BiblioVault - Books about Hockey

Blue Ice

The Story of Michigan Hockey

John U. Bacon

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Blue Ice relates the tale of the University of Michigan's hockey program--from its fight to become a varsity sport in the 1920s to its 1996 and 1998 NCAA national championships.

This history of the hockey program profiles the personalities who shaped the program--athletic directors, coaches, and players. From Fielding Yost, who made the decision to build the team a rink with artificial ice before the Depression (which ensured hockey would be played during those lean years), to coaches Joseph Barss, who survived World War I and the ghastly Halifax explosion before becoming the program's first coach, to Red Berenson, who struggled to return his alma mater's hockey team to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Players from Eddie Kahn, who scored Michigan's first goal in 1923, to Brendan Morrison, who upon winning the 1996 national championship with his goal said, "This is for all the [Michigan] guys who never had a chance to win it."

Blue Ice also explores the players' exotic backgrounds, from Calumet in the Upper Peninsula to Minnesota's Iron Range to Regina, Saskatchewan; how coach Vic Heygliger launched the NCAA tournament at the glamorous Broadmoor Hotel; and how commissioner Bill Beagan transformed the country's premier hockey conference.

In Blue Ice, fans of hockey will learn the stories behind the curse of the Boston University Terriers, the hockey team's use of the winged helmet, and the unlikely success of Ann Arbor's home-grown talent.

Unlike other sports at the collegiate level, the hockey players at Michigan haven't been motivated by fame or fortune; rather, they came to Michigan get an education and to play the game they loved.

John U. Bacon has won numerous national writing awards and now freelances for Sports Illustrated,Time,ESPN Magazine,and the New York Times, among others.

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The Breakaway

The Inside Story of the Wirtz Family Business and the Chicago Blackhawks

Bryan Smith

Northwestern University Press, 2018

“This is a terrific book, a dramatic family saga told in artful prose and filled with emotional turmoil, a few surprisingly touching moments but enough dysfunction for a couple of Eugene O’Neill plays.” —Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune

When Rocky Wirtz took over the Wirtz Corporation in 2007, including management of the Chicago Blackhawks, the fiercely beloved hockey team had fallen to a humiliating nadir. As chronic losers playing to a deserted stadium, they were worse than bad—they were irrelevant. ESPN named the franchise the worst in all of sports. Rocky's resurrection of the team's fortunes was—publicly, at least—a feel-good tale of shrewd acumen. Behind the scenes, however, it would trigger a father, son, and brother-against-brother drama of Shakespearean proportions. The Breakaway reveals that untold story.

Arthur Wirtz founded the family's business empire during the Depression. From roots in real estate, "King Arthur" soon expanded into liquor and banking, running his operations with an iron hand and a devotion to profit that earned him the nickname Baron of the Bottom Line. His son Bill further expanded the conglomerate, taking the helm of the Blackhawks in 1966. "Dollar Bill" Wirtz demanded unflinching adherence to Arthur's traditions and was notorious for an equally fierce temperament.

Yet when Rocky took the reins of the business after Bill's death, it was an organization out of step with the times and financially adrift. The Hawks weren't only failing on the ice—the parlous state of the team's finances imperiled every facet of the Wirtz empire. To save the team and the company, Rocky launched a radical turnaround campaign. Yet his modest proposal to televise the Hawks' home games provoked fierce opposition from Wirtz family insiders, who considered any deviation from Arthur and Bill's doctrines to be heresy.

Rocky's break with the edicts of his grandfather and father led to a reversal for the ages—three Stanley Cup championships in six years, a feat Fortune magazine called "the greatest turnaround in sports business history." But this resurrection came at a price, a fracturing of Rocky's relationships with his brother and other siblings. In riveting prose that recounts a story spanning three generations, The Breakaway reveals an insider's view of a brilliant but difficult Chicago business and sports dynasty and the inspiring story of perseverance and courage in the face of intense family pressures.

