Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War (review)

Coast to Coast represents another addition to a body of literature that has not received widespread scholarly attention. According to the book’s editor, John Chi-Kit Wong, the overarching theme of the book explores how hockey emerged as a signifier of Canadianness (viii), while at the same time clarifying and rearticulating the formation and organization of the sport in different contexts and among different groups. In doing so, more insight into the appropriateness of viewing hockey as a common cultural experience is revealed. The book features seven chapters exploring the game through the end of the Second World War.

Wong should be applauded in his attempt to find some cohesion among the seemingly disparate research interests of the contributing authors. He acknowledges the difficulty in finding appropriate contributors (at least those capable of broadly meeting the intended goals of the edited work). Not surprisingly, several chapters seem to be ‘reaching’ somewhat in meeting these aims. Nevertheless, one thread through many of the chapters is the commodification of the sport and the influence of commercialization on stakeholders. Carly Adams’s chapter on the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association reveals some interesting and contradictory issues facing women’s hockey. She shows how the women’s game struggled to gain a foothold in the popular imagination, yet acknowledges that the rise of the Preston Rivulettes – which did draw widespread attention to women’s hockey – ultimately undermined the delivery system as a result of the team’s competitive dominance.

Many chapters are highly descriptive, and few overtly challenge notions of the meanings of hockey discussed in previous research. An exception is Stacy Lorenz and Geraint Osborne’s reprisal of their work examining violence and masculinity in hockey matches, and how local newspapers articulated these themes. A strong contribution that this chapter makes is in how it questions assumptions about class-based views of violence that appear in other works examining hockey during the early twentieth century. The authors’ discussion of violence during games (and its tacit acceptance by the media) is particularly useful (190).

Another refreshing take is found in Robert Kossuth’s chapter on hockey in southern Alberta, which challenges perceptions that hockey was uniformly adopted as a sporting institution across Canada. He describes the sport’s emergence in light of other more popular sporting practices in smaller Alberta centres that, similar to other communities, remained tied to boosterism and concerns about professionalism.

Too many of the chapters in Coast to Coast get bogged down in detail that will be of interest to only a limited audience. Some chapters have been reworked or adapted from previous work, and topics are so focused that it is difficult to see how they connect to other works in the book. Others read disjointedly as they attempt to cover as many bases as possible. For example, the discussion of women’s hockey in Kossuth’s chapter seems misplaced, or at the very least incongruent with the flow of the rest of the chapter. The book might have been better framed around a theme such as boosterism, or entrepreneurialism, which would have given the authors a better opportunity to develop chapters that cohere as a collection.

In terms of scholarship, several chapters are capably situated within the broader literature, and the authors use appropriate sources to flesh out their respective narratives. To do so, the authors have meticulously pieced together sources. In some cases, this is difficult where foundational sources exist only in the popular literature. For example, Wong is forced to rely, in part, on player biographies (such as Whitehead’s works The Patricks and Cyclone Taylor) or the work of amateur historians (such as Coleman’s Trail of the Stanley Cup) in his chapter on the Vancouver franchise. However, he has unearthed interesting archival sources on the team and its owners. Until a more definitive scholarly history of hockey is written, these will remain the constraints...