the minds of hockey fans. Some 20 years later, though, it is more difficult to keep the times straight.
There are also annoying typographical issues. For example, one paragraph refers to the Canadiens being behind “twenty-one” but tying the game on a power play. Now that’s a powerful power play. In addition, the book frequently, but without rhyme or reason, uses em dashes instead of hyphens, causing the reader to pause to figure out what a sentence or phrase actually says. Given the fact this paperback follows a hard cover 20th anniversary edition of a book first published more than 20 years ago, such errors should not show up.
Still, the more timeless areas of the book are an admirable insider’s view of play at the professional level. It covers the history of the game, Dryden’s past, other past and then-current players and coaches, as well as the development of hockey styles and strategy. Dryden’s analysis of the differences between Canadian hockey and the then-burgeoning Soviet program are insightful. Several of his recommendations on how North American hockey could remain competitive were prescient.
Dryden urged speed and emphasis on a transition game, saying, among other things, that “the league must deliver a message, clear and uncompromising: hooking, holding, and highsticking will be penalized, so that the quick and skilled are not, so that open ice created will not be taken away.” Those concepts are a large part of what has created the “new NHL” this season, reflecting the caliber of Dryden’s analysis.
At the same time Dryden was playing for a longstanding NHL empire, others were trying to shake up the world of professional hockey. Taking cues from the American Football League and the American Basketball Association, the World Hockey Association was formed. The Rebel League, by Ed Willes, makes a worthy but not always successful effort to document the history of the WHA.
Although in existence only from October 1972 through March 1979, the impact the WHA on professional hockey in North American is unquestionable. As a renegade league of sorts, the founders and owners knew the only chance of success was to have top-name players. As a result, they lured superstar Bobby Hull with a million dollar bonus at a time when most NHL stars were lucky to make six figures.
Large contracts and bonuses allowed the WHA to land other quality NHL players and top quality draft picks. The WHA’s actions not only increased player salaries in the NHL, they cracked the reserve clause in the NHL. Whether that ultimately has been good or bad for hockey is a matter of opinion.
Yet the WHA also got Gordie Howe to come out of retirement and play — and quite effectively — with his sons. It delved heavily into European players, opening the door much wider for those players in the NHL. It also was the starting ground for many future NHL superstars, such as Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier.
Still, the WHA remains perhaps more renowned for its characters. There was, for example, the night a referee was somewhat stumped on what penalty to call when two teammates on the Minnesota Fighting Saints got in a fight on the ice. Seems the rules don’t specifically cover teammates fighting each other. Then there was goalie Gilles Gratton. A believer in reincarnation, among other things, Gratton begged off starting a game because of sore ribs he said were the result of a spear wound he suffered 300 years before. In another game, he simply left after two periods because he felt he’d faced enough shots.
Thanks to Hollywood, though, perhaps the most famous were the Carlson brothers of Minnesota. Not only did they serve as the inspiration for the bespectacled Hanson brothers of Slap Shot fame, two of the three actually played themselves in the movie.
The problem with The Rebel League is there is just too much ground and too many people to cover. Business and financial details compete with personalities and historical developments for both the writer’s and the reader’s attention. Willes also makes an effort to give each team equal time and its due but that is at time disruptive to the flow of the material. Still, it is a worthwhile excursion into a rebel league that would change the face of professional hockey.
Anyone who might question the impact of the WHA need only look at the Stanley Cup finals. The Carolina Hurricanes actually began as the New England Whalers in the WHA. Their opponent? The only original WHA team that remains from the WHA’s merger with the NHL 1979 — the Edmonton Oilers.
The “golden age of sports,” the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood.
Ken Dryden, The Game
We be back, although after two weeks in Florida and the Caribbean it was a bit of a shock to the body to walk out into 55 degrees and drizzle wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
I planned to catch up on the blogs and news and provide various links to things I’ve missed, as well as some reviews of books read on the trip. Suffice it to say that returning to 14 days of the local daily, seven magazines and six (yes, six) new books to review has and will consume my free time. That free time will become even more limited upon return to the office. Although I checked work-related e-mails occasionally, who knows what all is sitting on my desk? My guess is the balance of the week will be spent deciding which fire to put out next.
Now I remember why I avoided vacations the last couple years — you wonder if the non-monetary price you pay before and after is worth it. Still, two weeks with my family, including a week on a cruise that saw waves no larger than about four feet (where tropical storm Alberto is now afoot) and took us places we have never been is, as they say, priceless.
This is simply a long way of saying posting will remain sporadic as I try to catch up with returning to the real world. I must also say, though, that this morning’s gorgeous weather and blue skies reminds me of what keeps me here, despite the beauty of tropical islands and ports. My thoughts may be entirely different if this were January or February.
