My Road Hockey Obsession

The whole world knows how much hockey is a vital part of Canadian culture. The cold winters, old rinks, and frozen ponds are ubiquitous to millions of Canadians and contextual for countless more across the world. Even for those who didn't play ice hockey, the game still became palpable. In My Road Hockey Obsession, author Curt Solomon tells the story of a group of young friends building their lives, friendships, and adolescence around road hockey. For Solomon, road hockey was much, much more than a pastime. It was the only pastime. When he started playing road hockey, he knew he had found the city of gold, and there was no use looking for or pursuing any other activity. In this unique story built entirely around ball hockey, Solomon shares how he and his friends transformed a simple pastime into the most bonding and durable period of their lives. Road hockey was how they grew up, how they communicated, how they thought, and how they forged life-long memories. My Road Hockey Obsession narrates a joyous story that sparks nostalgia-the days of orange balls, plastic blades, and the hollow sound of wooden sticks on asphalt.

The whole world knows how much hockey is a vital part of Canadian culture. The cold winters, old rinks, and frozen ponds are ubiquitous to millions of Canadians and contextual for countless more across the world. Even for those who didnt play ice hockey, the game still became palpable. In My Road Hockey Obsession, author Curt Solomon tells the story of a group of young friends building their lives, friendships, and adolescence around road hockey. For Solomon, road hockey was much, much more than a pastime. It was the only pastime. When he started playing road hockey, he knew he had found the city of gold, and there was no use looking for or pursuing any other activity. In this unique story built entirely around ball hockey, Solomon shares how he and his friends transformed a simple pastime into the most bonding and durable period of their lives. Road hockey was how they grew up, how they communicated, how they thought, and how they forged life-long memories. My Road Hockey Obsession narrates a joyous story that sparks nostalgiathe days of orange balls, plastic blades, and the hollow sound of wooden sticks on asphalt.

Like many a Canadian kid, Stephen Smith was up on skates first thing as a boy, out in the weather chasing a puck and the promise of an NHL career. Back indoors after that didn't quite work out, he turned to the bookshelf. That's where, without entirely meaning to, he ended up reading all the hockey books. There was Crunch and Boom Boom, Slashing! and High Stick; there was Max Bentley: Hockey's Dipsy-Doodle Dandy, Blue Line Murder, and Nagano, a Czech hockey opera. There was Blood on the Ice, Cracked Ice, Fire On Ice, Power On Ice, Cowboy On Ice, and Steel On Ice. In Puckstruck, Smith chronicles his wide-eyed and sometimes wincing wander through hockey's literature, language, and culture, weighing its excitement and unbridled joy against its costs and vexing brutality. In exploring his own lifelong love of the game, hoping to surprise some sense out of it, he sifts hockey's narratives in search of hockey's heart, what it means and why it should distress us even as we celebrate its glories. On a journey to discover what the game might have to say about who we are as Canadians, he seeks to answer some of its essential riddles.

 Mixed martial arts or MMA is widely regarded as the fastest growing sport. Events fill stadiums around the world and draw vast television audiences, earning strong revenue through pay-per-view at a time when other sports have abandoned it. In 2016, the Ultimate Fighting Championship was bought by the massive talent agency WME-IMG for $4 billion. Despite this success, much of the public remains uneasy with the sport, which critics have denounced as “human cockfighting.” Through an exploration of violence, class, gender, race and nationalism, the author finds that MMA is both an expression of the positive values of martial arts and a spectacle defined by narcissism, hate and patriarchy. The long-term success of MMA will depend on the ability of promoters and athletes to resist indulging in spectacle at the expense of sport.

Drawing on decades of combined experience in hockey at all levels, Ken Campbell and Jim Parcels pull back the curtain on hockey to show just how far our national game has strayed from its roots. What they reveal is a system driven by unrealistic expectations of a financial windfall, where minor-hockey fees and new sticks for kids are deemed “investments”— and where there is no shortage of entrepreneurs more than happy to take money from starry-eyed parents. Always informative, often shocking, Selling the Dream is not only a guidebook for legions of hockey parents across the country, its a defence of the game we all love, and of childhood itself.

A riveting look behind the mask of an NHL goalie, The Save of My Life offers understanding and hope to anyone living with mental illness By the time he was twenty-two years old, goaltender Corey Hirsch had realized his childhood dream of playing in the NHL, won an Olympic medal and drunk from the Stanley Cup. While he excelled on the ice, out of the net Hirsch was plagued by persistent dark thoughts and ceaseless anxiety. On days when he could barely get out of bed, he was able to push aside the endless loop of dark thoughts running inside his brain long enough to win a game. But as soon as he got back home, the agonizing cycle started all over again. And it continued, until finally he was able to confide in a team trainer who helped him get the professional treatment he needed. Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Hirsch was able to embark on the rocky road to recovery. As one of the first professional athletes to talk openly about mental health, Hirsch wrote about his OCD for the Players’ Tribune. His piece remains one of their most-read articles ever. As Hirsch says, “I am not insane. I am not a bad person. I am not weak. I have an illness, and there is a treatment.”

This lavishly illustrated book is absolutely packed with beautiful color photography, displaying the most interesting, unique, famous and rare artifacts from the Hockey Hall of Fame's collection.

**One of Sports Illustrated's Best Sports Books of 2017** Controversial hockey star Sean Avery's no-holds-barred memoir of high living and bad behavior in the NHL—coupled with the behind-the-scenes glitter of celebrity and media nightlife in New York and LA. As one of the NHL’s most polarizing players, Sean Avery turned the rules of professional hockey on its head. For thirteen seasons, Avery played for some of the toughest, most storied franchises in the league, including the Detroit Red Wings, the Los Angeles Kings, and the New York Rangers, making his mark in each city as a player that was sometimes loved, often despised, but always controversial. In Ice Capades, Avery takes his trademark candidness about the world of pro hockey and does for it what Jim Bouton's game-changing Ball Four did for baseball. Avery goes deep inside the sport to reveal every aspect of an athlete’s life, from what they do with their money and nights off to how they stay sharp and competitive in the league. While playing the talented villain in the NHL, Avery broke far away from his on-ice character in the off-season, and Ice Capades takes the reader inside the other unexpected and unprecedented roles that Avery inhabited—Vogue intern, fashion model, advertising executive, restauranteur, gay rights advocate, and many more. Love him or hate him, Sean Avery changed the way professional hockey is played today. Rollickingly honest and compelling throughout, Ice Capades transcends the “sports book” genre and offers a rare, unvarnished glimpse into the world of 21st century hockey through the eyes of one of its most original and memorable players.