Stole This From a Hockey Card, by Chris Robinson (Harbour Publishing, 154 pp., $17.95)

The literary world offers no such easy explanations for a sudden blossoming, although borrowing from the NHL might help us understand Chris Robinson's latest success, Stole This From a Hockey Card.

With three previous books split topically between animation and Ottawa Senators history, Robinson has now given us a much more personal story, albeit with a strange approach: by hiding himself in a biography of the great but tragic Montreal Canadiens defenceman Doug Harvey.

It's an odd combination, especially in the world of hockey non-fiction, which is generally a staid and comfortable field for the somnambulist in all of us. And even while reading, the same question just keeps coming up: What does the life of Harvey, the enigmatic and troubled superstar, have to do with the story of a young precocious kid with family problems in Ottawa?

Well, it starts out with a hockey card, and a fascination with the game that seems to cover up the emptiness of going through life with a distracted mother and an absent father. Along with the booze he started drinking as a teen, hockey was Robinson's way of not facing his personal demons.

But the attraction to Harvey's card in particular comes down to attitude, or authenticity.

Robinson explains that Harvey was unlike the polite and boring superstar personalities of Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe and Bobby Orr. "I was drawn to Doug Harvey because he drank, didn't fit in. In short, he seemed like a human being. His apparent faults made me respect him all the more. I didn't want to know how perfect these guys were, I wanted, maybe needed, to know how faulty, fucked up and human they were."

So his dual biography of sorts boils down to two themes. The first, of course, is alcohol, which both characters struggle with but eventually seem to conquer (though Harvey died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1989). The second is the inconclusiveness of a person's character. Even after detailing Harvey's life, Robinson claims he still knows nothing of how the hockey legend actually felt. Moralizing becomes impossible, which is very refreshing.

Before you get the idea that Robinson's impressions of Harvey form the basis of this "auto"-biography, know that a lot of research went into this book. Robinson talked to the people who were part of Harvey's turbulent life, like famed Montreal Gazette columnist Red Fisher, who says Harvey always lived near the edge. "He was stubborn, aggravating, unselfish, hard drinking, fun loving and the best defenceman, by far, in Canadiens history," Fisher recounts in Robinson's book.

But the link between Harvey and Robinson is initially threadbare. Most of the time you want Robinson to either continue on with himself or with the hockey player. And by the time he hits that soft spot where their two stories intermingle, you feel a little let down that it's all finished. This is the book's major flaw, not Robinson's style, which is clear and unaffected (he likes words like "piss," "shit" and "puke" quite a bit). Once you make it to the end, however, you'll have nothing but good things to say about this Ottawa writer who seems to have hit his breakout season.

 
 

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N.H.L.: New Hockey Literature?     Bill Barilko is the Hockey hero mentioned in The Tragically Hip's ' Fifty Mission Cap'. He was a defenseman who scored the winning goal for the Leafs -Stanley Cup Playoffs in 1951. He went on a fishing trip and mysteriously disappeared. The Leafs didn't win another Stanley Cup until 1962-eerily -on the 10th Anniversary of Barilko's vanishing. 'Stole this from a hockey card' sounds like an interesting read. I have read a few novels on various hockey greats. The only one who didn't have a checkered past of boozing, violence, prison and drugs was Gretzky. (And incidentally my condolences and prayers for your mom , Wayne!) A lot of books on Gretzky but unfortunately,a lot of them bent mostly on statistics. I guess not having a rough past makes for boring reading. One great book to read is '" open Ice: The Tim Horton Story" by Douglas Hunter. Not only is it based on the hockey legend, it has an astounding compilation of Canadian history bites and how the game of hockey evolves through the Canadian Railway System and visa versa. I will definitely give Chris Robinson's book a chance.
David Fairhead	{11 votes}	December 28th, 2005
Reminds Me Of Roch Carrier's: The Hockey Sweater.......     If you get a chance to read your aspiring young hockey player a great book written by Roch Carrier, "The Hockey Sweater", read it, it's such a golden piece of hockey history and a great story with lots of emotion. Chris Robinson's latest success, Stole This From a Hockey Card, may not be the same childhood piece of lore, but still has some aspect of interesting logic to it, looking behind the mystique of what our heroes have to battle through and sometimes the demons that still haunt them throughout their career. Doug Harvey is a famous blueliner from Montreal Canadiens history that probably would have a difficult time making an NHL team this decade. The players are bigger, stronger and faster but also slightly younger than they used to be, breaking into the league. Look at young phenom Sydney Crosby and how long he's been scouted as the next "Great One". Red Fisher is a fountain of knowledge in Canadiens history and Robinson must have been given enough background to write another complete book with what he learned from talking to him. Harvey is described as: "..stubborn, aggravating, unselfish, hard drinking, fun loving and the best defenceman, by far, in Canadiens history,". And this may have been the definition of a hockey hero, in Harvey's fans eyes. Harvey, however, had the survival instincts to make it to the pros and stay there. Desperate and unafraid, and certainly tougher in some respects than the toughest hockey player you may find these days. Hard and fast living have claimed many of our recent heroes, taking the life of John Kordic, the passenger in a terrific car crash Dan Snyder, the lengthy legal and health woes of Bob Probert, and almost taking the life of young Dany Heatley. Yes, fame is sometimes fast and fleeting and for Doug Harvey, he remains a cornerstone of the Habs defensive corp but he was struggling silently with his own "demons", it just didn't really show anywhere in his resilliance and determination to stay at the top.
Steve Landry	{6 votes}	February 5th, 2006
Interesting...     I think it's cool someone writes books about these past heroes. It keeps them and the sport alive. Not that the sports is hurting thanks to everyone getting back to hockey this year, but everything successful has to stem from somewhere. Good to know what came before. I hope a book on the guy who was mentioned in that Tragically Hip song has his own book someday. Can't remember his name, but what a weird story.
Ger Madden	{3 votes}	December 22nd, 2005

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