Book Description
The wildest seven years in the history of hockey
The Rebel League celebrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of the fabled WHA. It is filled with hilarious anecdotes, behind the scenes dealing, and simply great hockey. It tells the story of Bobby Hull’s astonishing million-dollar signing, which helped launch the league, and how he lost his toupee in an on-ice scrap.It explains how a team of naked Birmingham Bulls ended up in an arena concourse spoiling for a brawl. How the Oilers had to smuggle fugitive forward Frankie “Seldom” Beaton out of their dressing room in an equipment bag. And how Mark Howe sometimes forgot not to yell “Dad!” when he called for his teammate father, Gordie, to pass. There’s the making of Slap Shot, that classic of modern cinema, and the making of the virtuoso line of Hull, Anders Hedberg, and Ulf Nilsson.
It began as the moneymaking scheme of two California lawyers. They didn’t know much about hockey, but they sure knew how to shake things up. The upstart WHA introduced to the world 27 new hockey franchises, a trail of bounced cheques, fractious lawsuits, and folded teams. It introduced the crackpots, goons, and crazies that are so well remembered as the league’s bizarre legacy.
But the hit-and-miss league was much more than a travelling circus of the weird and wonderful. It was the vanguard that drove hockey into the modern age. It ended the NHL’s monopoly, freed players from the reserve clause, ushered in the 18-year-old draft, moved the game into the Sun Belt, and put European players on the ice in numbers previously unimagined.
The rebel league of the WHA gave shining stars their big-league debut and others their swan song, and provided high-octane fuel for some spectacular flameouts. By the end of its seven years, there were just six teams left standing, four of which – the Winnipeg Jets, Quebec Nordiques, Edmonton Oilers, and Hartford Whalers – would wind up in the expanded NHL.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
FOR ALL SPORTS HISTORY BUFFS!.......2007-07-31
If you LOVE hockey and sports...Please read this one.....Great historical reference to a time when hockey grew ableit in some of the strangest cities.......This book gives a great insight to how the league started, yes survived and ended....The stories are priceless......Derek Sanderson, The Great One and even lots on the Carlson Brothers (most know them as the Hanson's from Slap Shot)......This book even outlines the behind the scenes development of the movie Slap Shot.......!!!!!!!!
Rebel League, WHA.......2007-07-23
This is great read, I found myself intralled with the knowledge, and research
of the writer. A person that does not know the history of the WHA and hockey in general would have no problem understanding this book. I would recommend
this book and writer to anyone.
Great stories for true hockey fans.......2007-06-08
Easy read with great stories about the old WHA. I lived in B'ham, AL during the time of the Baby Bulls and the Bruiser Bulls so the stories of Frank (the beater)Beaton, Gilles (bad news) Biladeux and the rest of that gang were great. I gave it to my dad for Christmas and he loved it too.
What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been.......2006-12-22
You don't have to be a hockey fan to enjoy the wild & fast times of the World Hockey Association. Even the league founders - who had successfully launched the American Basketball Association - did not have a clue about the sport.
But what they saw was an opportunity to bring life to a game that for too many years was operated like a feudal empire by the National Hockey League and made Major League Baseball - before the unity of the player's association - look absolutely progressive.
The WHA operated from 1972-1979 and revolutionized pro hockey in many ways; from a court decision in its first year that basically overturned the NHL's reserve-clause on player contracts, introducing the sport to Sun Belt cities and - for numerous franchises - being literally on the ground floor in new arena construction and introducing pro fans to a pair of young players that quickly redefined the game - Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier.
Author Ed Willes gives the reader a great tour of the often unique personalities on the ice and in the front offices in this fast-moving text. And some of the wacky highlights include:
* a team so in debt that a group of potential owners backed out of a deal to buy it for one dollar;
* a player slated to be a major star lasting only eight games in the first season and then striking a buyout deal to be paid for not playing;
* an arena where the players had to be especially careful not to have cockroaches find cozy homes in their gear;
* a radio announcer who had to use his wife's gasoline credit card to refuel the team plane so it wouldn't be stuck on the tarmac until the next morning.
