Book Feature The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey & the Globalization of Sports (by Bruce Berglund)

[Bruce Berglund]

Yes, during the mid- to late-60s, Brundage made no secret of his dislike for the winter games to IOC members and even the American press. Some of his complaints have merit, and you still hear them today from critics of the Winter Games: too few countries participate in winter sports, thus betraying the universal ideal of the Olympic movement. And there are few places in the world with access to snowy mountains and available facilities for hosting the games.

But Brundage’s main concern was creeping professionalization and commercialization. A big culprit was hockey. He believed that hockey, like all team sports, could not be disentangled from commercial interests. “Any sport which becomes primarily a business has no place in the Olympic program,” Brundage told a Canadian journalist. “Professional sport is not sport at all but part of the entertainment business.” When the journalist pointed out that the loss of hockey would cut into the profits of the Winter Olympics, Brundage responded that the IOC didn’t care about profits. Privately, however, Brundage acknowledged that without hockey, the Winter Games would be finished. And he didn't care.

Brundage really hated hockey, but even worse were figure skating and Alpine skiing. He fumed in 1968 when Peggy Fleming and Jean-Claude Killy became international stars. After Fleming signed with an ice show, he grumbled that the Winter Olympics had become an "undignified feeder for the professional ice shows.” Killy’s offense was to wear branded skis on the slopes and then to show the company names when he was being photographed. Brundage refused to put the medals on Killy after he won – or even attend the Alpine skiing events – owing to the logos on the skier's equipment.

After the Grenoble Olympics, Brundage launched a commission of inquiry to determine whether the Winter Games should go on. The commission acknowledged the sprawl of venues and rising costs. But they insisted that the Winter Games should continue, and Brundage stood down. As a cost-saving measure, they recommended going back to the 20s and 30s, when hockey and figure skating were held on outdoor rinks. Host cities didn't need to build an “indoor ice palace,” their report said.

One lasting idea that came out of this commission was the recommendation to hold the Winter Games on a different four-year cycle than the Summer Games, to give them more attention. This is the idea that the IOC later approved in 1986, when they instituted the new cycle for the Winter Games, starting in 1994.

 

[Theokritos]

It should also be noted that Brundage threatened to kick hockey out of the Winter Games after the IIHF voted to allow Canada the use of more reinstated professionals under the provision that the decision didn't put eligibility for the Olympics in danger. The IIHF backed down and as a reaction Canada – scheduled to host the 1970 World Championship – pulled out of international hockey.

 

[kaiser matias]

Thanks for the write-up Bruce, very informative.

Between Brundage and Ahern (never mind the sheer dominance of the Soviets), it's amazing that international hockey managed to survive at all through those decades. Those two really did their best to sabotage the sport.

 

[Bruce Berglund]

Between Brundage and Ahern (never mind the sheer dominance of the Soviets), it's amazing that international hockey managed to survive at all through those decades. Those two really did their best to sabotage the sport.

Brundage tried to sabotage hockey, certainly. But Ahearne stands out as a model for today's masters of world sports federations. He lined his own pockets, to be sure. But he was also recognized early on the importance of television and sponsorship deals as important for the game's financial security. Archival sources show that he was a savvy negotiator. The Canadians hated him, and he was only too willing to stab them in the back. Yet the growth of hockey as an international sport in the 1960s owes much to his leadership of the IIHF.

As for the Soviets' dominance, I argue that was also important for international hockey's growth in the 60s. The Soviets were a dynasty, just like the Canadiens in the NHL, the Celtics in the NBA, or UCLA in college basketball. Contrary to conventional wisdom, dynasties don't suppress interest in a sport, they stir it. The Soviets drew big crowds and big TV audiences. Other European programs had to meet the Soviets' challenge, and they changed how they trained, how they developed players, and how they compensated players in response to that challenge.

 

[Theokritos]

@Bruce Berglund:

You have given us a lot of information the Russian and Czech(oslovak) angles of your book, but I understand you're also covering Canada and the USA. Can you tell us a little bit about that too?

