Jimmy Ellis / The Tennessean, Nashville Tennessean via Imagn Content Services, LLC
For sale: Baby skates, never worn. Had Ernest Hemingway been a hockey fan challenged to write the shortest, saddest story of all-time, he might have scribbled those six words. Alas, unlike boxing and bullfighting, hockey didn’t enrapture Hemingway. He made only passing reference to Canada’s favorite pastime even while reporting for the Toronto Star in the 1920s. Yet he did acknowledge hockey’s place in the pantheon of “manly sports.”
Some of Hemingway’s peers and proteges devoted many more words to the coolest game, describing NHL pros in novels, memoirs, essays and songs. From Faulkner on Richard to Wallace on Gretzky to Thompson on Roy, behold hockey legends judged by true linesmen.
William Faulkner covered a Canadiens-Rangers game at Madison Square Garden
While on assignment for Sports Illustrated, Faulkner experienced the sound and the fury of a hockey game at MSG. He noted the “passionate glittering fatal alien quality” of Rocket Richard; the “know-how and the grace” of Edgar Laprade; and an “agile ruthless precocious boy” named Bernie Geoffrion. That game, which was the Nobel Prize winner’s first, appears to have been a 7-1 Habs victory over the Rangers on Jan. 9, 1955.
David Foster Wallace praised Gretzky in an essay and cited hockey in Infinite Jest
Wallace was a “near-great junior tennis player” before becoming a verifiable-great writer. Sometimes, those strings crossed. In 2006, he wrote an essay called “Federer Both Flesh and Not” that compares the titular racketeer to other sporting icons, including the undisputed ‘Great One.’ “Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces,” Wallace wrote. But Wallace earlier broke the ice in his 1996 mega-novel Infinite Jest. It has 388 endnotes, one of which claims “toothlessness in hockey” to be a “perverse mark of competitive status.”
Mitch Albom co-wrote a song about a hockey enforcer with Warren Zevon (David Letterman provided background vocals)
Flying high off Tuesdays with Morrie but partly grounded as a Detroit sports reporter, Albom met with musician friend Zevon to craft a singular sports ballad: Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song). It tells of Buddy from Big Beaver, a hamlet in Saskatchewan near the U.S. “borderline,” who got his big break when “a scout from the Flames came down from Saskatoon…