But through the hijinks was a small group of owners and a pool of players who wanted the league to succeed without merging with the NHL. It wasn't meant to be, as the league ended up with six teams in its last season, with four ending up in the NHL.
Maybe the WHA is judged as a failure because it sputtered to an uneventful end, but Willes demonstrates how chasing a dream can make for great memories....and some unbelievable stories.
What was on the ice was more fun than what was off the ice.......2006-11-05
One often hears "sports is a business," typically in the context of a player getting traded or cut.
"The Rebel League" talks about the business aspects of the World Hockey Association. While the league paid players fantastically (and simultaneously helped hundreds of players who never played in the WHA get paid more by the NHL), the league's revenue side was nowhere near as robust. Further, the league struggled with the practical aspects of putting on hockey games. For instance, the New York Raiders were hamstrung at Madison Square Garden by "a series of union contracts that guaranteed certain staffing quotas in the areas of concessions and maintenance. The rent might have been $1,700 on Sundays, but when you added in the costs of all those support workers, the actual price for staging a game was close to $20,000." I had never thought about an issue like that.
An unsung hero of the WHA that "The Rebel League" brings out is the late John Bassett, the owner of the Birmingham Bulls. It was Bassett who was most prominent in signing players under the NHL's age limit. "The Rebel League" argues this was a forcing function that finally got the NHL's dinosaurs to agree to the league merger. Bassett ends up being a martyr as neither he nor the Bulls made it into the NHL.
"The Rebel League" is a quick read. Willes is a lucid writer. His journalistic background comes out, both in the positive sense of the book being well-written and in the negative sense of the book lacking much depth.
Average customer rating:
- On a Park Bench Near You?
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Ice : New Writing on Hockey
Dale Jacobs
Manufacturer: Spotted Cow Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Anthologies
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ASIN: 0969466544 |
Book Description
This book of short stories, essays and poems about hockey is a must for anyone who has ever laced on a pair of skates or watched a game, peewee or professional. Forty-three authors, 20 of them American and 23 Canadian, have contributed to this anthology which is edited by Dale Jacobs. They bring new insights to the game and its importance to sports fans and others across North America.
Customer Reviews:
On a Park Bench Near You?.......2006-03-05
I have this habit of leaving things that I am finished with -- CDs I've copied to my hard drive, clean old clothing, small household items that still work, books I've read and don't want to keep -- on park benches here in NYC on the theory that someone can still use the item and may like it better than I did. Many other residents do something similar curbside, as if the city were one big free flea market.
Such will be the fate of my copy of "Ice: New Writing on Hockey." Hockey is a terrific sport, all the more so as spring and the Stanley Cup playoffs approach. But it has never gotten its "Bang the Drum Slowly" or "The Natural" (baseball) or "A Fan's Notes (football). "Ice," a collection of short stories, essays, and poems, doesn't even come close. Amid way too many images of frozen ponds and getting up at 5 AM to drive long distances to kids games (many of the works here stress the family connections of hockey, another of the wonderful things about the sport) only a couple entries are worth a second read -- e.g. Hockey Night in Metabetchouan, Hockey Nights and Naked Ladies, and -- perhaps only because I'm a Red Wings fan -- Return of the Dogman -- and even these are marred by a curious compulsion to wrap up the piece with an unnecessary one or two line coda.
Book Description
Celebrating ten years and more than one million books in print!
New four-in-one edition!
The first four Screech Owls mysteries are now collected in one volume:
#17 — The Secret of the Deep Woods
#18 — Murder at the Winter Games
#19 — Attack on the Tower of London
#20 — The Screech Owls's Reunion
Screech Owls books have won the Our Choice Award and the Manitoba Young Reader’s Choice Award. They have been endorsed by the Canadian Toy Testing Council and shortlisted for the Silver Birch Award, the Red Cedar Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Ottawa-Carleton Award, and the Palmarès de Communication-Jeunesse.
