Top Shelf?

How do you solve a problem like Auston Matthews? If you’re a fan of the woebegone Toronto Maple Leafs, you dream that one day he’ll find a way to lead his team out of the Stanley Cup wilderness. As a Canadian, maybe you tell yourself that, overall, he remains a force for lawful good, despite having captained the United States to Olympic gold at our expense in February.

Oh, I know: it’s not Matthews’s fault that the Leafs traded away Mitch Marner, failed again to solve a perennial goaltending quandary, and ended up as one of the NHL’s worst teams, missing the playoffs and ending the season under a cartoon cloud churning with hammers, lightning bolts, and exclamation marks to illustrate all the bad feeling and recrimination. Nor is the twenty-eight-year-old captain (entirely) responsible for fifty-nine years of Stanley Cup futility. But as someone who’s been described as “the best player in the history of hockey’s most storied franchise,” who has called himself “a Leaf for life,” and who is among the highest-paid NHL players ever, he is — well, implicated.

The quotes there are from Kevin McGran’s Auston Matthews: A Life in Hockey, published just as the Leafs season began. While McGran, a reporter for the Toronto Star, couldn’t convince Matthews to participate in the project, his publisher touts the book as “the definitive unauthorized biography.” As ominous as that sounds, life did go on for Matthews. His season turned out to be one of the most eventful of the ten he’s played in Toronto, even as his team withered on the ice. Close of business for the year came early for him: not long after he returned from the Olympics in Italy (via the White House), a villainous Anaheim defenceman shredded his knee.

Matthews is (when he’s healthy) an elite goal scorer, and that’s what generates the excitement that makes him a star. The distant/bemused/bored affect he brings to his non-competitive public appearances can seem like a code that needs cracking. Otherwise, it’s his unlikely provenance that makes him an interesting study in the shifting tectonics of hockey’s popularity. Here’s a kid from Arizona, with Mexican roots, playing Canada’s game, who developed his considerable skills carrying an American passport in Switzerland. All that holds our attention.

Coaches pay tribute to Matthews’s passion. That’s something the rest of us have in common with superstar athletes. “We too, as audience, are driven,” the American novelist David Foster Wallace once wrote. “Watching the performance is not enough.” We want to know how our heroes got to be that way and whether they are at all like us, and we want to hear it from them.

McGran ponders his subject’s moustache and his friendship with Justin Bieber. He hears from Connor McDavid that the Leafs captain is “quite funny.” He’s diligent in tracing the advantage Matthews gained working with a coach named Boris Dorozhenko, who helped him elevate his skating. Teammates from various stages of his career testify that “his wrist shot was insane,” that “the puck followed him around,” that there was never “a more competitive kid.”

Why didn’t Matthews get involved directly with McGran’s project? Too busy? That scans. Too soon? The player himself might harbour dreams of telling his own tale once his on‑ice career has reached its (championship?) finish. If so, as Leonard Cohen might say, I hope he’s keeping some kind of record.

It could be that he’s just not wired that way. Another American novelist, Richard Ford, has imagined a sportswriter musing about this: “Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do.” Fair enough. But while Matthews, like every other superstar, is perfectly within his rights to leave the explaining of the doing he does to others, it doesn’t help, exactly, those of us who don’t do — people like me and maybe you and Kevin McGran.

Matthews isn’t the problem here. It’s what yet another American writer, Alec Wilkinson, has called the Sportswriter’s Fallacy or the Pundit’s Fallacy (he can’t quite decide): “It means that the people who haven’t done the thing they are describing, whether athletics or statecraft, are frequently mistaken in their assumptions. Not only are they working in the context of concealed information but they don’t know the intimate terms of the engagement. They’re guessing.”

I don’t have the data to prove it conclusively, but 2025 did feel like a boom year for both biography and its voluble cousin, autobiography. Anyone who still browses bookstores was finding the front tables of the good ones piled with new lives of Paul Gauguin, Mark Twain, James Baldwin, John Candy, Gwyneth Paltrow. Nearby, speaking for themselves, were Arundhati Roy and Patti Smith, Graydon Carter and Margaret Atwood, Miriam Toews and Alan Doyle. A biography even got a biography, when Zachary Leader delivered a tome on Richard Ellmann’s landmark study of James Joyce, from 1959.

One of the senior eminences of the English novel was also on the case. Ian McEwan’s canny and compelling (if all too portentous) novel What We Can Know was inspired and informed by the work of a friend, the masterly literary biographer Richard Holmes.

