Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Playing the shots at both ends The story of Ken and by Murray Dryden Corbett's World '05. could be Canada's prime minister one day. Some say: "Please, and soon." At the moment, he's the federal Social Development Minister, which doesn't surprise anyone; for he is actually following in his father's footsteps -- that of caring for people. The quiet, articulate former NHL goaltending great, lawyer, best-selling author, filmmaker, hockey executive, turned politician was credited with saving Paul Martin's troubled Liberal government from extinction with some sage advice in recent days. Martin adopted Dryden's words by promising Canadians a federal election once the sponsorship inquiry tabled its report. However, Dryden is much more comfortable behind the scenes; and abhors the loud mouths, which, seemingly roar, daily in the halls of Ottawa's Parliament Buildings. As a CP story points out , Dryden, who has a far-reaching plan for universal child care, is a man of vision with child-care centres eventually becoming community hubs. As for the cost of such an idea, Dryden would sooner leave that to the bean-counters. And as for seeking the PM's job, he told the reporter, in his methodical manner, "I don't know. I didn't know I could write, I didn't know I could play in the NHL . You find out." As for his deep social concerns, Ken, learned those from his father -- D. Murray Dryden. Both the Missus and myself had the privilege of being with the senior Dryden on a number of occasions in his -area home, where after pointing out where his sons, Ken and Dave, learned their goaltending skills in the small backyard pond, he would take people on a tour of the crowded Sleeping Children Around the World "headquarters." A number of volunteers would always be scurrying around as Mr. Dryden told of his humanitarian efforts, in a quiet and forthright manner. A SCAW website best tells his story: "Murray was born on a farm in Domain, , in 1911 and knew the meaning of hard work and a loving family. After leaving home during the Depression years, like many others, Murray found it difficult to find work. "He became a door-to-door peddler, subsisting on whatever little cash he could make. While travelling East, many nights he slept in train stations as he rode the rails from one town to another. He learned then what it was to be deprived of a good night's sleep. "In 1932, Murray found work in Hamilton, , selling plant food, and it there that he met Margaret Campbell in 1938. In 1948, the Drydens moved to Etobicoke when Murray began selling building materials, and here they raised their three children. During the 1950s, Murray pursued a hobby in photography. One night he was particularly taken by the peaceful pose of his sleeping daughter, Judy, and took her photo. This led to a desire to photograph more and more children as they slept.It was his hope to publish a coffee-table book. "One night while travelling in India, Murray tripped over a child sleeping on the street. A man of ideas, he decided that he must and would do something for children who had no comfortable bed. He couldn't feed the world, or alleviate hunger, but he believed a good night's sleep could make a hungry child's life more comfortable. "Murray was a champion for children in developing countries, primarily because they have no welfare system, no Medicare, and often little or no hope for a future. Thus, with a strong desire to help others and a firm belief that with God nothing is impossible, Sleeping Children Around The World was begun in 1970, with a distribution of 50 bedkits in Pune, India. "Murray and Margaret devoted their retirement lives to this program, initially hoping to raise $1 million. After this was achieved, Murray set a new goal of 1 million bedkits. "One of Murray's favourite quotes was "There is nothing more peaceful that a sleeping child." Even though Murray Dryden died on February 1, 2004 in his 93rd year, Sleeping Children Around the World continues its tremendous work even today. (Phone: 416-231-1841) FAMILIAR PHRASES: To Close Ranks -- Meaning: To present a united front. Origin: "In the old-time European armies, the soldiers were aligned side by side, in neat rows, or ranks, on the battle. When the enemy attacked, officers would order the troops to close ranks; that is, to move the rows close together, so that the enemy faced a seemingly impregnable mass of men." (From Fighting Words, by Christine Ammer) SO WHAT ABOUT: Beyond the Pale -- Meaning: Socially unacceptable. Origin: "The pale