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blues sky, is by no means a waste of time.
John Lubbock, The Use of Life
Sadly, many Americans get their concept of the criminal process through television, where justice is capably dispensed in 60-minute installments. In reality, the criminal justice system is like the adage about hot dogs — you really don’t want to see how they’’re made. And those elbow and knee deep in the muck and mire of the process are the public defenders.
David Feige’s Indefensible seeks to take readers inside that process from the eyes of a longtime public defender in the South Bronx. And rather than hot dogs, this system tries, often not well, to produce “some vague facsimile of truth.” Feige’s truth isn’t pretty and his account is often scathing. In fact, at times it reads as if he has more than a few axes to grind.
Using a so-called typical day for a public defender handling murder cases, Feige covers the gamut of the system. We meet the clients, ranging from those charged with murder to a woman who agrees with Feige that she needs to be jailed to get off the street and back on her psychiatric medication to the man accused of walking dogs without proof of their vaccination. We meet other defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges. We see the vagaries of the system and those who comprise it, the system’’s occasional successes and its more numerous delays and failures.
Although the day in the life approach might be a workable vehicle for the author, it hurts the flow. In order to cover all the issues and ground he wants, Feige frequently reflects on older events and cases, blending them into his thoughts during this day’’s docket. While these matters are necessary to an understanding of the whole, it tends to tug the reader here and there. And some areas make those familiar with the law raise their eyebrows. For example, when he has one murder client testify before a grand jury Feige leaves the impression that either he questioned his client in the proceeding (something the law prohibits) or that the prosecuting attorney followed the defense script for the case. Still, there is quite a bit to commend Indefensible.
The book may be at its best not necessarily in describing the inner workings of New York’’s struggling criminal court system but in portraying public defenders. At the core is concern for the client. That concern, however, has an equally motivating counterpart — fear of the consequences of failure.
Those represented by any public defense system tend to be at or near the bottom of the social and economic ladders. This status tends to carry over into the criminal justice system. Feige finds his ““indigent ghetto clients”” just as personable as more well-off (and frequently Caucasian) criminals, such as Bonnie and Clyde or John Gotti, who tend to be mythologized.
But put a black face on Gotti and no matter how dapper a don he is, the press, the prosecutors and the public only read menace. …. Fundamentalist Christians speak passionately about seeing the possibility of redemption in everyone, and no one bats an eye. But make this same point in the secular context of the criminal justice system, and rather than praiseworthy piety it is heard as liberal gibberish.
Yet Feige worries less about redemption than simply guiding his clients through the system. Even though he readily admits many are guilty, that isn’t what bothers him.
“Nothing good can happen when you represent an innocent client,” Feige says. If he wins the case, that is what was supposed to happen. But if the client is convicted,
the case haunts you, so that in the middle of the night and until sunrise you wonder what you did wrong, what you forgot, what you could have said or done — how such a thing could have happened. It is a searing, guilty pain that can last for years, if not forever. It’s the innocent ones that drive you out of the work.
Feige also sees something else in the innocent. Their belief that the system will exonerate them produces a “touched smile,” giving them “a look that is similar though not identical, to the calm of the true sociopath.”
And just as the clients are complicated, so are the other players in the system. Feige describes fellow defense lawyers, various prosecutors, police officers, jail officials and judges. Some he likes, some he doesn’t. Feige doesn’t hold back, particularly with the latter and this is where Indefensible can come off as invective. For example, he describes a domestic violence prosecutor as “small, mean and twitchy” and says victims “find their cases to be less about them and their protection than about [the prosecutor] and her ego.” He also describes one of the judges in that court as not only “astonishingly biased” and “relentlessly nasty” but a person with an “icy pucker and utter detachment” and “complete heartlessness” in whom he sees “only cruelty.”
Indefensible also shows some of the pressures of being a public defender. Their caseloads are such that they hurry from case to case and courtroom to courtroom, frequently not having the time clients really need. While that seems endemic to the practice of law today, criminal defense lawyers are gambling with someone else’’s life. This leads Feige and many others to the verge of collapse, believing there must be a better way. He reflects upon times he would go to bed and pull the covers over his head, vowing ““never to go back to those hellish courtrooms.”” Yet, ““after a day or two, or sometimes just a night of heavy drinking, the faces and voices of the clients I love start filtering back.”
And, sadly for our system, that is far too often the fate of the public defenders. It is a job that drives talented lawyers from representing the truly powerless. The burnout factor is stealthy yet enormous.
It rarely arrives with the bang of revelation; rather, it’s the creeping suspicion that maybe everyone around you is right — your clients really are scum, the system really is completely broken, and you can’t really touch anyone’s life anyway It is the sneaking sense of futility that undermines your resilience…. Burnout sets in when outrage ends.
