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Hockey: A Global History
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.
600 pages, Paperback
Published November 5, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 21, 2019
This book has some fascinating information on the early days of hockey and the other games from.which it was derived such as bandy. However, it is a very dense book that is not an easy read and is hard to follow even though it does follow the global game chronologically. It gets three stars because I finished, but it will take a long time to read and absorb all the minutia about hockey's development.
February 20, 2019
Hockey: A Global History was written by two professors, and it shows: the book is well-researched. But, it might also be a bit dense for the average reader, using words such as "anathema" and "perfunctory."
The book feels like one part love letter to the sport, one part history, and one part criticism. The authors discuss how the game has become "more corporate and more influenced by the NHL," as well as how opportunities are vastly different for women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. But they also clearly love the sport, and what it can do.
In addition to the book's range, I appreciate that the authors acknowledge that there's never been a golden age of hockey, despite people's predilection for seeing the past with rose-colored glasses. And I feel like they'd be the two to know - I've not seen another book cover this wide an expanse of hockey history. If you want to learn the history of the sport, this is the book to read.
(Full disclosure: I did not finish the entire book. It's long, and detailed! But I read enough to know I'd recommend it for the above reasons - especially how well-researched it is.)
The book feels like one part love letter to the sport, one part history, and one part criticism. The authors discuss how the game has become "more corporate and more influenced by the NHL," as well as how opportunities are vastly different for women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. But they also clearly love the sport, and what it can do.
In addition to the book's range, I appreciate that the authors acknowledge that there's never been a golden age of hockey, despite people's predilection for seeing the past with rose-colored glasses. And I feel like they'd be the two to know - I've not seen another book cover this wide an expanse of hockey history. If you want to learn the history of the sport, this is the book to read.
(Full disclosure: I did not finish the entire book. It's long, and detailed! But I read enough to know I'd recommend it for the above reasons - especially how well-researched it is.)
May 2, 2024
DNF reading almost half of it. Gave it a go even seeing that was supposedly quite dry, but holy hell, it’s the driest book I’ve ever seen. It’s a textbook. I thought it would be more about the game itself but it’s a minute by minute history of every single hockey association and who started what and combined with who over the course of history, and the politics and world events around hockey that influenced it. So many dates, so many numbers, but very very few interesting stories/accounts/details on the game itself to keep it interesting enough for me. I was hoping it would shift, but I see that seems to be maintained throughout the rest of the book.
Mega respect to the author(s) for their dedication gathering all the facts and writing such a detailed book, but it just wasn’t at all what i was expecting it to be.
Mega respect to the author(s) for their dedication gathering all the facts and writing such a detailed book, but it just wasn’t at all what i was expecting it to be.
July 28, 2018
This really is the HISTORY of hockey, it starts at the very beginning, even going as far back as the 1500s to look at how all the sports have progressed. The first chapters though deal mainly with the 1800s and the forming of hocking in Canada and how it spread throughout America. Once we get to the 1900s it focuses on the rest of the world as well. As a child I used to skate (ice dance), and I also followed the local ice hockey team (Bradford), however, I have only been an NHL fan for the last few years (I’m from England, where most people follow Soccer, Rugby and Cricket). I found this global history of hockey mesmerising and addictive, I learned so many interesting facts, facts about locations, stadiums, players, and the politics. There is also in-depth information on European and Russian hockey leagues. Extremely well informed and written. It took some reading (definitely not a quick read). Too many dates and facts and figures for them to be absorbed, but still a super interesting reference. The book also touched on women’s hockey, gay and LGBQA hockey, I do however wish they had spent more time on the hockey of today, I would have loved to have learned more about hockey over the last decade or two.
April 30, 2020
This is a very unique take on the history of hockey. They divided it into four historical eras: pre-1875 (when the first recognized game was held), 1875-1920 (established rules to 1920 Olympics), 1920-1972 (1920 Olympics to Summit Series), 1972-2010 (Summit Series to 2010 Olympics). They argued these are important breaks in terms of looking at the game in global context, not just in Canada/US.
They then looked at the game in all aspects but the NHL (though of course that was touched on a bit, but not really). In particular they touched on women's hockey and American amateur hockey, which are topics not often covered in depth. They argue that North America and Europe shared concepts and ideas long before the established norm (arguably from the 1980s), and that each side benefited from the other that way. While I don't fully agree with all their arguments, they do a solid job of presenting them and definitely gives some needed depth to the topic. One other critique is that they didn't consult non-English sources, which is something they openly admit to; seeing how a large focus is on Europe, this would have been good to include and get a better handle on things, but it still does a good job for giving a global history of hockey.
They then looked at the game in all aspects but the NHL (though of course that was touched on a bit, but not really). In particular they touched on women's hockey and American amateur hockey, which are topics not often covered in depth. They argue that North America and Europe shared concepts and ideas long before the established norm (arguably from the 1980s), and that each side benefited from the other that way. While I don't fully agree with all their arguments, they do a solid job of presenting them and definitely gives some needed depth to the topic. One other critique is that they didn't consult non-English sources, which is something they openly admit to; seeing how a large focus is on Europe, this would have been good to include and get a better handle on things, but it still does a good job for giving a global history of hockey.