in this expression has nothing to do with the whitish color, but comes originally from the Latin palus, meaning a pole, or stake. Since stakes are used to mark boundaries, a pale was a particular area within certain limits." The pale that inspired this expression was the area around Dublin in Ireland. Until the 1500s, that area was subject to British law. "Those who lived beyond the pale were outside English jurisdiction and were thought to be uncivilized." (From Getting to the Roots, by Martin Manser) THEN THERE'S MY FAVORITE: I've Got A Frog In My Throat -- Meaning: I'm hoarse from a cold. Origin: Surprisingly, this wasn't inspired by the croaking sound of a cold-sufferer's voice, but by a weird medical practice. "In the Middle Ages," says Christine Ammer in It's Raining Cats and Dogs,"infections such as thrush were sometimes treated by putting a live frog head first into the patient's mouth; by inhaling, the frog was believed to draw out the patient's infection into its own body. The treatment is happily obsolete, but its memory survives in the 19th- century term frog in one's throat." Playing the Shots at Both Ends: The Story of Ken and Dave Dryden by Murray Dryden and James R. Hunt (1972, Book, Illustrated) The lowest-priced item that has been used or worn previously. The item may have some signs of cosmetic wear, but is fully operational and functions as intended. This item may be a floor model or store return that has been used. See details for description of any imperfections. What does this price mean? This is the price (excluding shipping and handling fees) a seller has provided at which the same item, or one that is nearly identical to it, is being offered for sale or has been offered for sale in the recent past. The price may be the seller's own price elsewhere or another seller's price. The "off" amount and percentage simply signifies the calculated difference between the seller-provided price for the item elsewhere and the seller's price on eBay. If you have any questions related to the pricing and/or discount offered in a particular listing, please contact the seller for that listing. creases, they’re for crashing. The Chicago Cougars were blue in February of 1975, in a bleak place. I’m not referring to Toronto here, though that’s where they were geographically, on another stop on the WHA’s schedule. The funk that the Cougars were in related to the losing streak they rode into Toronto (they’d won just 3 of 16 games) as well as the team’s uncertain financial future. Before this, their third season in the upstart WHA, the original owners of the Cougars had sold the team to three of its prominent players, Ralph Backstrom, Pat Stapleton, and Dave Dryden. By February, with the new (playing) ownership having trouble finding further financial backing, there was talk that the Cougars might be upping skates and leaving Chicago — that, or folding entirely. Toronto was a balm, actually, in the face of all this: the Cougars ended up beating the local Toros, 4-3 in overtime, on a goal by Rosaire Paiement. Reporting for The Globe and Mail , Jeff Goodman wrote that the Toros helped in the effort as best they could: his account of the game at Maple Leaf Gardens features the phrase erratic passing and the word sleepskating . Pictured here in the fearsome mask is Chicago owner Dave Dryden, in the company of Toros defenceman Steve Cuddie and (in back) Chicago’s Darryl Maggs. “This win was something we needed badly,” said Chicago coach Jacques Demers when it was all over but the flood. “Things just weren’t going good. The players were depressed because they didn’t know where they stood.” The Cougars finished the season, but the franchise didn’t live to see another one. After failing to make the WHA playoffs in April of ’75, the Chicago Cougars were dissolved. Many of the players (Maggs included) ended up with a new franchise, the Denver Spurs. They didn’t last long: by December of that same year, they’d folded, relocating to Ottawa, where they played out the season (but not beyond) as the Civics. The Edmonton Oilers claimed Dryden in the draft that dispersed the Cougars, and he played there for five seasons, four of them as the WHA wound up and one as the team debuted in the NHL. He took his mask with him, apparently. A friend in Chicago by the name of Bob Pelkowski was an artist and painted its ferocious face, according to Michael Cutler’s 1977 book Hockey Masks and the Great Goalies Who Wear Them . Dryden told Cutler that he had made the mask himself in 1965 at a cost of $10, and it as the only one he’d ever