Firewagon Hockey

The title of this post comes from an excellent book by Mike Leonetti about the NHL in the 1980s. If I were teaching a class in Hockey Studies at Bovine University, it would be required reading. It's a year-by-year account of the notable events in the decade from 1980-1989 (featuring glossy pages with many fantastic color photos), and it really took me back to high school when me and my buddies were playing an embryonic version of fantasy hockey. There was no internet and thus no website to tabulate and compile stats for you, so you had to get the newspaper every day and look in the box scores to see how your players did and add everything up yourself (the inconvenience of it all!). With fantasy hockey, this was not nearly as tedious a task as it was for fantasy baseball, which we also played. There were only 6 players to check (there were at least 14 or 15 for baseball) and only a few basic scoring categories (goals, assists, shutouts), as opposed to several for baseball (runs, hits, home runs, stolen bases, wins, saves, strikeouts). It was a lot of fun for me to read about players that I had on my fantasy hockey teams: Peter, Anton, and Marian Stastny of the now-defunct Quebec Nordiques. Grant Fuhr, Edmonton's peerless, cat-quick netminder. Pittsburgh's Randy Carlyle. Dale Hawerchuk of the now-defunct Winnipeg Jets (always a favorite player). Tony Tanti of Vancouver. Darryl Sittler of Toronto. Lanny McDonald, who started the decade with the sad-sack (and now-defunct) Colorado Rockies, and later starred for the Calgary Flames. Paul Coffey (my favorite player for many years). Kent Nilsson (nicknamed "The Magic Man", as much for his propensity to disappear during some games as for his clever playmaking abilities). Jari Kurri. And, of course, Wayne Gretzky. The Great One. Needless to say, whichever one of us had Gretzky on his fantasy team usually won the league. I could go on and on. It was a great time for hockey. Scores of 7-5, 10-6, and 12-7 were not unusual. Wouldn't most people (apart from the goaltenders) prefer that to sitting through a 1-1 tie between the Wild and the Columbus Blue Jackets, which was a lot like the last 1-1 tie between the Wild and the Columbus Blue Jackets?

Back to Firewagon Hockey. In the author's own words, "This book is one that the current NHL brass should pick up and look at carefully because this look back at the past will tell them how the sport of hockey was alive and vibrant during the Eighties. Fans will come to understand that the decade was filled with players that had speed, skills, and smarts and that, by the end of the ten year period, the league had achieved the right balance between offense and defense." I couldn't agree more. If you're a hockey fan and you're jonesing for a fix and college or high school hockey (both of which produce great, exciting action in their own right, I'll just add) just don't do it for you, go pick up a copy of Firewagon Hockey. Now.

In a future post, I'll share my opinions as to how the NHL screwed everything up, and how they can fix it and draw casual fans back to the game (where they can more readily be converted to rabid fans) without trampling too much tradition in the process.

Cheers!