Hockey

Book excerpt: Long considered Canadian, ice hockey is in truth a worldwide phenomenon--and has been for centuries. In Hockey: A Global History, Stephen Hardy and Andrew C. Holman draw on twenty-five years of research to present THE monumental end-to-end history of the sport. Here is the story of on-ice stars and organizational visionaries, venues and classic games, the evolution of rules and advances in equipment, and the ascendance of corporations and instances of bureaucratic chicanery. Hardy and Holman chart modern hockey's "birthing" in Montreal and follow its migration from Canada south to the United States and east to Europe. The story then shifts from the sport's emergence as a nationalist battlefront to the movement of talent across international borders to the game of today, where men and women at all levels of play lace 'em up on the shinny ponds of Saskatchewan, the wide ice of the Olympics, and across the breadth of Asia. Sweeping in scope and vivid with detail, Hockey: A Global History is the saga of how the coolest game changed the world--and vice versa.