worn during his pro career. When he got to Edmonton, he had Pelkowski repaint it, with drops of oil dripping down over the eyes. Did he subsequently change it up? Certainly this one, below, seems like a different model, with a different array of ventilation holes. Share this: on this night in 1962: boom goes the leafs’ bench. The hockey headlines from 57 years ago tonight, when the Toronto Maple Leafs hosted the New York Rangers? Leafs won, 4-1, to solidify their hold on second place in the NHL standings. A 20-year-old Dave Dryden was a story that night, too. As the on-call back-up in those days before teams regularly travelled with spare goaltenders, the Junior-A Toronto Marlboros’ ’minder was summoned from the stands early in the second period after the Rangers’ Gump Worsley left the game with an injured elbow. In his NHL debut, clad in Worsley’s too-small sweater, Dryden stopped 23 shots in his only career appearance for the Rangers, allowing three goals. “He played extremely well,” New York GM Muzz Patrick declared. “He’s a darn good prospect.” But Dryden’s pro debut wasn’t the reason the game made the front page of The Globe and Mail the following Monday. The story there, just below the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (ten years on the throne) and the latest on the crisis in Algeria, was the bomb that someone threw from the stands at the Leafs’ bench while the band was playing “God Save The Queen” before the opening face-off. To sum up: at an NHL game in 1962, two-and-a-half months before Toronto won the Stanley Cup, a small bomb exploded near Bobby Baun at one end of the Leafs’ bench, briefly blinding the defenceman, and linesman Matt Pavelich, too. Despite its title, Bobby Baun’s 2000 autobiography doesn’t mention the 1962 incident. That first report allowed that it might have been a “giant firecracker,” but Toronto police detectives would subsequently classify the device as a “homemade bomb.” No-one, apparently, saw who tossed it, and the police investigation doesn’t seem to have turned up a perpetrator. From what I can see, all trace of the incident disappeared from the papers within the week. File it away, I guess, as an unsolved mystery whose consequences could have been much more serious than they were. “The blast came,” the Globe recounted, “when the house lights were dimmed and the drums of the band were rolling at the start of the National Anthem. There was a loud noise, a bright flash, and a cloud of smoke. Players and fans in the vicinity said the smoke smelled of gunpowder.” Pavelich was standing by the gate at the southern end of the Leafs’ bench. He said he felt something graze his nose, then his forearm before the explosion. From the Globe : There were holes in his sweater from wrist to elbow on the right sleeve and the front of the sweater was seared. There also were powder marks on his clothing as well as on Baun’s glove, which he had raised to his face automatically when he heard the blast. Pavelich first clutched at his arm, then held a hand over his eyes. “It just knocked me off balance,” Baun said, “and both Pavelich and I had trouble seeing for a minute or so. It exploded at the top of the gate.” The game went ahead. I can’t tell you much about how jarred Pavelich was, or whether Baun’s play showed any shell-shock. The latter, just back in the line-up after a wrist injury, seems to have played as Toronto’s fifth defenceman, spelling Al Arbour. He took a second-period penalty, two minutes for interference. Evidence of the blast did eventually go to laboratory used by Ontario’s Attorney-General: scrapings from the ice, a towel Pavelich used to wipe his face, his sweater, Baun’s glove. No trace of the device itself was discovered. Globe columnist Jim Vipond couldn’t understand how the bomber could have gone undetected by his neighbours in the stands. He urged anyone who knew anything to speak up. No-one seems to have come forward, though. The lab analysis didn’t reveal anything, either. The Leafs did step up security for their next home game, against the Boston Bruins. Private detectives and extra police were on duty at the Gardens that night. And this time, too, when the band played the anthem, the lights weren’t dimmed quite so low. Aftermath: In the week after a bomb exploded at Maple Leaf Gardens this month in 1962, a Toronto cartoonist picked up on the news. Share this: under review: plan like subbans. A version of this review appeared in the October, 2017 edition of the Literary Review of Canada . If you’re someone who’s mothered a famous hockey