 

[Bruce Berglund]

Of course, sections on Canada and the United States make up large part of the book. These were difficult to write for a couple of reasons.

First, in the case of American hockey: this is was the history I grew up with, having been raised with the game in Minnesota. This is always difficult as a historian, when you are researching and writing about events that you remember and in some way experienced. What you're taught in graduate school is to remove yourself entirely from your writing, to base your account of the past on research rather than memory. I disobeyed my old profs and put myself in the book. Right at the start, I write about listening to the radio broadcast of the Miracle on Ice game with my dad. Later in the book, in the section on the growth of women's hockey in the 1990s, I write about the experience of my sister and her friends in wanting to play hockey. Of course, these personal experiences are set against a broader array of sources and the work of other researchers.

Second, writing about Canadian hockey was difficult because there has been so much terrific work done on the subject. What could I possibly say that was new or interesting?

To give one example: What could I write about the Summit Series? As it turns out, there is a lot of terrific source material in archives that shines new light on the '72 series and its aftermath. At the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, I dug into the files of materials dealing with the decline in ratings for Hockey Night in Canada after the series. The CBC, the producers, and the advertisers all noticed the declining ratings right away in the 72-73 season, and they tried to figure out the problem. Their audience surveys and memos get at a variety of issues – Canadian fans' attitudes toward the NHL, the history of television, marketing, viewing habits of men and women. Eventually, in 1976, Imperial Oil decides to end its 42-year sponsorship of HNIC. The archives reveal a fascinating story in what brought them to that point.

The big issue that I dig into relative to North American hockey is the cost of participation. Everyone I interviewed – in North America, Europe, and Korea – talked about rising costs as the most serious problem in the game. To get at the question of why hockey has become such an expensive sport, I dug into the history of youth hockey in the postwar decades, which brought me in the history of the Baby Boom, the growth of the suburbs, changes in parenting, and broader developments in sports.

 

[Theokritos]

Having read the book now, it's a well-written and broadly-based overview of how hockey developed over time on both sides of the Atlantic. Berglund's focus is on the respective background of these developments in the spheres of politics, economics and mentalities. As he himself has put it here, the book is not as much a history of the game as it is a look at „what hockey reveals about modern sports and the place of sports in our globalized world“. At some points I was almost inclined to call it an attempt at a short history of modern North American and European societies in the mirror of hockey, but in reality Berglund's own description quoted above is more fitting as sport remains the object of observation throughout the book. In shining the spotlight on various hockey hotbeds and areas (Minnesota, Michigan, Sweden, Russia, the role of the NCAA in women's hockey, etc etc) and illuminating their ebb and flow, Berglund provides a far-sighted, very broad and very well-sourced synopsis of the hockey world as it developed. It helps me fill gaps in my knowledge and I'm sure there will be plenty of occasions for me to pick the book up again in order to look something up.

The aspects I found most interesting were perhaps the portrait of British Canada and how Canadian used to be almost synonymous with British, the different development in North America and Europe in regard to club structures and the question of amateurism versus professionalism, and the television ratings and viewer surveys from the 1960s and 1970s. It's great that Vladimír Kostka gets some exposure and I also appreciate the assessment that Anatoli Tarasov was not the lone father of Russian hockey and that perception and reality do not always exactly align when it comes to Tarasov.

The story I personally found most impressive in the book is the one of the Canadian boy whom Game 1 of the 1972 Summit Series prompted to question the existence of god.

Berglund provides substantial and concise overviews of the individual topics. If he doesn't go as much in depth on some aspects as I would have wished as a reader, it is a natural and necessary consequence of the character of his book and the limits of its size. However, in a few instances his remarks nevertheless strike me as almost too concise. For example, while we learn of the Anglo-Protestant heritage of hockey and how the game slowly spread through Canada, we also hear that the Mi'kmaq already played with a puck in the mid-19th century – and that's all we get. We're left wondering how that fits into the story. Did the Mi'kmaq adopt the game from the Europeans? Or was it the other way round? And when did the adoption happen? Even if the answers to these questions are unknown, they're pretty fundamental ones and a few lines should have been dedicated to inform the readers on what we know and what we don't know.

