When I was growing up in Vancouver, there were two groups of people in every hockey dressing room: there were the “White Kids” and the “Brown/Asian Kids”, and there was me. Nobody ever spoke about these groups and yet, they existed. I didn’t have this experience in my neighbourhood or my school and although I…
Author’s Note: To be transparent, I know Sami Jo Small. She has been incredibly kind to me and I consider her a mentor and a friend. However, at the same time I have tried to be as honest and unbiased as I can be in my review of her autobiography. Luckily, but not surprisingly, I…
Harnaryan Singh has slowly become a household name for hockey families across Canada. In 2008, he started as the play-by-play commentator on the Hockey Night Punjabi broadcast, and to date, has called over 700 games for the program. Today, he works on both Punjabi and English hockey coverage. Singh was born to be a commentator. I have…
Most sports films and novels focus on men’s sports and are intended for an assumed male reader, so much so that if one wants to find a story about women athletes or teams they have to specify “women’s sports films” or “women’s sports literature.” Women’s sports stories, on the page or screen, are comparatively rare…
Teammate: I saw you on the television. Me: What was I doing? Teammate: You were at a book launch. That book launch happened to be for Rhonda Leeman Taylor and Denbeigh Whitmarsh’s Offside: Challenges faced by women in hockey. It was a small but mighty gathering on October 5th at the Original Hockey Hall of Fame in…
Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (2012; Douglas & McIntyre) is a harrowing, yet ultimately uplifting, novel that explores the impact of Canadian residential schools on generations of Aboriginal Canadians.Why, then, is it being reviewed on a hockey blog? Although not necessarily a novel about hockey, Indian Horse centrally features hockey, and offers important insights about the…
You might recognize the names Willie O’Ree and Herb Carnegie but what about Val James? Val(more) James became the first black American to skate in the NHL for the Buffalo Sabres in 1982, twenty-four years after Canadian, Willie O’Ree would officially break the “colour-barrier.” For the majority of his career he was an AHL enforcer…
When the list of Summer Reads came out on Hockey and Society, at the very bottom was something I couldn’t not read: a hockey romance novel. Obviously some sort of bastardized Harlequin and Fifty Shades-esque image materialized in my mind. No sooner had that happened, I read Courtney’s note that her search for books about…
“I never thought of Terry Ryan’s hockey career as memorable until I picked up a copy of his soon-to-be-published book, Tales of a First-Round Nothing: My Life as an NHL Footnote…The book is an honest, poignant and often funny look at the life of a player on the fringe.” – Pat Hickey, Montreal Gazette Tales…
Photo by Courtney Szto “Tootoo’s book is a confession, consequences be damned. And it’s motivated by the same middle-finger-to-the-world attitude that got him from Rankin Inlet all the way to the NHL.” (The Hockey News, 2014) Summer time means summer reading. While others are thumbing through the new E.L. James series, I am catching up…
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