player, chances are that you have not subsequently gone out and written a book about it. Is this because your parental pride is more private than, say, a father’s, your fulfillment so much the quieter? Or that you don’t feel the same urgent need to explain your son? Maybe. In the teeming library devoted to our beloved winter game, the books of hockey-parent lit may only fill a half- shelf, but this we know: almost all of them are written by fathers. There is something charmingly local about the fact that these books are published at all: only in Canada could there be enough oxygen to sustain such a sub-genre. If hockey fathers (necessarily) antedate the birth of the sport itself, the dads of professional hockey players only started writing books in the early 1970s. First to the font was Murray Dryden, who, if he were a primary character in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones , might be dubbed Father of Goaltenders. Dave and Ken’s dad was suitably satisfied when his sons both made the NHL, with Buffalo and Montreal, respectively— all the more so when they started against one another in a regular-season game in 1971. Dryden’s Playing The Shots At Both Ends (1972) is light and genial, a quick and agreeable excursion. At 156 pages, it set a standard of brevity that subsequent exemplars from the genus Pater librorum glaciem hockey have failed to follow. The memoir Walter Gretzky published in 2001 was called On Family, Hockey, and Healing . After a stroke threatened Gretzky Senior’s life in 1991, he faced a long and complicated recovery. As a spokesman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, he was as focussed on advocacy and promoting awareness as he was on spinning hockey tales about his son Wayne. Published in both French and English editions, Michel Roy’s Patrick Roy: Winning, Nothing Else (2007) ran to more than 500 pages. It was positively militant in its mission, which was to cast Patrick as a hero and correct the public’s faulty perceptions of his character. People thought the younger Roy was testy, aloof, selfish, and they were wrong. “I wanted to present Patrick as he is,” Michel told an interviewer soon after the book was published. “I wanted to defend the truth.” The exception to the rule of mothers not writing books is the memoir penned by the late Colleen Howe. Wife to Gordie, and mother to NHLers Mark and Marty, she was a force in her own right, which you will know if you’ve read My Three Hockey Players (1975). To my mind, it remains the most interesting of the parental hockey books: filled with anecdote and incident, it’s candid and bracingly caustic, knotty with grievance and criticism, holding nothing back. The newest addition to the shelf, Karl Subban’s How We Did It: The Subban Plan For Success In Hockey, School and Life , fits in alongside Dryden and Gretzky, down at what we might call the more generous end of the shelf. With his son P.K. — at? nearing? — the peak of his game, Karl seems to be enjoying the moment as much as he might be hoping to seize an opportunity while his son is at centre-ice to tell his own story and shape it as a platform for his ideas on parenthood and mentoring young people. Writing with an assist from Scott Colby, an editor with the Toronto Star , Karl is in a sharing mood. I suspect that theirs might be the hockey-dad book that finds a wider audience than those that have gone before. This has to do with P.K.’s compelling personality and his philanthropy, both of which transcend the game he plays. More than any other player of recent note he has also managed to unsettle hockey’s sense of itself, and there will be readers from beyond the rink who will come to the book curious about questions of race and racism, the snubs and the insults that Subban has suffered, and how they’re coded, or not. A quick recap, for those who might have been exiled for a decade, on an atoll, far from Wi-Fi: Pernell Karl Subban is a vividly skilled 28-year-old defenceman who has been one of the NHL’s best since at least 2013, when he won the Norris Trophy. Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Connor McDavid: all of them can dominate a game and electrify a crowd. But is there a more consistently entertaining hockey player to watch, or one who seems to play with more joy than Subban? “Like Roger Federer, or Kevin Durant, or Yasiel Puig,” Ben McGrath wrote in a persuasive 2014 New Yorker profile, “[Subban] awes less because of the results he achieves than because of the way he achieves them — kinetic charisma, approaching genius.” He was still a Montreal Canadien back then, beloved to many, infuriatingly flamboyant to others—a polarizing figure, including (the rumours went) within his own dressing room, and with his own coach, Michel Therrien, who was often critical of Subban’s defensive lapses. And as a columnist from USA Today wrote during last season’s playoffs, “Subban has haters.” The adjectives that have crowded into mentions of Subban’s hockey exploits over his eight years in the league include dynamic ; freewheeling ; passionate ; booming (his shot); dazzling (his rushes); jaw-dropping (his creativity), but they also run to the more hostile emotional ; individualistic ; cocky ; arrogant ; and bigger than the team . Debate hasn’t stopped roiling in Montreal since he was traded in the summer of 2016 to Nashville, whose golden-garbed Predators he helped attain a berth in this last spring’s Stanley Cup finals. The fact that they lost there to Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins didn’t do anything to change that: regret weighs heavily to this day with many Montreal fans who can’t — and don’t want to — forget the on-ice skill and exuberance that made him one of most exciting athletes anywhere, in any sport, or his astonishing 2015 pledge to raise $10-million over seven years for the city’s Children’s Hospital. For all its flashing lights and bold embrace of new markets (hello, Las Vegas), the NHL remains a bastion of staid and conservative attitudes. Because he is anything but, Subban has been accused of arrogance and disrespect, of excessive self-regard, of not knowing his station. As a rookie with the Montreal Canadiens, he was called out by the then-captain of the Philadelphia Flyers. “It’s just frustrating to see a young guy like that come in here,” whined Mike Richards, “and so much as think that’s he’s better than a lot of people.” Never mind that Subban was better than a lot of people—as he always has and will be. Hockey’s brassiest establishment voice, Don Cherry, would soon be scolding him for daring to play with verve and personality; another, Mike Milbury, called him a clown during the spring’s playoffs, berating him for courting too much attention, and for the mortal sin of overt enthusiasm. There is no good gauge of which of or how much, if at all, the reproaches directed Subban’s way have to do with the fact that he is a black man in a sport that has been so glaringly white for so long. There are books about that, too, including Herb Carnegie’s instructive 1997 memoir A Fly in a Pail of Milk . A stand-out scorer in the 1930s and ’40s who couldn’t find a way through hockey’s colour barrier, Carnegie never played an NHL game. He had no doubt that it was racism that kept him from cracking the New York Rangers’ line-up in 1948. Playing the shots at both ends: The story of Ken and Dave Dryden by Murray Dryden. VGMDP would like to thank: VINTAGE GOALIE MASK DISCUSSION PAGE. Vintage Goalie Mask Discussion Page Vintage Mask Discussion Top 10 Vintage Mask Oriented Books that YOU own. Chat room Support Search RSS runboard.com Sign up (learn about it) | Sign in (lost password?) Page: 1 2 3. -Rookie Goalie Gerry Desjardins by Bill Libby. -The Jacques Plante Story. -Goaltender by Cheevers. -Playing the shots at both ends by Murray Dryden. -Great Goalies: Giacomin, Vachon, Parent, Esposito. -Goalie: the man behind the mask (has rare pick of Gary Simmons in his "Indian Painted Mask" when with the Seals) -Hockey Masks by Michael Cutler (weird small 1977 book with a bunch of drawings and profiles) Bigger Than the Team. I f you’re someone who’s mothered a famous hockey player, chances are that you have not subsequently gone out and written a book about it. Is this because your parental pride is more private than, say, a father’s, your fulfillment so much the quieter? Or because you don’t feel the same urgent need to explain your son? Maybe. In the teeming library devoted to our beloved winter game, the books of hockey-parent lit may only fill a half-shelf, but this we know: almost all of them are written by fathers. There is something charmingly local about the fact that these books are published at all: only in Canada could there be enough oxygen to sustain such a sub-genre. If hockey fathers antedate the birth of the sport itself, the dads of professional hockey players only started writing books in the early 1970s. First to the font was Murray Dryden, who, if he were a primary character in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, might be dubbed Father of Goaltenders. Dave and Ken’s dad was suitably satisfied