In Canada, hockey’s annual biographical buzz comes around as reliably as Leafs angst. The sport’s earliest books laid out the rules of the game and insider advice on prospering as a player. “Do not listen to remarks from the spectators,” the Stanley Cup–winning netminder Percy LeSueur recommended in a 1909 primer, How to Play Hockey. “It is a habit, particularly at the general admission end of the rinks, to call all kinds of things at the goalkeeper and he cannot listen to them and keep his mind on the game.” A pulpy profusion of dime novels came next, though mostly not in Canada: the liveliest early hockey fiction featured jolly New England schoolboys outwitting bullies to score decisive goals to win big games and, often enough, the affections of a headmaster’s daughter.

Biography was relatively late to the rink. Ed Fitkin was something of a pioneer, starting off in the 1930s as a reporter in Toronto for the Daily Star and the Globe and Mail before taking up a post as director of publicity for Maple Leaf Gardens. After the war, he wrote a series of lightly reported paperbacks, including Come On Teeder! The Story of Ted Kennedy, from 1950, and Max Bentley: Hockey’s Dipsy-Doodle Dandy, from 1951.

If the players themselves didn’t really go in for telling their own stories in the succeeding decades, the market for how‑tos returned in the ’50s and early ’60s. Was it possible that Frank Mahovlich’s prose could help a kid develop a major-league wrist shot and a conditioning regimen to go with it? In 1964, three dollars would buy you a dream and his Ice Hockey: How to Play It and Enjoy It. The great Gordie Howe had a book out around the same time, though his program was a little more ascetic. “A priest once told me something that I’ve never forgotten,” he confided. “He said that you can have any two of the following three things — hockey, social life and education. You must have an education — so that leaves a choice between a social life or hockey.”

It was in the latter ’60s, soon after the NHL expanded from six teams to twelve, that the Leafs lost their way. More generally, the league saw its pool of talent dilute and, not incidentally, on‑ice violence increase. That helped attract American viewers, many of whom found the sanctioned spectacle of Canadians punching one another to be new and intriguing. A boom was born, too, in hockey biography, much of it generated by one industrious writer.

Now ninety-four, Stan Fischler reversed Ed Fitkin’s trajectory back in the ’50s, starting in PR with the Rangers before making the leap to the New York Journal-American. Soon he was a prolific hockey reporter who also found time, somehow, to become a hockey-book cottage industry unto himself. In the winter of 1972 alone, he published three titles. Today his output runs well past a hundred, including slim, snappy, unauthorized biographies of Howe and Bobby Orr.

In 1971, Fischler teamed with Maurice Richard. The Canadiens legend was fifty that year and had been retired for a decade, during which time, apparently, he’d stirred himself into a considerable snit to which Fischler gave anguished voice. Expansion had ruined the game, the Rocket declared, everything was worse: stickhandling, backhanders, bodychecks, rivalries, and the Stanley Cup final. Fischler soon moved on to ghosting for active players, and many of the diminished game’s rising superstars signed up. Actually, as ghosts go, Fischler was fairly corporeal: his name got billing on the covers of the books he was able to wring out of young stars like Rod Gilbert, Brad Park, Denis Potvin, and Derek Sanderson.

A twenty-four-year centreman in his third season with the Boston Bruins, Sanderson was renowned as much for his joie de vivre (“he’s mod, girl crazy and a swinger,” one reviewer noted) as for his work with pucks. His I’ve Got to Be Me, from 1970, I’m sorry to say, memorializes a world view that includes statements like “Sex is more important than drinking, so I don’t drink” and “Any woman who wants a career is not going to be my woman.”

A year later, Fischler voiced Park’s Play the Man. The New York Rangers defenceman was twenty-three, playing in the fourth season of what would be a seventeen-year Hall of Fame career. He didn’t hold back, lambasting the rival Bruins and some of their stars as bush-league bullies whose guts were lacking and referring to his own boss, the New York GM Emile Francis, as “a cheap s.o.b.” (Call it . . . negotiating? Park was in a contract wrangle at the time.) Fischler later noted that he liked to add “a dose of pepper” to his collaborations, as he did in 1977, when he channelled another immodest defenceman, twenty-four-year-old Potvin from the New York Islanders, who was happy to proclaim that he was better than Orr.

