The Canadian Hockey Atlas Hardcover - 2006

Introduction

Town and Country

I tricked myself into writing the book you have in your hands, after I was asked by a publisher if I’d be interested in putting together an international hockey atlas, a book examining the sport from England to Ukraine.

I could only listen politely for so long, and then, finally, I interrupted. “‘Hockey is the Canadian specific’–British Columbia poet Al Purdy said that.

“Why not a Canadian hockey atlas? Everywhere else, hockey is a sport. But here, it’s a way of life. What’s that old expression, If life gives you a lemon, make lemonade? Life gave much of Canada five-month-long winters, and so in response we came up with the sport of hockey. Why not talk about the sport from the perspective of our towns and cities? Let’s, at last, have a record of where our players come from. Record the names of the teams and the players who have made hockey special. Tell their stories. Tell our story.”

“A Canadian hockey atlas? Sounds great–let’s go for it,” the publisher responded.

A few days later, panic set in. How in Bobby Hull had I ever let myself be roped into writing something as big as all of Canada’s outdoors? It’s easy enough to decide where to start writing about hockey in this country. But where do you stop? A more crucial problem – how to find those records of “where players came from.”

Fortunately, my primary researcher, Paul Patskou – one of Canada’s foremost hockey archivists – was able to solve the latter problem, obtaining from his colleague Normand Pawluck a 2,900-name list that documented the birthplace of every Canadian player who had skated as little as a single shift in the National Hockey League between 1917 and 2006.

The Canadian Hockey Atlas is more than a record of Canadian NHL accomplishments, though. Junior, senior and women’s teams, as well as players, are profiled here; as are many city clubs that achieved international glory, from the Dunlops of Whitby, Ontario (“Go Dunnees!”), to the Smoke Eaters of Trail, British Columbia. This hockey atlas also includes the tale of a Maritime hockey rivalry so fierce that the federal government was once called upon to intercede, as well as the story of how Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin left his imprint on Manitoba.

Ever since Foster Hewitt, famed broadcaster for the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs, first hunched over a Hockey Night in Canada microphone (on 12 November 1931), and shouted out his soon-to-be-famous cry–“Hello Canada! And hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland…”, the National Hockey League has enjoyed a mystical place in the Canadian imagination. Whenever a player is introduced to fellow Canadians as having played in the NHL, the one-word response is always the same: “Wow!”

For this reason, “Native-born NHL players” are listed, place by place, among the more than 100 civic entries and 300 stories included in this volume. A list of famous local teams and a brief chronology of how the towns and cities came into being also form part of these introductory sections. I wish that there could have been room for more entries, more stories. But had any more been included here, the result would have been a coffee table book that looked…well… that looked like Kramer’s actual coffee table-sized book on that famous episode of Seinfeld.

In addition, however, to the more than 100 Canadian towns and cities profiled here, close to 1,000 Canadian towns and cities and the NHL players that brought them to our attention are fully listed in an appendix at the back of the atlas.

The decision as to which towns and cities to profile in this collection was not based on size. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal are here; but so are Cupar, Saskatchewan – Eddie Shore’s hometown (population 591) – and Port Hood, Nova Scotia (835 citizens), where Al MacInnis turned the family barn black with the imprint of tens of thousands of drilled pucks.

The goal, in selecting which stories to tell was the same, in either case – to help define our hockey experience, while providing a Canadian geographical hockey history.

The outcome of this odyssey, then, is The Canadian Hockey Atlas. Good luck to the brave cartographer who tries to chart the English and Ukrainian hockey experiences. Although every hockey enthusiast should know that the best Ukrainian hockey players, Johnny Bucyk, Vic Stasiuk and Bronco Horvath – the famous NHL Uke Line from the late 1950s – were born in Canada.

Praise for Slapshots:

“The best hockey book of the year.”
–Don Cherry

“The funniest hockey book ever written.”
–Mondo Canuck