when his sons both made the NHL, with Buffalo and Montreal, respectively—all the more so when they started against one another in a regular-season game in 1971. Dryden’s Playing the Shots at Both Ends (1972) is light and genial, a quick and agreeable excursion. At 156 pages, it set a standard of brevity that subsequent exemplars from the genus Pater librorum glaciem hockey have failed to follow. The memoir Walter Gretzky published in 2001 was called On Family, Hockey and Healing. After a stroke threatened Gretzky Senior’s life in 1991, he faced a long and complicated recovery. As a spokesman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, he was as focussed on advocacy and promoting awareness as he was on spinning hockey tales about his son Wayne. Published in both French and English editions, Michel Roy’s Patrick Roy: Winning, Nothing Else (2007) ran to more than 500 pages. It was positively militant in its mission, which was to cast Patrick as a hero and correct the public’s faulty perceptions of his character. People thought the younger Roy was testy, aloof, selfish, and they were wrong. “I wanted to present Patrick as he is,” Michel told an interviewer soon after the book was published. “I wanted to defend the truth.” The exception to the rule of mothers not writing books is the memoir penned by the late Colleen Howe. Wife to Gordie, and mother to NHLers Mark and Marty, she was a force in her own right, which you will already know if you’ve read My Three Hockey Players (1975). To my mind, it remains the most interesting of the parental hockey books: filled with anecdote and incident, it’s candid and bracingly caustic, knotty with grievance and criticism, holding nothing back. The newest addition to the shelf, Karl Subban’s How We Did It: The Subban Plan for Success in Hockey, School and Life, fits in alongside Dryden and Gretzky, down at what we might call the more generous end of the shelf. With his son P.K.—at? nearing?—the peak of his game, Karl seems to be enjoying the moment as much as seizing an opportunity while his son is at centre ice to tell his own story and shape it as a platform for his ideas on parenthood and mentoring young people. Writing with an assist from Scott Colby, an editor with the Toronto Star, Karl is in a sharing mood. I suspect that theirs might be the hockey-dad book that finds a wider audience than those that have gone before. This has to do with P.K.’s compelling personality and his philanthropy, both of which transcend the game he plays. More than any other player of recent note he has also managed to unsettle hockey’s sense of itself, and there will be readers from beyond the rink who will come to the book curious about questions of race and racism, the snubs and the insults that Subban has suffered, and how they’re coded, or not. A quick recap, for those who might have been exiled for a decade, on an atoll, far from wifi: Pernell Karl Subban is a vividly skilled 28-year-old defenceman who has been one of the NHL’s best since at least 2013, when he won the Norris Trophy. Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Connor McDavid: all of them can dominate a game and electrify a crowd. But is there a more consistently entertaining hockey player to watch, or one who seems to play with more joy, than Subban? “Like Roger Federer, or Kevin Durant, or Yasiel Puig,” Ben McGrath wrote in a persuasive 2014 New Yorker profile, “[Subban] awes less because of the results he achieves than because of the way he achieves them—kinetic charisma, approaching genius.” He was still a Montreal Canadien back then, beloved to many, infuriatingly flamboyant to others—a polarizing figure, including (the rumours went) within his own dressing room; his own coach, Michel Therrien, was often critical of Subban’s defensive lapses. As a columnist from USA Today wrote during last season’s playoffs, “Subban has haters.” The adjectives that have crowded into mentions of Subban’s hockey exploits over his eight years in the league include dynamic ; freewheeling ; passionate ; booming (his shot); dazzling (his rushes); jaw-dropping (his creativity), but they also run to the more hostile emotional ; individualistic ; cocky ; arrogant ; and bigger than the team . The debate hasn’t stopped roiling in Montreal since he was traded in the summer of 2016 to Nashville, whose golden-garbed Predators he helped to attain a berth in this last spring’s Stanley Cup finals. The fact that they lost there to Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins didn’t do anything to change that: regret