In what might count as a triumph for literature, some of the Bruins whom Park disparaged on the page sought to fight him on the ice after his book was published. In a boost for patriotism, his peccadilloes were forgiven when he and the Boston star Phil Esposito played together for Team Canada against the Soviets, rising above literary feuding to become friends. Four decades later, in 2012, when Park published a second memoir at age sixty-four (with a different co‑writer), he wrote that he was “startled” by the earlier book’s “final form,” blaming Fischler for the vendetta against the Bruins.

Even as it made inroads into the U.S., hockey couldn’t — and still can’t — compete with the popularity of baseball, basketball, and football. Likewise, nothing in Fischler’s piquant oeuvre stirred the publishing scene the way Jim Bouton’s infamous baseball memoir, Ball Four, did in 1970. For Bouton (and his amanuensis, Leonard Schecter), there was no such thing as inside baseball. It was all for airing out: drugs, womanizing, cheating. If the scandals therein don’t seem that scandalous today, the book does seem to flag the end of a determinedly heroic trajectory that sports biographies had been on.

Hockey lit hit a watershed in 1983, when the former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden published a DIY memoir, The Game. “I wanted to write the book myself,” he later said. “I didn’t want a ghostwriter. I felt what I had read about sports didn’t quite describe my experience. Even in the better books (i.e., Brosnan, Bradley), I felt detached from the personal moments in those books. You always want to take your crack.”

Here was an elite athlete who was also a gifted and sensitive writer. Batting away Ford’s and Wilkinson’s axioms like weak backhanders, Dryden produced an account of his NHL tenure that was sharply detailed, acutely personal, and (felt) entirely authentic. It was a book that he’d “lived and researched over twenty-five years.” With its honesty, intellect, and insight, it set a hockey-book standard that has yet to be matched.

At least four full-blown biographies have told Gordie Howe’s story over the years, so you can understand why Mr. Hockey or his family would want to get his own word out. He did so on three occasions, with the last book, Mr. Hockey: My Story, appearing in 2014, two years before his death at eighty-eight. Politely received at a time when Howe’s struggles with dementia were also making news, it acknowledged the help of the CBC business reporter Paul Haavardsrud, though not on the cover.

Hockey sells in Canada, and you don’t have to be a superstar to earn a book contract — or several. Maybe you scored sixty goals in the NHL (Dennis Maruk) or had many brash opinions (Jeremy Roenick). Goaltenders tend to be observant and thoughtful, and they often have something worthwhile to say (Clint Malarchuk, Kelly Hrudey, Curtis Joseph). No sport pays as much literary attention as hockey does to its rule breakers, which is to say those whose careers revolved largely around punching others and being punched in return. Mere role players most of the punchers may be, but they do show up on bookshelves in startling numbers. I don’t think it’s schadenfreude that keeps drawing in the readers, but morbid fascination may be a part of it.

Darren McCarty did his share of clouting as a winger for Detroit. He was in on four Stanley Cup championships with the Red Wings, which he wrote about (with an assist from the journalist Kevin Allen) in My Last Fight: The True Story of a Hockey Rock Star, from 2013. For those who didn’t get the message, he’s back with another — this time in raucous graphic form.

By graphic, I mean both pictorial and bawdy: a proudly vivid and violent colouring in of all that sex, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, and fighting. In his earlier memoir, the garrulous McCarty confided that his formula was to write 75 percent about life and 25 percent about hockey, and it was to the life that readers made a connection. “Many people have come up to me to say they could relate to what I was going through,” he wrote, “because they had gone through bankruptcy, divorce, alcoholism, or drug addiction, or all of the above.”

I haven’t calculated the percentages on Darren McCarty: Life Is a Grind, Enjoy My Truth, but I’d guess the numbers haven’t shifted much. Like the title, the content is broad and browbeating — and McCarty survives to the end. This is one of those rare autobiographies that come at you on the cover with an outright imperative. I like it. It works.

A more peaceable player, Ken Morrow, has a hockey legacy that’s solidly settled, and I trust he’s got the commemorative hardware to prove it. Now sixty-nine, Morrow wasn’t a generational talent or a fearsome pugilist, but he was an eminently dependable defenceman for the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Olympic team, which upset the mighty Soviets and went on to win gold. Immediately afterwards, Morrow joined the Islanders, with whom he evolved into a reliably steadfast defenceman who helped them win four Stanley Cup championships.

