★ “This simple story of discovery, sport, and friendship is filled with likable characters and innocently joyful moments...Delightful.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review Kenyan orphans, Kitoo and Nigosi, spend their days studying, playing soccer, helping their elders with chores around the orphanage and reading from the limited selection of books in their library. When the librarian gives Kitoo a copy of Sports Around the World he becomes fascinated by an image of the Canadian national men's ice hockey team. Then one day the fates align and Kitoo finds a pair of beat up old roller blades, he teaches himself to skate and dreams of one day playing hockey like the men in his book. But you can’t play ice hockey in Kenya, can you?
Owen and Holly learn that, with friends and hockey, any Christmas can be bright and anyplace can feel like home. When Owen and Holly have to move from Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia just before Christmas, they miss their friends -- and hockey. But their dad has a surprise up his sleeve. On Christmas Eve, the secret is revealed: an outdoor hockey rink he has made nearby -- and it's filled with new friends. A paperback edition of a favourite Canadian holiday story.
Get to know the men who fulfilled their childhood dream From the beer league to the minor league, hockey players from coast to coast often say theyÍd give anything to play just one game in the NHL. One Night Only brings you the stories of 39 men who lived the dream „ only to see it fade away almost as quickly as it arrived. Ken Reid talks to players who had one game, and one game only, in the National Hockey League „ including the most famous single-gamer of them all: the coach himself, Don Cherry. Was it a dream come true or was it heartbreak? What did they learn from their hockey journey and how does it define them today? From the satisfied to the bitter, Ken Reid unearths the stories from hockeyÍs equivalent to one-hit wonders in the follow-up to his bestselling Hockey Card Stories.
Hockey Night in Canada has reached a great age (and for television, practically an immortal one) because it made itself into something that Canada couldn't live without. It is this surge of emotion that connected us all each week, and which connects us through the years to now. Hockey Night in Canada didn't just aim a camera at a game and observe what happened-it actively gave the country a prism through which it could see itself and its evolving diversity. We look where the eye of Hockey Night in Canada looks, and it looks at us. We remember what it remembers. We feel what it feels. That is the dynamic that has made the show much more than a long-lived TV success; it is a cultural juggernaut. Ask fans where they saw their first hockey game, and chances are it was on Hockey Night in Canada. Ask the players-male or female-what first got them into the rink, and the answer will be the same: they wanted to be like the players on Hockey Night in Canada.
From the national bestselling author of One Night Only come 39 new stories about what a big-league goal can mean to an NHLer Including interviews with Billy Smith, Chris Mason, Damian Rhodes, Christian Thomas, and Slap Shot’s Dave Hanson. This follow-up to Reid’s national bestseller One Night Only: Conversations with the NHL’s One-Game Wonders unearths the blood, sweat, tears, and laughs of the journey to and from a single big-league goal. If you’ve ever picked up a hockey stick, chances are you’ve dreamed of scoring in the National Hockey League. Ken Reid interviews and profiles 39 men who did just that: they bulged the twine in the best hockey league in the world … but only once. From minor league call-ups to season-long mainstays and even a Hall of Famer, One to Remember answers all the questions … What did that one tally mean? Was it enough to satisfy a lifelong ambition, or was it just the smallest taste of success? Is the achievement still cherished years later? Or is it bittersweet, a distant reminder of what could have been?
Stories from behind the scenes of one of hockey’s longest running and most popular broadcasts, Hockey Night in Canada’s Satellite Hot Stove, from an insider who’s seen it all. For more than twenty years, hockey fans tuned in during intermission on Saturday nights to watch one of the most popular segments in the game’s long broadcasting history. They’d hear news from around the league, the latest rumours and gossip, and—of course—some of the most controversial opinions of the day. No, we’re not talking about Coach’s Corner. The Satellite Hot Stove was a revolutionary show for talking about the game we love. Here, during the second intermission of the first game of every Hockey Night in Canada broadcast, pundits, and insiders would convene in studios across North America—in arenas and other locales—to discuss the biggest topics. Hot Stove was the best place to get news, opinions, and a good laugh. And Al Strachan was in the middle of it all. A bestselling author and award-winning sports journalist, he has been writing and talking about hockey for more than forty years. As a regular TV pundit on Hot Stove, he witnessed the most exciting and talked-about episodes in the modern game. And more than once, his unfiltered, say-it-as-it-is style added controversy of its own, too. In this new book, he relives the best stories of his long career, from working with some of the biggest personalities, on and off the ice, to the hijinks that went on behind the cameras. From embarrassing himself in front of Scotty Bowman, to cooking up a plan with Wayne Gretzky to save hockey, and frank conversations with Ken Dryden and hockey’s elite, Hockey’s Hot Stove delivers all new hockey stories you won’t hear anywhere else.
"A wildly evocative chronicle of the decade that changed hockey forever. aaaaa"Lady Byng died in Boston" read a sign in the Garden arena in 1970, a cheery dismissal of the NHL trophy awarded the game's most gentlemanly player. A new age of hockey was dawning. For 30 years, hockey was an orderly and (relatively) well-behaved sport. There was one Commissioner, six teams and five colours--red, white, black, blue and yellow. Oh, and one nationality. Until 1967, every player, coach, referee and GM in the NHL had been a Canadian. And then came NHL expansion, the founding of the WHA, and garish new uniforms. The Seventies had arrived- the era that gave us not only disco, polyester suits, lava lamps and mullets but also the movie Slap Shot and the arrest of ten NHL players for on-ice mayhem. But it also gave us hockey's greatest encounter (the 1972 Canada-Russia Summit), its most splendid team, the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens, and the most aesthetically satisfying game--the three-all tie on New Year's Eve, 1975, between the Canadiens and the Soviet Red Army. aaaa Modern hockey was born in the sport's wild, sensational, sometimes ugly Seventies growth spurt. The forces at play in the decade's battle for hockey supremacy--dazzling speed vs. brute force--are now, for better or worse, part of hockey's DNA. This book is a welcome reappraisal of the ten years that changed how the sport was played and experienced. Informed by first-hand interviews with players and game officials, and sprinkled with sidebars on the art and artifacts that defined Seventies hockey, the book brings dramatically alive hockey's most eventful, exciting decade."
A heartwarming wintertime tale about a bunny and her boy. When Brandon was first given his rabbit, Rosa, he thought she was better than perfect. He would stroke her and feed her bits of carrots and apples from his fingers. And Rosa felt happy. But as Brandon grew up, he became too busy to play. Rosa was hungry and lonely and worried that nobody loved her. One snowy day, Brandon takes Rosa outside to show her the snow . . . and then forgets her. With the help of some friendly woodland animals, she is able to find her way home -- just as Brandon comes out to look for her. A bit of separation has made him realize what he almost lost, and Rosa knows from the smile on his face that he really does love her after all. On a Snowy Night is a sweet tale of friendship, with a gentle message about helping others. Readers will delight in Jean Little's soothing text and Brian Deines's warm, expressive illustrations as they enjoy this reassuring tale again and again.
Owen and Holly are having a perfect day on frozen Humboldt Lake passing the puck around with their father -- until Holly shoots the puck past Owen and it falls down an ice-fishing hole. Accepting defeat, they think the game is over, until their father imparts some wisdom and solves their dilemma by teaching them an ageold technique of hockey lovers from the past. On the surface, The Hockey Tree is a simple tale about winter and a great day of playing hockey; at its roots it is a moving appreciation of the joys and wonders of the great outdoors, completely Canadian in its depiction.