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Changing on the Fly

Hockey through the Voices of South Asian Canadians

Courtney Szto

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Winner of the NASSS Outstanding Book Award

Hockey and multiculturalism are often noted as defining features of Canadian culture; yet, rarely are we forced to question the relationship and tensions between these two social constructs. This book examines the growing significance of hockey in Canada’s South Asian communities. The Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi broadcast serves as an entry point for a broader consideration of South Asian experiences in hockey culture based on field work and interviews conducted with hockey players, parents, and coaches in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This book seeks to inject more “color” into hockey’s historically white dominated narratives and representations by returning hockey culture to its multicultural roots. It encourages alternative and multiple narratives about hockey and cultural citizenship by asking which citizens are able to contribute to the webs of meaning that form the nation’s cultural fabric.

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Hockey

A Global History

Stephen H. Hardy, Andrew C. Holman

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Long considered Canadian, ice hockey is in truth a worldwide phenomenon--and has been for centuries. In Hockey: A Global History, Stephen Hardy and Andrew C. Holman draw on twenty-five years of research to present THE monumental end-to-end history of the sport. Here is the story of on-ice stars and organizational visionaries, venues and classic games, the evolution of rules and advances in equipment, and the ascendance of corporations and instances of bureaucratic chicanery. Hardy and Holman chart modern hockey's "birthing" in Montreal and follow its migration from Canada south to the United States and east to Europe. The story then shifts from the sport's emergence as a nationalist battlefront to the movement of talent across international borders to the game of today, where men and women at all levels of play lace 'em up on the shinny ponds of Saskatchewan, the wide ice of the Olympics, and across the breadth of Asia. Sweeping in scope and vivid with detail, Hockey: A Global History is the saga of how the coolest game changed the world--and vice versa.

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Hockey Priest

Father David Bauer and the Spirit of the Canadian Game

Matt Hoven

Catholic University of America Press, 2024

Born in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1924, to a prominent family, David Bauer attended St. Michael’s College-School run by the Basilian Fathers of Toronto. After serving in World War II, Bauer joined the religious community and coached its St. Michael’s Majors to a national championship in 1961. Influenced by philosophers like Jacques Maritain, Bauer tried to find solutions to problems created within elite hockey and thus founded Canada’s first ever National Team program. This team countered the cutthroat ideals of hockey’s powerbrokers and set out to return Canada to international glory. The team represented the nation at several global tournaments and three Winter Olympic Games. Bauer was posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989. Hockey Priest looks past simply understanding Bauer as a do-gooder or hockey innovator. It shows how he attempted to create a different stream of hockey that could better support youth and so build up the nation. Archival research for the book uncovered Bauer-written hockey reports, speeches, and notes that detail his thinking about the game and his politicking to bring about change in it. Interviews with dozens of associates and family members told the story of his bold efforts to take on the National Hockey League. Despite his work being undermined by some supporters of the corporate game, Bauer offered a vision for Canada’s sport that remains an important counterpoint in the sport’s history and its ongoing challenges.

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Home Ice

Confessions of a Blackhawks Fan

Kevin Cunningham

University of Iowa Press, 2017

Unable to skate and surrounded by sports fans who cared more about Evel Knievel than hockey, Kevin Cunningham became obsessed with the Chicago Blackhawks as a confused eight year old. He has no idea why. Yet from that moment on he embarked on a fan’s journey that absorbed his childhood, destroyed his GPA, and made him seriously weigh romance against an away game at Calgary. What explains this fascination?

Home Ice combines memoir and history to explore how the mysteries of Blackhawks fandom explain big questions like tribal belonging, masculinity, and why you would ever trade Chris Chelios. In recounting the team’s—and his own—wins and losses (and ties), Cunningham covers everything from Keith Magnuson’s bachelor pad to the grim early aughts to Patrick Kane’s Cup-winner. Throughout, he explores how we come to love the things we love. Funny and touching, Home Ice is one Blackhawk fan’s attempt to understand why sports fandom is utterly ridiculous and entirely necessary.