February 4, 2023
Look, this was interesting. I feel like I learned a lot about the international history of hockey and how political relations affected the sport. But it frustrated me how little information there was about the NHL. For a 600-pages book about the "global" history of hockey, I expected a lot more about not only the most famous players (that have all played in the NHL), but also the business inside the NHL. There was so much information about the creation of other leagues, internationally, but also minor and junior leagues in North America. I get that so much has been written about the NHL, so they decided to make a book about the lesser-known people and parts of the sport. But as a big fan of the NHL, it was pretty annoying how the most important players in the sport were barely mentioned. I did like some of the storylines that were explained, like amateur vs professional, violence vs skill and the NCAA vs Major Junior Canadian leagues. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with this book, but I still learned a lot.
July 7, 2019
A worthwhile enterprise - writing a history of hockey that is global in scope and not just focused on the NHL, or on men’s hockey generally. It’s long and the writing is fairly dry. Wish I’d had more time with it, but it was due back to the library. Probably not for anyone but serious hockey fans with an interest in the history of the game, or people with an academic interest in the history of sport and why certain sports thrive in particular places and times. But if you fall into one of those categories, worth checking out.
May 29, 2019
***Finalist in the North American Society of Sports History Book Prize, monographs; 2019***
One of the distinctions we often draw in typifying historians is between ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’: those who pull apart to delve into highly specific detail, and ‘lumpers’: those who look for the big picture patterns through synthesis. This fabulous piece of work is very much the latter, drawing together scholarly and popular research into hockey (note to those outside North America, as in Ice Hockey) to lay out the long term trends in sports where we skate and push around a rubber disc. That’s not an attempt to be sarcastic or denigrate, but to note that modern hockey came from somewhere, from other games – bandy, shinny/shinty, khokkei – that are still played alongside and sometimes in competition with hockey.
Hardy & Holman’s sweep is broad, focusing on Canada and the USA, Sweden, Russia/Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and its successor states (Czech Republic & Slovakia) with forays into Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and China to trace the way the game developed, the ways it was contested, the ways local and international forces played out in organisation, style, structure and perceptions of the game, with all its variations. Their case is built on several interwoven aspects. The first is the big picture synthesis that hockey history can be broken into three stages characterised by convergence, divergence and convergence again with key shifts in flows and practices around 1920 and around the late 1940s. In its earliest stage many forms of game that involved skating and hitting a ball of some kind were draw on to develop more ‘modern’ versions that eventually settled on hockey, but even then it was a single thing with common organisation, technology or practices.
This shifting between convergence and divergence may be seen in technology, styles of play, organisation of the game, cultures of practice or the purpose of the game. These differences and the game itself are built on and change because of shifts in technology, business and organisation as well as social and cultural practices and expectations in various localities. Crucially, also, they stress that there is nothing inevitable about the current form the game takes and that to a large degree its development is based in contingencies, unexpected and unpredictable developments that are both unintended and unplanned. This is a welcome aspect of the case, where all too often, especially in histories of cultural practices such as sport, the current arrangements are taken, usually implicitly, to be the logical and only way the game can be played, organised or arranged; Hardy & Holman do a good job to take us as much as possible to an understanding that actors in the past had choices and opted, through debate, struggle, trial and error for options that not only took us in particular ways but in doing so excluded many other options.
This means that we are taken into debates over rules of play, over rules of entitlement to play, over different ways to arrange the game’s institutions. They unravel debates between advocates of amateurism and professional play, over where the locus of control should lie for various groups of players (should, for instance, collegiate play be controlled by educational institutions colleges or should there be a single common set of rules applying to all, and if the latter then who should determine them). Crucially we are also reminded not only that in many cases hockey is tightly woven into models of appropriate masculinities, but that women and people of colour have been challenging those ideals of manliness from the outset and continue to do so. It is gratifying also to the game’s internationalisation considered including mechanisms of diffusion, local circumstances (such as Sweden’s continuing attachment to bandy as well as hockey, or the point that that the same word can have different meanings – khokkei in Russia being different to hockey). Hardy & Holman are open about the limitations of their reach and their reliance on scholars who publish in English in Sweden, Czech Republic and elsewhere, noting that there are many stories and aspects untold in the lumping synthesis.
This is a big, dense, scholarly book: I know little of hockey but don’t think that has weakened my grasp and appreciation of the case. Hardy & Holman are good enough scholars to explain, and intense enough fans of the game to bring colour and life to the text through their examples and cases: as an academic (and professional historian of sport) I found this to be a good balance, but know also that it is a book for scholars from a university press. So, this is not a book to reinforce the takens for granted of blind devotion but a critical, sceptical denial of a golden age pointing to the history of hockey as scrappy, disputatious, contested and contingent (much like the game itself!). It is also an outstanding example of engaging, rich synthetic history that not only tells a powerful story, but also mounts a compelling argument that should provide a base for further research as well as contested interpretations and understandings. As historians, we can’t ask for much more.
