Grab your gear for the hockey road trip of a lifetime!
Roy MacGregor
A joyful, beautifully written tribute to Canada’s most salient features—hockey and highways.
In the waning days of the pandemic, sportswriter Ronnie Shuker stuffed his skates, sticks, and backpack into his faithful automobile, Gumpy, named for legendary goaltender Gump Worsley, and set off on a 30,000-mile, coast-to-coast-to-coast investigation of the many ways hockey touches the lives of Canadians. From St. John’s, home of hockey’s most colorful father-son combo, to a frigid barn in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, and the world’s largest hockey stick in Duncan, British Columbia, Shuker finds the people and places that make hockey an indelible part of the Canadian experience. He hits famous sites of hockey lore, from the cradle of the game in Windsor, Nova Scotia, to Brantford, Ontario, where streets, highways, schools, and much else bear the name Gretzky, to Vancouver, site of the infamous 1994 and 2011 Canucks riots. But he also finds the game in unlikely places—crash sites, greenhouses, houseboats, memorials, backyard halls of fame, even a Hutterite colony—where a seemingly endless and always engaging cast of characters, including pros, semipros, beer-league veterans, family, and fans, share unforgettable stories of how pucks have dented their lives.
From The Country and the Game:
Follow any road in this country and it will lead you to the game. Because both naturally and artificially, like a birthmark you come to accept or a tattoo you occasionally regret, hockey is everywhere in Canada. It is inscribed onto its lakes, rivers, and ponds, where the game was born. It is part of Canada’s history, art, literature, film, and music, and inseparable from its climate and geography. It is carved into the country’s architecture and infrastructure, bound to its corporations, imprinted on the currency, illustrated on its postage stamps, and in bed with its beer and coffee companies. It is in ancient arenas and glorious new coliseums, dive bars and bowling alleys, crash sites and plane wrecks, restaurants and restrooms, think tanks and universities, schools and churches, and in a national mosaic of memorials, museums, monuments, and murals. Most important, it is part of the people who watch and play and talk about the game: fans, skaters, Zamboni drivers, beat reporters, radio hosts, memorabilia collectors, pilots, truckers, tour guides, police officers, farmers, carpenters, restaurant owners, architects, curators, mechanics, loggers, high school teachers, cowboys, professors, roughnecks, miners, painters, even prime ministers. I know this to be true, because I saw it all and spoke to many of them during my eight months and more than 30,000 miles on the road.
