Hockey and History

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I’ve had a long relationship with the “Coolest Game.” I was a player, a coach, and an administrator across the 1960s and 70s. When I started an academic career at the University of Washington in 1979, I used bus time to begin a novel that eventually became The Commissioner: A Sports Mystery. In 1991, I signed a contract with U of Illinois Press to write a short history of hockey. Three decades and a great co-author later, the project became Hockey: A Global History (2018). Along the way, I published a number of articles and chapters on hockey. I also developed a popular course at the University of New Hampshire called Coolest Game: Hockey and History. So I have a reservoir of material and ideas to share on this site.

Andy Holman and I turned in our manuscript to Illinois in 2016. We had trimmed a great deal, but it still totaled 323,000 words. Not surprisingly, our editor asked us to cut at least 25%. That took another year. We decided to cut whole sections if we could. That left us with bunches of good material. We have published some of it elsewhere. We post some of it below.

Above is an American Sports Ambassadors 1971 team I coached on a European tour. Here we were in Switzerland.