Book Description
"He is so strong, he doesn't call the cattle in. He carries them in." -- Gordie Howe, on Bobby Hull "We raced the other day and it wasn't a photo finish. It was an oil painting." -- Bob Plager, Blues executive, after scrimmaging with Doug Wickenheiser, who had injured his knee "Sometimes people ask, 'Are hockey fights for real?' I say, 'If they weren't, I'd get in more of them.'" -- Wayne Gretsky "Was Wayne Gretsky sick?" -- Larry Robinson, after being named Player of the Week
Customer Reviews:
1001 Beautiful One-Timers.......2002-11-21
Hockey Shorts is a wonderful compilation of over 1000 quotes dealing with hockey. There are quotes about the Stanley Cup, superstars, fighting, fans, refs and just about everything else that is in some way a part of the game. This is an amazing book that any hockey fan will love and even the non-hockey fan will enjoy. There are a lot of laughs, a bunch of memories and some great inspiration within this book. A definite must have for any fan of the coolest game on earth.
Hockey's Funniest One Liners in a fun, easy to read format.......2001-12-27
Hockey is a conducive book for great one lines. The history of hockey has some great characters who said some hilarious things. Whether a current stars or all-time greats, this book is filled with some hilarious lines. Of course, I'm biased since I wrote the book, but I am sure you will enjoy it if you are a hockey fan. For more information about my books, please contact me at glennliebman.com. Hope you enjoy the book!
Hockey and Humor: 2 things that go hand in hand.......1999-06-13
This book makes you love the game even more. Quotes from and about hockey's greatest players, most memorable events, and off-base topics will have you reading this book from cover to cover, nonstop. Its witty paroxyms of absurdity and out right hilariousness will have you falling out of your chair while tears of laughter stain the pages. Definitely read this book!
Great Book.......1999-05-22
I think that this is the greatest hockey book ever! Thhanks. Sincerly, Writer
Average customer rating:
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The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories
Roch Carrier
Manufacturer: House Of Anansi
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Binding: Paperback
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Similar Items:
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The Hockey Sweater
ASIN: 0887840787 |
Book Description
The title story, about the Quebec boy who is shipped a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake, has become a Christmas favorite. Also included are nineteen other tales of a childhood in a Quebec village. The Hockey Sweater is now an award-winning National Film Board film. This is Roch Carrier at his best!
Average customer rating:
- Affectionate, Elegant, Warm and Human Stories
- Almost Four Stars, but....
- Long Live Hockey Fiction
- Long live hockey fiction
- I hope this gets reprinted.
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Hockey Sur Glace: Stories
Peter LaSalle
Manufacturer: Breakaway Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
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ASIN: 1891369008 |
Amazon.com
There has been some terrific fiction written around sports, baseball first among all others. The drama of a game or a championship season lends itself to the telling of a great story. Peter LaSalle has deftly illustrated that hockey has as much to offer; his short stories evoke the crisp air and exhilaration of winter sport.
Customer Reviews:
Affectionate, Elegant, Warm and Human Stories.......2001-04-28
Ice hockey, perhaps the greatest and most demanding of sports (do you sense a bias?), rarely has been the subject of fiction. For this reason, if no other, Peter LaSalle's collection of stories, "Hockey Sur Glace", is remarkable in itself. But the seeming anomaly of the book's mere existence only draws the light more brightly on these deeply affectionate, elegantly written, warm and human stories about the way hockey indelibly marks the lives of those who play it, those who watch it, those who live their lives at the rink or on the icy ponds of long northern winters. "Hockey Sur Glace" is, to be sure, an uneven collection of stories (with a few short poems interspersed). The best of the lot are the first two, "Hockey Angels" and "Le Rocket Negre". But while the other stories are somewhat less than remarkable, all of them bear the mark of strong feeling for a sport which, perhaps more than any other, suffuses the lives of those who play it. If you play hockey, or have children who play hockey, or if you just like the sport, reading this slim collection of stories will be time well spent.
