So, the blog title is kinda lazy, but I'm going with it.
This monster tome is the coffee table companion to what I believe was a CBC miniseries about 5 years back. It's about 9x12 and weighs in at.... a bunch of pounds (kilos?), and is chock full of pictures and sidebars. Including some amazing ones from early in Canadian hockey history and of a shockingly sweet 13 y.o. Wayne Gretzky.
The book is a little like if a Ken Burns documentary got shoved into a book. It makes strange segues, and fades to sepia a bit. Which is probably all the case b/c it was a documentary shoved into a book. But such fantastic stories. Girls using their skirts to help hide the puck as they deked around a defender, dudes whose names are on trophies being actual people. Getting drunk and trading a player for $1million for example. Or forcing everyone on your team to enlist during WWII.
It took me weeks to get through this thing - lots of lapses in concentration and intervening life and whatnot. But experiencing it over time, in bits and pieces, was sort of the way to go. How better to go through >100 years of one's favorite sport, especially as interwoven into the history of a country?
I'd like to mention the severe lack of Paul Kariya, but I guess that's to be expected. *I* know that he was a crucial part of the 2002 Olympic team, and that'll have to be good enough. :)
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