Hockey: A Global History by Stephen Hardy and Andrew C. Holman

Abstract

HARDY, Stephen, and Andrew C. HOLMAN – Hockey: A Global History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Pp. 582. While most scholars agree that the modern sport of ice hockey was born in Montreal in or about 1875, Stephen Hardy and Andrew Holman, the authors of Hockey: A Global History, point out that the story is not so simple: the sport had antecedents, so Montreal should more accurately be seen as the place of “the game’s re-invention” (p. 36). The city had a vibrant bourgeois club culture and institutions such as the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA) and the Victoria Skating Rink, where early progenitors such as James Aylwin Creighton, an engineer from Halifax, adapted rugby, field hockey, and lacrosse rules to a pre-existing informal stickand -ice game and made it popular. For the authors, the publication of a set of rules and the formation of a McGill University hockey club in 1877 marks the birth of what became known as the “Montreal Game,” and subsequent commercialization drove the sport’s rapid development, building on tournaments at regional events such as the Montreal Carnivals of the 1880s to the Stanley Cup competitions of the 1890s. Hardy and Holman frame the overall history of hockey as an oscillation between convergence and divergence over time and geography, with “contingency, individual interest, and luck” (p. 65) being crucial variables, especially before 1920. They identify four vectors of development: without the social groups of the “middle classes” aspiring to manly pursuits, without rail links to join their activities, and without indoor rinks to host them, hockey might not have flourished. And without the hockey evangelists who spread the gospel of the Montreal Game, hockey would not have become a global game. By the First World War, the game was poised for growth, with a focus on speed, skill, “star” players, and not a little on-ice savagery, along with accompanying innovations in technology (equipment and ice), organization (the corporate form), and marketing (the press). One of the highlights of the book is a rare analysis of playing styles, which in this era featured experimentation with on-ice strategies and tactics, such as positional alignments and combination plays. The authors perhaps miss an opportunity here to link the on-ice specialization to larger trends in industrial process evolution (Taylorism, for example). They do, however, highlight the strangest aspect of hockey—its normalization of workplace violence. Indeed, the authors argue that “mayhem” was an essential element of commercial hockey, one that, when added to individual skill and combination play, produced “a trinity of appeal” (p. 147) for spectators. The authors explain how the dominant form of hockey, which came to full flower in the 1920s in the form of the “major-league” NHL, primarily reflected white male social and economic power, but they also devote substantial space throughout the book to consider the class, language, race, and gender implications of the sport, and in particular the ways in which various groups expressed their own versions of the game. First, commercialization quickly brought proletarianization of hockey, as winning demanded recruitment outside the preferred bourgeois classes, who would rarely relinquish their day jobs for the itinerance of a hockey career. Francophones in Montreal also broke through, establishing their own clubs and a foothold in the NHL, supported by the consumer preferences of the large francophone market. Others were less fortunate. A player of First Nations descent, minor-pro player Bud Maracle (Haudenosaunee), had a difficult time breaking out of the category of racial novelty, as did whole clubs like the St. Catharines Orioles, which played only briefly in the Ontario Hockey Association. Women also had a hard slog. Although they had been participants from the beginning, and women’s and girls’ teams and leagues had a local and regional presence—and their own stars—the cultural equation of the game as a man’s sport “cast a long shadow” over the women’s game (p. 158) and limited its growth. (It continues today.) The book shines in providing the global perspective. When Canada features centrally it does for good reason, but the authors integrate the hockey histories of other nations and regions, in some cases requiring...