Indefensible reflects that Feige seems to have plenty of outrage. Perhaps it will help the public better understand the need of the indigent and to see the role of public defenders in the process of seeking that facsimile of truth.
God help you when you have those innocent kids.
David Feige, Indefensible
A quick personal note and check-in. As I write this, I sit on the deck of a cruise ship southwest of Cuba and east of Mexico. Since later this week marks the 20th anniversary of when I began practicing law, I am in the midst of something I have never done in those 20 years — taking a two-week family vacation.
Don’t get me wrong. I have previously taken advantage of what our firm calls an “extended vacation,” a four-week block of time we get on a rotation basis every few years. But with the kids older and starting to leave the nest, I thought maybe we should at least once take a two-week family vacation. So, after battling the crowds in the rat kingdom (aka Disney World) we are now on a western Caribbean cruise with beach time, Mayan ruins and relaxation.
Thus, there has been and will be little to see here. In fact, what I am paying for internet access (via ship satellite) is the equivalent of a couple months of broadband access at home. But knowing there is access to e-mail and the like makes things a bit easier for everyone — especially the kids, who are going through withdrawal since they can’t text their friends on their cell phones. Seems there’s no cell towers in the middle of the Caribbean.
A book review or two have and will appear due to prior commitments but little else. I didn’t come here to spend time online and don’t plan to use my internet minutes keeping up too much with the outside world. That can wait until I get back — assuming I don’t jump ship somewhere along the line.
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Crabbed Age and Youth
I’ll admit it. My predisposition (okay, bias) was that I wouldn’t like Annette Gilson’s novel, New Light.
First, she is professor of creative writing and “contemporary literature.” It may be unfair, but I tend to think such authors write with more flourish and exposition than necessary, as if demonstrating their “expertise” to their students. Then, to top it off, the back cover blurb by a noted critic describes the book as a “romance” with its heritage in a romance novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I, of course, have never heard of that work and romance would be near the bottom of any personal ranking of genres.
But Gilson and New Light surprised me. After a start I thought was reinforcing my beliefs about creative writing teachers who write novels, I found myself engaged by a highly readable and enjoyable work.
The book tells the story of approximately a week in the life of Beth Martin. After three years of unsatisfying life in New York City, Martin travels to St. Louis to visit her former college roommate. At a party the night of her arrival, she encounters an enigmatic man and shortly thereafter experiences what she can only describe as a vision. The man, who later tells her he knew she would have a vision, holds her as she shakingly tries to absorb and understand what happened.
Known by his acquaintances by the nickname Houdini, he is a neuroscientist researching visions and related phenomena. At turns distant and friendly but always inscrutable, Houdini tells Beth of his plans to visit a commune in southern Missouri devoted to creating a utopian community and exploring a higher level of consciousness through visions. After vacillating a bit, Beth agrees to accompany him.
The commune, New Light, is led by a charismatic woman the community refers to as The Mother. New Life’s residents are both disquieted by Beth’s presence and drawn in by her apparent ability to have visions without engaging in the rituals they use. At New Light, Gilson leads the reader on a couple different tracks. Exactly who is Houdini and what are his ultimate aims? Why is there an underlying sense of tension and foreboding among community members? Why is Beth having visions and what do they mean? Could she be the “messenger” The Mother believes will help guide the commune to its next stage of development?
With Beth as the narrator, Gilson explores, but does not necessarily resolve, these mysteries while at the same time raising thoughtful questions about faith, belief, trust and philosophy. Given the timing of the book and its search through meaning via communal life, some may compare New Light to Justin Tussing’s The Best People in the World. Yet New Light is clearly distinctive and stands on its own. In fact, romance is not a genre that comes to my mind in trying to categorize the book. Likewise, I doubt there are many, if any, other books on the market that can adequately blend chaos theory with what can best be described as New Age concepts.
While likely reflective of my own personal preference, Gilson’s writing seems strongest when she uses shorter, straightforward declarative sentences rather than some of her longer, highly descriptive sentences, particularly in the opening chapters. Stylistically, though, the differences serve their purpose. Broadly speaking, the more detailed sentences set groundwork and background. As and when the action or tension increases, Gilson uses the simpler sentences to help set the tone and pace for the reader.
I still don’t know anything about Hawthorne’s book or the literary heritage of New Light. Likewise, this is not the best book I’ve read this year. Yet it’s always a delight when an author defies a reader’s expectations (okay again, biases) and gives them an engaging read.
I wonder whether, all along, it’s actually someone else’s powers of projection that draw us to them. We find the person who can present us with the self we want to be.
Annette Gilson, New Light
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