An exemplary career, I’m sorry to say, does not guarantee a diverting autobiography. In the pages of Ken Morrow: Miracle Gold, Four Stanley Cups, and a Lifetime of Islanders Hockey, Morrow seems like an affable sort, but the memories he musters are so untextured that nothing the journalist Allan Kreda can do to try to enliven them really helps. Kreda does his best, quarrying contemporary newspaper accounts and shoring those up with platitudes, generalities, and consistent chapter-ending exclamation marks: “It sure was a lot of fun for a guy like me to be able to score the occasional big goal!” I’m afraid that what was once miraculous is here rendered plain as a puck.

As a bonus, or ballast, Morrow balances things out with a foreword by his old teammate and fellow autobiographer Potvin and with a pleasantly rambling afterword (caboose?) from none other than the venerable Stan Fischler himself.

Ken Dryden called Guy Lafleur “a contented victim.” The goaltender wasn’t close to his Montreal teammate in the high-flying 1970s, but Dryden, as ever, cast a keen eye in The Game on the particular challenges that Lafleur faced as a French Canadian idol to whom the destiny of a province and its people had been entrusted. If Auston Matthews remains (for now) a celebrity in Toronto, Lafleur’s status in Montreal was (and still is) something altogether Greeker: like Morenz, Richard, and Jean Béliveau before him, whether he wanted the role or not, he was a hero on a mythic scale.

Lafleur, who died in 2022, never committed himself to the page, but he was much biographized by others, in both French and English. The overall tenor of a dozen or so books on the shelf would tip to the adulatory: a selection of subtitles would include L’Homme qui a soulevé nos passions (The man who stirred our passions) and Le Dernier des vrais! (The last of the true ones), though you’d also have to log L’Ombre et la Lumière (Shadow and light) and Gloire et Persécution (Glory and persecution).

In 1978, Claude Larochelle’s Guy Lafleur: Le Démon blond was disappointingly rendered into English as Hockey’s No. 1. It described the right winger as “an imperceptible individual,” perhaps another translation fail but perhaps not. I don’t know that Lafleur is hard to perceive so much as he is challenging to fathom. Dryden wrote that he was “sensitive and awkwardly shy,” sometimes intemperate. I think it’s fair to say that, occasionally, he was hard to reach, under all the expectation he was shouldering.

Pierre Gince and Steven Finn do excellent work in plumbing the depths in their oral biography, Lafleur: The Legend. Originally published in 2023 as Guy Lafleur et nous, it collects the perspectives of forty people who were close to Lafleur. It’s a remarkable array that includes testimonials from a son, Martin, along with many teammates (Dryden included) and opponents (Denis Potvin et al.), coaches (Scotty Bowman), the Canadiens owner Geoff Molson, the NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, and Jean Béliveau’s widow, Elise, not to mention the Lord of the Rings star (and massive Habs fan) Viggo Mortensen, who lauds Richard’s “presence” and “instinctive choices.” To Mortensen, Lafleur “was the Marlon Brando of hockey.”

The book’s questionnaire format gives it a bit of a stilted, even bureaucratic feel. (Prompts include “Tell us an unforgettable story” and “You attended his funeral. Tell us about it.”) This means that it does sacrifice much in the way of context: if you don’t already know about the bitterness that attended Lafleur’s original retirement or, say, the legal troubles of another son that embroiled Lafleur, you’re going to have to look elsewhere for clarification.

Still, the book does contain and distill many of the man’s multitudes: his drive and his charisma, his sense of humour, the attention he paid his admirers. He loved Oh Henry! chocolate bars. He liked poker but lacked a poker face. His flying instructor extols his skills as a helicopter pilot. There are poignant notes, too. “Guy didn’t take care of himself,” the former Canadiens captain Yvan Cournoyer laments. “He probably thought he was invincible.”

At first glance, it may seem as if Howie Morenz might have believed that he too had eternity on his side. Then again, the closer you study the hasty abandon with which he conducted himself, on the ice and off, the more you can convince yourself that he suspected the opposite and was hurrying to live as much life as he could.

In 1935, Morenz found a moment to publish an otherwise perky feature in Esquire (he might have got some help writing it), in which he acknowledged that “Father Time easily overhauls the fastest mortals.” It was just two years later that he died of a pulmonary embolism in a Montreal hospital as he was recovering from a badly broken leg. He was thirty-four.