Almost Four Stars, but...........2000-05-16
A book by and for north people, who grew up in cold winters, whose toes froze on the walk back from pond to home, and who built the small fires of kindling and scrap wood to stay warm as afternoon faded and the hockey game went on. I hadn't thought for years about the way we carried skates, even those of us who didn't play much, by their laces slung over the blade of the hockey stick, but Peter LaSalle gets that detail and so much else about the game and the era, late fifties to early seventies mostly, exactly right. The problem is the stories themselves are lightweight and entirely too similar in tone and substance. The first two -- Hockey Angels and Le Rocket Negre -- are the best of the book, closely followed by three poems, particularly A Pond-Hockey Pledge. So, overall, a slight read, but still, for those of us who come from this place and this era, there's a sweet feel of things gone by here, and it's nice to see hockey written about, and this book can be good consolation in late spring when your team has been unceremoniously booted from the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Long Live Hockey Fiction.......2000-03-10
The intertwining of hockey and life is well done in this book. Great for anyone who loves and lives the game.
Long live hockey fiction.......2000-03-04
It is really great to read about hockey and life and how hockey is intertwined with the lives of those of us who love the game.
I hope this gets reprinted........1998-06-16
This collection of stories is an excellent read for anyone who enjoys a little history, a little drama, and most of all, a little hockey. I'm praying that the publisher reprints the hard cover edition, as I lost mine when I moved out of my old apartment.
Average customer rating:
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Our Game: An All-Star Collection of Hockey Fiction
Manufacturer: Raincoast Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 155192823X |
Book Description
From the Forum to the backyard rink, the Original Six to the expansion teams, heroes to has-beens, the 30 tales in this collection are a glorious celebration of hockey.
In the three periods between first word and last, accomplished writers such as Morley Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, Audrey Thomas, Wayne Johnston, Paul Quarrington and more show us familiar—and unforgettable—characters who are forever haunted by the sounds, smells, roughness, rhythm and romance of hockey.
Average customer rating:
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Alex and Sarah (Little Wolf Books. Level 3)
Gilles Tibo , and
Carolyn Perkes
Manufacturer: Dominique & Friends
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Tibo, Gilles
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ASIN: 1894363760 |
Average customer rating:
- And They Called it Yuppie Love...
- an honest, funny, and original voice
- Confidential Sources confirms that Barbara Fischkin has penned another winner!
- Thank you Barbara!
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Confidential Sources
Barbara Fischkin
Manufacturer: Delta
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
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Exclusive: Reporters in Love...and War: A Novel
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MUDDY CUP: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America
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Eye Contact
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Strange Son
ASIN: 0385338007
Release Date: 2006-10-31 |
Book Description
She’ll take Manhattan. He’ll take Managua. When two ambitious reporters from the same New York newspaper get married, something’s got to give. And in this wry, witty tale of a modern globe-spanning romance, what gives is the conventional and the expected–as fact turns more fantastic than fiction.
Jim Mulvaney has never met a story he didn’t think he could write. Barbara Fischkin isn’t sure she can write anything in the midst of their maddening marriage. But while Mulvaney is following his legendary nose for war, disaster, and scandal, sending them careening from Central America to Beijing, Fischkin is finding the stories between the lines–and they’re both learning the real inside scoop from baby Jack and his big brother Danny…the most revolutionary sources of all.
Customer Reviews:
And They Called it Yuppie Love..........2007-01-20
Barbara and Jim Mulvaney (called Mulvaney) are globe trotting reporters, each trying to outdo the other. This "sequel" to "Exclusive" follows these reporters to Nicaragua on assignment from "Long Island Newsday." At one point Mulvaney buys a baby girl from a poor family and presents her to Barbara, who is understandably nonplussed. After a short period of raising the girl named Caridad ("Charity" in Spanish, named by Mulvaney because the girl had previously gone unnamed), Barbara's mother comes to visit from Brooklyn. On page 129 it is said that the baby leaves, but where Caridad went or who ended up raising her is never said.
