Tropic of Hockey · 13 May 07
Legend has it that one afternoon in ’98, Dave Bidini – who loves hockey, watches it, plays it, and writes songs about it (with Canada’s own Rheostatics) – found the Stanley Cup final so tedious that at one point he changed channels to Martha Stewart… and never switched back. This event set him in motion to try to find where in the world the game might exist free of the complications of professional sport. He set out to find the Tropic of Hockey.
His quest took him to a rink in a shopping mall in Hong Kong, to an unlikely arena in Dubai in the desert of the United Emirates, and to a slightly less unlikely rink in Transylvania.
Dave’s experiences with odd-sized rinks and odd-sized players inspired him to chronicle his stories of “hockey in unlikely places” with wry and often stomach twisting stories about places and players he encountered on his quest.
I started reading this book the weekend I went to Toronto to play in the Exclaim Cup (in which Bidini himself was a player). It seemed like the right book to read on the plane starting a weekend such as that. Once I had been to the Hockey Hall of Fame and played my first ever game against a team from another part of Canada, I knew I had chosen wisely.
It is a fun book, an informative book and an easy read. Although Dave’s use of language is a little difficult at times, and I did have to re-read a number of sentences to understand why the punctuation was so scattered, I likely would have been more disappointed if a book about hockey was brimming with effervescent prose.
[ File under: Sports & Me ]