weighs heavily to this day with many Montreal fans who can’t—and don’t want to—forget the on-ice skill and exuberance that made him one of most exciting athletes anywhere, in any sport, or his astonishing 2015 pledge to donate $10 million over seven years for the city’s children’s hospital. For all its flashing lights and bold embrace of new markets (hello, Las Vegas), the NHL remains a bastion of staid and conservative attitudes. Because he is anything but, Subban has been accused of arrogance and disrespect, of excessive self-regard, of not knowing his station. As a rookie with the Montreal Canadiens, he was called out by the then-captain of the Philadelphia Flyers. “It’s just frustrating to see a young guy like that come in here,” whinged Mike Richards, “and so much as think that’s he’s better than a lot of people.” Never mind that Subban was better than a lot of people—as he always has been and will be. Hockey’s brassiest establishment voice, Don Cherry, would soon be scolding him for daring to play with verve and personality; another, Mike Milbury, called him a clown during the spring’s playoffs, berating him for courting too much attention, and for the mortal sin of overt enthusiasm. There is no good gauge of which of or how much, if at all, the reproaches directed Subban’s way have to do with the fact that he is a black man in a sport that has been so glaringly white for so long. There are books about that, too, including Herb Carnegie’s instructive 1997 memoir A Fly in a Pail of Milk. A stand-out scorer in the 1930s and ’40s who couldn’t find a way through hockey’s colour barrier, Carnegie never played an NHL game. He had no doubt that it was racism that kept him from cracking the New York Rangers’ line-up in 1948. Readers who come to How We Did It in hopes of a broader discussion of race and racism in hockey may be left wanting. It’s not that Karl Subban seeks to avoid it, exactly, more that he addresses the issue as he sees fit and moves on. Yes, his son has run into his share of ignorant morons and their abhorrent slurs in his time playing hockey. No, Karl doesn’t think either—the slurs or the morons—is worth engaging; they’re nothing but distractions. “Racism is a fact of life,” he writes. Why give it permission to get in the way of where you’re going? In the book’s final pages, P.K. endorses his dad’s approach. And that’s as far as it goes. Like the P.K. that fans see and hear, Karl is one to keep both his outlook and message unrelentingly positive. “Hockey matters,” he declares at one point, “but people matter more.” He’s an affable, even friendly narrator, even if he does reveal himself to have been intense and, occasionally, over-the-line hotheaded as a parent of minor-league hockey players. (The guilty chapter describing the time he yanked a 10-year-old P.K. from an elite Toronto minor team runs to nearly 17 pages.) How We Did It is evenhanded: much as P.K. fans might wish for a narrative that emphasizes the middle-born son who spends his winters wearing number 76, father Karl makes time for his elder daughters, Taz and Tasha, as well as to for P.K.’s younger brothers, Malcolm and Jordan, talented players both, both on the verge of NHL careers of their own. (P.K. has said that Jordan is “going to be the best of us all.”) Karl has no trouble conceding that his sons’ hockey careers are extensions of his frustrated aspirations. Born in Jamaica in 1958, he followed his parents to Canada in 1970, when he was twelve. He remembers feeling air-conditioning for the first time, and his introduction to the exotic Canadian cuisine known, outlandishly, as the hot dog. The family made a home in Sudbury, Ontario, where Karl’s mother started as a seamstress and his father worked as a diesel mechanic. An ardent cricketer, young Karl soon traded bats and wickets for a road hockey stick. He idolized Ken Dryden and dreamed of joining his Montreal Canadiens. Problem: he was in his mid-teens before he started skating and never got into an organized league. “Raising a hockey player,” he writes of his parents, “was not in their pocketbook.” At university he was a talented basketball player and thought maybe that was a career he would court before turning to teaching. That eventually took him to Toronto, where he embarked on a 30-year career as an influential teacher and highly successful administrator in the public system. It’s where he would also meet (and eventually marry) Maria Brand. Then—well, “before you knew it,” is how Karl frames it, “we were blessed with five kids—our starting five, as I like to call