One of the distinctions we often draw in typifying historians is between ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’: those who pull apart to delve into highly specific detail, and ‘lumpers’: those who look for the big picture patterns through synthesis. This fabulous piece of work is very much the latter, drawing together scholarly and popular research into hockey (note to those outside North America, as in Ice Hockey) to lay out the long term trends in sports where we skate and push around a rubber disc. That’s not an attempt to be sarcastic or denigrate, but to note that modern hockey came from somewhere, from other games – bandy, shinny/shinty, khokkei – that are still played alongside and sometimes in competition with hockey.
Hardy & Holman’s sweep is broad, focusing on Canada and the USA, Sweden, Russia/Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and its successor states (Czech Republic & Slovakia) with forays into Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and China to trace the way the game developed, the ways it was contested, the ways local and international forces played out in organisation, style, structure and perceptions of the game, with all its variations. Their case is built on several interwoven aspects. The first is the big picture synthesis that hockey history can be broken into three stages characterised by convergence, divergence and convergence again with key shifts in flows and practices around 1920 and around the late 1940s. In its earliest stage many forms of game that involved skating and hitting a ball of some kind were draw on to develop more ‘modern’ versions that eventually settled on hockey, but even then it was a single thing with common organisation, technology or practices.
This shifting between convergence and divergence may be seen in technology, styles of play, organisation of the game, cultures of practice or the purpose of the game. These differences and the game itself are built on and change because of shifts in technology, business and organisation as well as social and cultural practices and expectations in various localities. Crucially, also, they stress that there is nothing inevitable about the current form the game takes and that to a large degree its development is based in contingencies, unexpected and unpredictable developments that are both unintended and unplanned. This is a welcome aspect of the case, where all too often, especially in histories of cultural practices such as sport, the current arrangements are taken, usually implicitly, to be the logical and only way the game can be played, organised or arranged; Hardy & Holman do a good job to take us as much as possible to an understanding that actors in the past had choices and opted, through debate, struggle, trial and error for options that not only took us in particular ways but in doing so excluded many other options.
This means that we are taken into debates over rules of play, over rules of entitlement to play, over different ways to arrange the game’s institutions. They unravel debates between advocates of amateurism and professional play, over where the locus of control should lie for various groups of players (should, for instance, collegiate play be controlled by educational institutions colleges or should there be a single common set of rules applying to all, and if the latter then who should determine them). Crucially we are also reminded not only that in many cases hockey is tightly woven into models of appropriate masculinities, but that women and people of colour have been challenging those ideals of manliness from the outset and continue to do so. It is gratifying also to the game’s internationalisation considered including mechanisms of diffusion, local circumstances (such as Sweden’s continuing attachment to bandy as well as hockey, or the point that that the same word can have different meanings – khokkei in Russia being different to hockey). Hardy & Holman are open about the limitations of their reach and their reliance on scholars who publish in English in Sweden, Czech Republic and elsewhere, noting that there are many stories and aspects untold in the lumping synthesis.
This is a big, dense, scholarly book: I know little of hockey but don’t think that has weakened my grasp and appreciation of the case. Hardy & Holman are good enough scholars to explain, and intense enough fans of the game to bring colour and life to the text through their examples and cases: as an academic (and professional historian of sport) I found this to be a good balance, but know also that it is a book for scholars from a university press. So, this is not a book to reinforce the takens for granted of blind devotion but a critical, sceptical denial of a golden age pointing to the history of hockey as scrappy, disputatious, contested and contingent (much like the game itself!). It is also an outstanding example of engaging, rich synthetic history that not only tells a powerful story, but also mounts a compelling argument that should provide a base for further research as well as contested interpretations and understandings. As historians, we can’t ask for much more.
January 23, 2023
Very comprehensive story of how hockey came to be the game that we know today. Fairly easy read and witty enough. It does fall into the trap that many history books can with the alphabet soup of abbreviations. When looking at many factors in one time frame it can feel a bit disjointed at times.
December 26, 2023
A really great and recent collection of hockey history that actually goes beyond the NHL, from before hockey was even hockey. While it’s not always a page-turner, it’s thorough and touches on just about every angle of the game.
September 13, 2021
Tbh this felt like it was trying to do too much
October 30, 2021
Didn't finish. Will keep it around for research reference.
July 23, 2018
We’re a hockey family. My parents had season tickets for one of the original six NHL teams and my son plays. So when I saw this pop up, I seized the opportunity to read it. Sadly, neither my son nor I could finish this. I realize it’s more of a “history” type book, but there just wasn’t anything there to hold our interest. Perhaps I’ll come back to it someday.
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the authors for the opportunity to read this book.
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the authors for the opportunity to read this book.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews