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So, what are you reading?
I'm still on McGilchrist. Picking up The Count of Monte Cristo again, from Dantes' escape.
A Season in Time by Todd Denault, the story of the 1992–93 NHL season. It's pretty much an object lesson on why Americans can't stand Canadian sportswriters. It starts off with a preface where the author boldly proclaims that this was the greatest season in NHL history, and also lets it drop that this happened to be his senior year of high school and that he stopped following hockey as closely when he got to college. Okay, so there's some emotional attachment to the subject selection, but that's not too big a deal. That season did have a number of compelling storylines—Gretzky coming back from injury to make his only cup finals appearance with the Kings, Mario Lemieux's battle with cancer that saw him miss a month of the season and still win the scoring race, Teemu Selanne absolutely destroying Mike Bossy's rookie goal scoring record, the inaugural seasons of the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators, and several others. It also happened to be the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Unfortunately, if you knew nothing about the season when you started reading this you'd incorrectly assume that this team was the Toronto Maple Leafs, because Denault spends the first five chapters talking about them. They were a storied franchise in hockey's most important city that had been god awful for over a decade, and in 1993 they put together an unlikely playoff run. But they got eliminated in the Conference finals. Denault can't even talk about other teams without bringing the Leafs into the discussion; the Pittsburgh Penguins were an absolute juggernaut that year and were expected to cruise to a third straight championship before getting upset in the second round of the playoffs. That and Lemieux's story make the PEnguins a compelling team to talk about this season. But we have to hear about them in terms of how this was the team the Maple Leafs aspired to be, blah, blah, blah. We have an entire chapter about GM Cliff Fletcher's time with Calgary in the '80s. We have a chapter about coach Pat Burns's career as a police officer before entering coaching. If he wanted to write a book about the 92–93 Leafs, why not just do it?
The book is about as extensively researched as one can expect it to be, provided you don't expect the author to leave Toronto. When discussing media reaction to the events of the season, the quotes are almost exclusively from Toronto newspapers or The Hockey News. There's something disconcerting about discussing media reaction without bothering to see what people in the cities where the teams actually played were saying. After all, these are the guys who are covering one team full-time all season. He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams. It's almost as if he lives in a solipsistic dreamland where the only real team is the Toronto Maple Leafs and all other teams exists solely to give them competition; they don't have their own struggles or fanbases or media. It's like they're all the Washington Generals going up against the Harlem Globetrotters, except the Globetrotters suck.
I could forgive all that, though, if the book were at least engaging. And it is, provided the author is giving background information and speaking in broad strokes. Unfortunately, most of the book is descriptions of games that mean little if you aren't actually watching them. It suffers from the same problem as war histories that try to provide overly detailed descriptions of actual battles. It doesn't matter how good the prose is if you don't have a lighted map to show you the troop movements. This isn't too much of a problem until we get to the playoffs, at which point it's nothing but this, over and over again. Even the interstitial bits between games aren't compelling since all he does is quote players and coaches giving meaningless quotes to the media like "We need to play better" after a loss. I get that there's not much to go with here, but Denault doesn't give his audience any credit and quotes this stuff as if it were genuinely insightful.
I've certainly read much worse things, but I'm pissed off that the book started off engaging enough but slowed to a crawl when the playoffs just became game after game after game. So I'm waaay too far into this to stop reading (over 300 pages) but I've still got a hundred to go and I can only read it in short sittings. It's frustrating. I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
They were though. Don Cherry is a legend and the announcers were an order of magnitude better than any of the American ones who knew (and still to this day know) absolutely nothing about hockey. Like, lacking basic terminology about the game and substituting generic folksy expressions for their ignorant viewers. Then there was the FoxTrax glow puck debacle, because American sports fans were apparently incapable of keeping up with a game that wasn't 75% advertisements and breaks in play a la NFL/MLB.
Anyways, then Hockey Night in Canada they sold the trademark music to RDS and Don Cherry's dementia progressed to a point where Ron Mclean couldn't drag him through the weekly programs. RIP.
This is the year. McJesus is bringing Lord Stanley's cup home.
But yeah, fuck the Leafs.
Wat? In my timeline he was coherent enough to complain onair about 'you people' who won't wear a poppy on Remembrance day, resulting in rapid cancellation due to 'anti-immigrant dogwhistling'. I think he did a podcast or something for a while?
Naturally -- I can agree that I don't want to read a book about the '93 Leafs; maybe I will go reread "The Game" instead, I think it's still in the basement.
I don't know man. Things were pretty grim there at the end (the whole channel recommends itself). But man, was it great television.
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