them.” For those waiting patiently for P.K. to make his debut, that comes on page 85, or almost a third of the way through the book. Pay attention, it happens fast. Where Michel Roy logs the minute of son Patrick’s birth, the delivering doctor’s name, and his inaugural weight (seven pounds, one ounce), Karl Subban lingers not at all in the delivery room. They grow up so fast: turn the page and P.K. is two-and-a-half and already skating. Readers hoping for the dish on P.K.’s early years may be disappointed. He was, as you’d imagine, an energetic kid who was good at sports. There were good times (when the family went skating together on freezing Friday nights in Brampton) and mishaps (the time P.K. threw a beach ball and his sister was nearly blinded). Along with the rest of his sisters and brothers, P.K. pops in now and then with a paragraph of first-person testimony. For anyone not inclined to keep diaries or write extensive letters, reconstructing the past from mere memories is hard work. You can do a certain amount of scrapbooking with anecdotes and make that work, as most of the hockey-father books do, more or less. The absence of more revealing details is understandable, and not unique to Karl Subban’s contribution to the genre. What none of the hockey-parent books really achieves is any kind of convincing explanation of just what it is that makes their sons so exceptional in their hockey talents. Walter Gretzky confides that he was strict about proper eating and early bedtimes before important games, and that when, as a toddler, Wayne watched older kids play hockey, “there was a kind of intensity there.” Gretzky Senior doesn’t really stretch himself beyond that: Wayne’s “life in hockey always seemed to be predestined.” Karl Subban doesn’t really have any insight into the alchemy of P.K.’s success. Or, no—I guess what he would say is that it’s all about family. That’s what shaped his boys into NHLers: the crucible of family love and presence and pressure. Hockey reporters might hope to plumb How We Did It for inside grist on the trade that so shockingly ended P.K.’s tenure with Montreal a year ago: What happened? Why? What were P.K.’s true feelings? Was the abandon with which he plays somehow an affront to the traditions of the sainted Canadiens? There is nothing much on any of that here. Karl takes two paragraphs to say how little the trade surprised him before handing over the page to Nashville’s VP and chief revenue officer for the corporate view on how welcome P.K. is in his new NHL home. Are there fathers out there who will seize on How We Did It with the idea that it contains a foolproof formula for raising their own little NHL all- star? The title does pack more of a DIY imperative than most of those of the other books on the hockey-father shelf. I’m advocating caution. As any parent (and every hockey scout) knows, there is no recipe to any of this, and if you do try it at home, you’re mostly on your own. That’s not to say that advice from someone like Karl Subban doesn’t have its place. The Subban narrative is a positive one, and even at times uplifting. Everyone has potential, Karl counsels, you just have to find your gift. Dreams are important, so nurture them and never let them wilt. Occasionally the message veers off into banality: be a good person is a key tenet herein, because that’s the only kind that succeeds in hockey. P.K. has five years left on his Nashville contract. Beyond that, it’s impossible to say where his career will go from here. It will be worth watching, and maybe at some point, the man will sit down and write his own book to help explain himself. In the meantime, we have something of a provisional statement in his 2015 announcement at the Montreal’s Children Hospital. “In life I believe you are not defined by what you accomplish but by what you do for others,” he said there. “Sometimes I try to think, ‘P.K., are you a hockey player or are you just someone who plays hockey?’ I just play hockey. Because one day I won’t be a hockey player anymore. I’ll just be someone who played hockey. So what do I want people to remember me for other than being a hockey player? Well, every time you walk into this hospital, you’ll know what I stand for.” Stephen Smith wrote Puckstruck: Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada’s Hockey Obsession . He runs a blog of the same name. Related Articles. Minor Hockey as Big Business. A review of Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids Are Paying the Price for Our National Obsession by Ken Campbell with Jim Parcels.