Mulvaney somehow manages to get them expelled from the country, so it's on to Mexico. Their son Danny was born there in 1987. After some humorous descriptions of the local protocol, the trio travels to Hong Kong. Danny becomes trilingual, speaking Spanish, English and some Cantonese. While both are searching the globe for that breakthrough story, meanwhile their sons are providing them with news from the home front.
Danny's brother Jack was born shortly after Danny's third birthday; Danny suffers from a severe ear infection and fever. The once verbal child becomes nonverbal and exhibiting autistic behavior. Within a short space of time, he is displaying behavior suggestive of Kanner's autism.
The family returns to the U.S. and settles in California and later, Long Island. The boys grow and thrive; Jack's input makes a good story even better. One especially funny anecdote is found at the beginning of the book. Mulvaney acted a fool at Jack's hockey game and was understandably asked to leave. A copy of the Code of Conduct at the games is included and one can only smile at Jack's take on this as well.
My favorite parts were where Jack describes Danny's behavior and how he accepts him unconditionally. I love the way Jack makes it plain that Danny is a valuable and vital human being with a lot of gifts to share and offer. Hats off to Jack!
A good book. The only thing that could be considered confusing is where the fiction leaves off and real life reporting of their lives begins.
an honest, funny, and original voice.......2006-12-18
In telling the "Mulvaney-true" story of her marriage and life as a reporter, Barbara Fischkin gets to the heart of "true-true." She's funny and warm as she embellishes on reality, taking the reader from the slums of Mexico City to the high-rise expatriate enclaves of Hong Kong to the mountain haunt of Filipino rebels to ringside at a Long Island hockey rink. Barbara hits right on the nose the trade-off that journalists wrestle between the adrenaline rush of reporting a story and the power of personal relationships. Read this book and her first novel, Exclusive: Reporters in Love and War. You won't be sorry!
Confidential Sources confirms that Barbara Fischkin has penned another winner!.......2006-12-01
Stop the presses! Confidential Sources confirms that Barbara Fischkin has penned another winner! In her delightful sequel to Exclusive: Reporters in Love...and War, she once again brings her readers along for a wild ride following the escapades of two globe-trotting investigative journalists, "Fischkin" and "Mulvaney." An engaging tale, often poignant yet always entertaining, that allows us to vicariously live the exciting lives of husband and wife reporters searching out that next big news story as they build their careers and along the way, their family. Although the protagonists of Confidential Sources have the same names as the author and her husband, they are fictional characters. Or perhaps, better said, the fictional alter-egos of the real-life Barbara Fischkin and Jim Mulvaney!
Fischkin shows us that life is often like following a juicy news lead; the story you finally report is far different, yet far more interesting, than what you first anticipated. In tandem with her journey to scooping the next big news story from her husband, the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, Jim Mulvaney, she graces her readers with a honest look into the world of autism. With her wry humor intact, Fischkin portrays the heartache, anger, fear and even moments of sheer joy that every family experiences when raising a child diagnosed with autism.
In a delightful surprise chapter written in the voice of her younger son, Jack, one gains insight on how dramatically life is impacted both good and bad, for children living with an autistic sibling. If the real-life Jack is as good a writer as his fictional alter-ego, then the Mulvaney/Fischkin writing talent is secure for another generation. Even at his young age, "Jack Mulvaney" the character has wisdom beyond his years: He recognizes that his older brother, Danny, even without speech and language since a toddler, has many gifts to share, not only with his family but with humanity as well. What a service this book does by showing us how precious life can be when parents fully love and accept every child regardless of obstacles.
If you only read one book this year, it must be Confidential Sources!
Thank you Barbara!.......2006-11-03
Thank you Barbara for finally offering a refreshing narrative on what life is like with an autistic child, as well as how she continues on as "normal" as possible for your other child and career. Barbara treats the reader like a best friend and it helps to abate the loneliness that is often a major part of a parent's life with autism. Now if only I had a large block of time to sit and read the entire book in one sitting!
Average customer rating:
- What a disappointment
- What a gem!