I was also a bit surprised to see two theories about the etymology of the word „hockey“ brought up but not the one presented (and IMO rather well substantiated) by Gidén, Houda and Martel in „On the Origin of Hockey“, despite the book being listed in the bibliography.

In another instance, an alternative explanation is overlooked in favour of a compelling narrative. While ten Americans had been regular players in the NHL in 1938, the number had dropped to one American in 1958. Berglund's interpretation: American's didn't get a chance because the NHL scouts and managers only considered players within the „closed system controlled by the NHL“ and „seldom looked beyond its confines“. Overlooked is the fact that American college hockey didn't follow suit when the NHL introduced the centre red line in 1943, kept allowing two-line passes even after it finally adopted the red line in 1961 and didn't permit bodychecking in the offensive end of the rink until 1968. Players developed under those 1943-1968 American college rules would evidently not have learned the skills necessary to succeed in the NHL with its more restricted passing and its physical forechecking.

Two slight inacuraccies caught my eyes: Sergei Savin already travelled to Latvia in the summer of 1945, not in spring 1946 (the latter date is indeed often mentioned, but an interview with Savin shows it isn't true: Воспоминание о дне рождения. Интервью с первооткрывателем. Могучая сила первой волны. Почему автор решил писать про вратарей? | Вратари советского хоккея); and Valeri Kharlamov's ankle was hardly „broken“ by Bobby Clarke in the 1972 Summit Series, but rather bruised. Granted, I'm not a physician, but it took Kharlamov three weeks to get healthy again (his comeback for CSKA was on October 14 against Dinamo Moscow), which doesn't suggest a fracture.

Of course, this doesn't change anything about the high overall value and quality of Berglund's book. For example, I've read a lot about Soviet hockey over the last few years, but the book still contained some new clues that were unknown to me. How much more for the other chapters! There's plenty to learn for almost everybody and it's a good read too, so I highly recommend it as one of the recent books on hockey history people really ought to read.

 

[Theokritos]

 

[Theokritos]

 

[Theokritos]

 

[kaiser matias]

Bumping this because I've finally gotten around to reading the book (I have a very long list of books to go through). I'll copy my review I wrote elsewhere.

Much like the title says, this is a look at how hockey became a global sport, something beyond that played in Canada. Berglund gives due focus to the development of the sport in the US, Western Europe, and Russia, showing that while hockey may have first been codified in Canada, it grew in parallel in all these regions as well. In particular it is good to have a focus on regions like Germany, Scandinavia, and Czechoslovakia here, as they are often only quickly mentioned in other histories of the game. Berglund also shows how the different regions interacted with each other, borrowing ideas and further refining their own aspects to make hockey the sport that it is today, in both good and bad terms.

If there is one thing to critique, it is that the book is quite short (about 250 pages of text), while it's clear that Berglund could easily write much more, and not have it become bloated or dragging on.

While an academic book (with copious citations in multiple languages), it is easily accessible, and something that would appeal to both those looking for a scholarly work on the subject, and people looking for a solid history of hockey.

@Bruce Berglund, definitely enjoyed it. Not a lot of English work on Czechoslovak or Swedish and Finnish hockey, so that was a great plus to have some more information on.

 

[Bruce Berglund]

Glad you enjoyed the book, @kaiser matias Thanks for the review.

You are right that I could have easily written much more – and I did. But my editor was quite strict about the word count. There were some painful cuts.

 

[kaiser matias]

Glad you enjoyed the book, @kaiser matias Thanks for the review.

You are right that I could have easily written much more – and I did. But my editor was quite strict about the word count. There were some painful cuts.

I can imagine. It really shows you enjoyed writing it, and I'm sure having to visit places like Prague and Zurich were quite enjoyable (as well as Pyeongchang; I was in Korea at the time myself, but didn't go out to the Games).