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Jack Parker's Wiseguys

The National Champion BU Terriers, the Blizzard of ’78, and the Road to the Miracle on Ice

Tim Rappleye

University Press of New England, 2017

Over the winter of 1977–78, anyone within shouting distance of a two-mile stretch of Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue—from Fenway Park to the trolley curve at Packard’s Corner—found themselves pulled into the orbit of college hockey. The hottest ticket in a sports-mad city was Boston University’s Terriers, a team so tough it was said they didn’t have fans—they took hostages. Eschewing the usual recruiting pools in Canada, Jack Parker and his coaching staff assembled a squad that included three stars from nearby Charlestown, then known as the “armed robbery capital of America.” Jack Parker’s Wiseguys is the story of a high-flying, headline-dominating, national championship squad led by three future stars of the Miracle on Ice, the medal-round game the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team won against the heavily favored Soviet Union. Now retired, Parker is a thoughtful statesman for the sport, a revered figure who held the longest tenure of any coach in Boston sports history. But during the 1977–78 season, he was just five years into his reign—and only a decade or so older than his players. Fiery, mercurial, as tough as any of his tough guys, Parker and his team were to face the pressure-cooker expectations of four previous also-ran seasons, further heightened by barroom brawls, off-the-ice shenanigans, and the citywide shutdown caused by one of the biggest blizzards to ever hit the Northeast. This season was to be Parker’s watershed, a roller-coaster ride of nail-biting victories and unimaginable tragedy, played out in increasingly strident headlines as his team opened the season with an unprecedented twenty-one straight wins. Only the second loss of the year eliminated the Terriers from their league playoffs and possibly from national contention; hours after the game Parker’s wife died from cancer. The story of how the team responded—coming back to win the national championship a week after Parker buried his wife—makes a compelling tale for Boston sports fans and everyone else who feels a thrill of pride at America’s unlikely win over the Soviet national team—a victory forged on Commonwealth Avenue in that bitter, beautiful winter of ’78.

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Legacy on Ice

Blake Geoffrion and the Fastest Game on Earth

Sam Jefferies, Foreword by John Buccigross

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

In 2010, Blake Geoffrion became the first player from the University of Wisconsin hockey team to receive the Hobey Baker Award, recognizing him as the best player in men’s college hockey. Blake was a rising scion of hockey royalty, descendant of legendary Canadian players Howie Morenz and Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, and he would soon be the first fourth-generation player to reach the NHL. His professional career promised to cement his family’s storied legacy on ice. But in 2012, while playing for the Montreal Canadiens’ minor league team beneath Morenz’s and Boom Boom’s retired numbers, Geoffrion suffered a devastating injury that ended his career—and nearly his life.

With sure-footed and swift-moving prose, Sam Jefferies tells Geoffrion’s story against the backdrop of modern North American hockey. Thorough research and scores of interviews fuel this tale of soaring success and terrible tragedy, offering insight not only into one man’s athletic journey but also into the rise of American hockey on the national and international stage. Geoffrion’s brief career, marked by tribulation and triumph, illustrates the subtle but omnipresent currents of American media, sports labor, and the interplay between college and professional athletics. It tells the story of what was, what is, and what may yet be for the fastest game on earth.

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White Ice

Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey

Thomas Aiello

University of Tennessee Press, 2023

Having skyrocketed from six to fourteen teams between 1966 and 1970, leaders of the National Hockey League had planned to wait a few more years before expanding any further. But as its rivalry with the World Hockey Association intensified, competition for markets rose, and the race for continued expansion became too urgent to ignore. Not to be outdone, the NHL introduced two new teams in 1971: one in Long Island, New York, and one in Atlanta, Georgia.

For its own part, Atlanta had been watching as White residents left the city for the suburbs over the course of the 1960s. As the turn of the decade approached, city leadership was searching for ways to mitigate white flight and bring residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. So when a stereotypically White sport came to the Deep South in 1971 in the form of the Atlanta Flames, ownership saw a new opportunity to appeal to White audiences.
But the challenge would be selling a game that was foreign to most of Atlanta’s longtime sports fans.

Filling a significant gap in scholarly literature concerning race and hockey within US history, White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey is a response to two simple questions: How did a cold-climate sport like hockey end up in a majority Black city in the Deep South? And why did it come when it did? Over seven chronological chapters, Thomas Aiello unpacks the history, culture, and context surrounding these questions, teasing out what the story of the Atlanta Flames can teach us about the NHL, Atlanta, race, and the business of professional sports expansion.

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