Guru or Court Jester? The Lloyd percival paradox: the globalization of training regimes - the case of Canada, Sweden and the Soviet Union

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the Canadian fitness advocate and coaching legend Lloyd Percival’s fabled The Hockey Handbook, and its influence on player development and team strategy in Canada, Sweden and the former Soviet Union. Utilizing the notion of global ‘scapes’, as developed by Arjun Appaduari, to more fully understand the complexity of the global development of ice hockey, we argue that globalization of the game must be perceived as a multi-faceted interaction at both the global and local levels, i.e. as a critical binary relationship. According to the conventional, evangelistic narrative, Percival’s instructional manual was responsible for the rise of ice hockey in Europe and the USSR. Our contrary argument is that the global cultural flow of The Hockey Handbook was a complex combination of factors related to the movement of capital, technologies, people, ideological considerations and mediated images. As such, it brings into question, the presumed status of The Hockey Handbook, as a dominant influence of the global hockey world. Rather, our argument suggests, it is a manufactured ‘scape’, serving to privilege a Canadian ice hockey system while relegating other ‘narratives’ and ice hockey systems to that of mere receivers.