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The Good Body: A Novel
Bill Gaston
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Contemporary
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Gaston, Bill
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ASIN: 0060394110
Release Date: 2001-02-05 |
Amazon.com
To say that Bill Gaston's The Good Body is hilarious is to miss the profound forest for the mesmerizing trees. Oh, The Good Body will split you with laughter (how could a story of an aging semi-pro hockey player cheating his way into a graduate creative writing program not?), but the comedy is in fact another aspect of the novel's intimate understanding of its characters. It is this closeness that wires The Good Body with an electric psychology alternately hilarious, insightful, affirming, and terrifying.
None of Bob Bonaduce's career of hockey violence prepares him for the crushing blow he receives in a doctor's office after one foot doesn't stop tingling and his hands suddenly go clumsy. Sent into the boards by the body that has given him a career, a broken marriage, and the purest grace he has ever known, Bonaduce decides to reintroduce himself to his estranged son. What better way to do that than to play hockey on the same varsity team? Life on the road has given him plenty of time to read. He's tried some writing. If he needs to be a student to play with his son, isn't creative writing really the thing? Application portfolio? Oh, Bonaduce can get around that defense.
Fellow players, housemates, ex-lovers, and classmates all meet Gaston's unflinching honesty, alternately kissed by sympathy or slashed by damning eyes. With Gaston's uniquely polymorphous talent, humor, insight, sex, and tragedy all are marks of a voice that is so comforting for the wounds it both opens and heals. --Darryl Whetter
Book Description
After twenty years. Middle of the night, guitar on the roof, skates in the back, maybe two months' grace in the wallet....
At passing speed, squinting into the next few months, be hit the city limits....
Here he was, Bonaduce back in town.
He is Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce: professional hockey player, old-fashioned charmer, incorrigible rogue. After an athletic career spent chasing -- and never quite catching -- stardom, Bobby is facing the end of a long love affair with his own arrested adolescence. With the chasm of retirement before him, he is compelled to reach out to the family he abandoned years before, fast-talking his way into the home of Leah, the wife he left behind, and into a graduate seminar at the school where his son, Jason, is an undergrad. With valiant, bullheaded grace, Bobby wrestles with the earnest idiocies of academia, tilting desperately at writing assignments that stubbornly elude him. Yet at the same time -- unbeknownst to his family -- he is also struggling with an insidious disease that threatens to rob him of the one thing that has never let him down: his body.
Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a kind of rough bond with his son, and to learn to trust the truths of his heart in place of the waning force in his body -- The Good Body blends all these strains into a funny, never sentimental, but deeply moving song, full of discordant harmonies and unexpected resolutions. Rich with poignancy and humor in equal measure, it marks a welcome American debut for a writer of singular insight into the human spirit.
Customer Reviews:
What a disappointment.......2006-07-25
This is not a very good novel at all.The story is not credible and unrealistic.The prose is dull and predictable.Most of the
characters are either bland general types or stereotypes.The only ones you'll even remotely care about are Bobby,Oscar,and
Margaret,because they're the only ones who seem to have any life to them.Forget it.There are other,better novels out now.
What a gem!.......2002-05-22
It's rare in these busy times to stumble upon a novel worthy of the glorious yet exhausting all-night read. But within the first few pages of "The Good Body," I knew that a good night's sleep was not in the cards. It's 5AM in the morning; my work day is doomed, yet my mind still reels from the poetic beauty and honesty that is this novel. Can a mere book still move a jaded reader to tears? The answer, thanks to Lewis Nordan's "Sharpshooter Blues", Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," and now Bill Gaston's "The Good Body," is a resounding YES! What a triumph!
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- The Revenge of the Wannabes (The Clique, No. 3)
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- Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers: More Mad, Marvy Confessions of Georgia Nicolson
- Twelve Years a Slave
- Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation
- What Color Is Your Parachute for Teens: Discovering Yourself, Defining Your Future (What Color Is Your Parachute for Teens)
- What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel
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Books Index
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Shorthanded: The Untold Story of the Seals: Hockey's Most Colorful Team
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Walking Together Forever: The Broad Street Bullies, Then and Now
Striking Silver: The Untold Story of America's Forgotten Hockey Team
