The NHL: 100 Years of On-Ice Action and Boardroom Battles

by D'Arcy Jenish

Overview

In-depth research meets great storytelling in the history of an organization that has been a talking point and newsmaker for 100 years.

     The National Hockey League—born in a Montreal hotel room on November 26, 1917—has much to celebrate as it approaches its centenary. Millions of fans from Montreal to Miami and Edmonton to Anaheim attend NHL games each year, millions more watch on TV and the league pays its best players multi-million annual salaries.
Over the course of its first century, the NHL's fortunes have ebbed and flowed. It has experienced setbacks and triumphs and innumerable crises. The league has awarded many franchises only to see some of them falter, fail and fold. The board of governors—which has included rich eccentrics and at least one future convict—has sometimes been fractured by men who loathed each other. How on earth has the NHL survived? The answer lies in the remarkable fact that it has had only five presidents and one commissioner. Two of these chiefs were stop-gaps. For the balance of league's ninety-plus years, four men have shaped and guided its fortunes and controlled the tough, hard-nosed, sometimes unruly owners who constituted the board of governors.
     This is the story of two perpetual struggles—the one on the ice and the one going on behind the scenes to keep the whole enterprise afloat. D'Arcy Jenish was granted unprecedented access to previously unpublished league files, including revelatory minutes of board meetings, and conducted dozens of hours of interviews with league executives, including commissioner Gary Bettman and former president John Ziegler, as well as well as owners, coaches, general managers and player representatives. He now reveals for the first time the true story behind some of the most significant events of the contemporary era.
    This is a definitive, revelatory chonicle that no serious hockey fan will want to be without.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385671484
Publisher:	Doubleday Canada
Publication date:	10/25/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	438,203
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

D'ARCY JENISH is the author of Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West, the award-winning Indian Fall: The Last Great Days of the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy and the bestselling The Stanley Cup: A Hundred Years of Hockey at its Best and The Montreal Canadiens: 100 Years of Glory. He is also co-editor of Canada on Ice: Fifty Years of Great Hockey.

Table of Contents

Introduction: To Survive and to Grow 1

Part I Through Thick and Then with Frank Calder (1917-1943)

1 The War with Eddie Livingstone 9

2 Here Come the Americans 30

3 From Ten to Six 59

4 Dutton's Short Shift 99

Part II The Long Reign of Clarence Campbell (1946-1977)

5 A Lopsided League 113

6 No Quick Fix 143

7 Countdown to Expansion 168

8 Growing Pains 192

9 War of Attrition 212

Part II An American at the Helm (1977-1992)

10 "This League Is Insolvent" 247

11 A Walk in Central Park 259

12 Back on Track 269

13 The Sins of Alan Eagleson 297

14 Goodenow's Word 320

15 Stein's Seven Months 330

Part IV The Bettman Era (1993-)

16 Going South 339

17 The Knock Against Gary 366

Acknowledgements 366

Sources 387

Endnotes 392

Image Credits 403

Index 404

Editorial Reviews

"Hockey is a game oft-told tale—yet there is much still in the vaults. D'Arcy Jenish has ransacked the archives to pull together a unique chronicle of people, places and events that shaped the NHL. Augmented with dozens of fresh interviews and reflections, this is a book that challenges conventions about what we think we know while revealing a great deal heretofore unknown. It deserves a place in every serious hockey fan's library." —Rosie DiManno, author of Coach: The Pat Burns Story

From the Publisher