In Montreal, they called Morenz “l’homme éclair,” among other elemental things. One writer likened him to “fire dancing on ice,” while another considered him “as unstoppable as falling water.” Apart from anything else, he may have done more than any other player to help the game find a vivid descriptive voice. Styled as “hockey’s Babe Ruth,” he was such an exciting athlete that he also bestowed the gift of making hockey fans of those who might not otherwise have paid attention.

Dean Robinson wrote the landmark book on Morenz in 1982 (an updated edition appeared in 2016), but Donald Murray’s new appraisal of his life and renown is a welcome one. In Howie Morenz: The Greatest Season in the Life of Hockey’s First Legend, Murray drills deeply into the 1930–31 NHL season when, aged twenty-eight, at the hurtling height of his fifteen-year career, Morenz led Montreal to a second successive Stanley Cup.

Writing about Richard Ellmann’s monumental life of James Joyce, his friend Ellsworth Mason noted the biographer’s “beaverosity,” and I admire the word and this book enough that I’m going to apply it here, too. Murray, a lawyer from Halifax who grew up in Montreal, goes game by game through that pivotal season, illuminating in fifty-four chapters Morenz’s exploits on the ice and much more beyond, expanding his focus to explore a (mostly) fascinating succession of broader themes. Thus does he frame how Morenz’s choice of skate blade affected the way he played, his explosive temper, and the physical costs he accrued over the years. He’s good on places and personalities, on rules and referees, on the gambling that insinuated itself into pro hockey. In its research and granular detail, this is as rich a portrait of the early NHL as we’ve seen in the past decade. I might also suggest that Murray does, at times, stretch his fabric thin.

Earlier I mentioned Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, which measures the lengths we go to — and the limits we run up against — in learning about the lives of others. It’s McEwan, so there’s much more to it than that, but a protagonist, Tom Metcalfe, is a biographer who argues that you can both be rigorous in your research and extrapolate from it. His partner, Rose, who is also in the business, holds that a biographer’s only duty is to the truth, no guessing allowed. They argue about this. Tom reserves “an essential freedom to speculate, infer, make educated guesses and animate circumstance and states of mind.” He has, he believes, a duty “to vitality, to convey the experience of lived and felt life.” The alternative — sticking to the plain facts — usually guarantees “a numbing series of agnostic shrugs,” and where’s the fun in that?

Reading Howie Morenz, I have to take Rose’s side. Murray conjectures with confidence and, at times, brio. But I’m not sure I buy his categorical contention that in alluding to fires, flames, and flammables in their descriptions of Morenz’s gifts, fans, newspapermen, and even teammates all implicitly understood that they were invoking “a Christian apostolic experience.” Elsewhere, Murray imagines a date for Morenz with a Canadian actress in New York (“because professional hockey players were regarded as sexually exotic entertainment for the city’s most important women”) and enlists F. Scott Fitzgerald to project a dim view of his marriage. He even drifts into his subject’s thoughts to declare what he was thinking as he waited, one night in 1931, by the side of a gravely injured teammate.

Is it possible to imagine an unplugged Auston Matthews, abed this spring in his post-surgery convalescence, reaching for a copy of Kevin McGran’s biography? Does he go through it cover to cover — muttering the occasional Huh?, maybe a Did I, really? — learning a lot along the way about his own motivations and reading passages aloud to William Nylander, who’s just happened to stop by? Or does he go the other way instead and hoist the book across the condo?

Last year, Gwyneth Paltrow branded her biographer a “hack.” She also went on the record admitting that she had not read Amy Odell’s book, though her husband had. Paltrow’s pan was nevertheless comprehensive. “She totally missed everything,” she told British Vogue, “the truth of who I am, what my impact is.”

Gino Odjick, who died in 2023 at the age of fifty-two, wasn’t involved in the biography that his friend Peter Leech and a Vancouver journalist, Patrick Johnston, wrote, even if Gino: The Fighting Spirit of Gino Odjick is marketed as the “authorized” biography of the Vancouver Canucks left winger. A sister, Dina, contributes a foreword. “I wanted this book,” she writes, “to be for people to get to know the real Gino.” Soon after the book appeared last fall, though, other members of Odjick’s family objected to its publication: the real Gino, they suggested, wouldn’t have approved.

Odjick, who was Algonquin and from Kitigan Zibi in western Quebec, became a cherished Canuck in the 1990s, an important cog in the 1994 team that reached the Stanley Cup final. But maybe I mean piston rather than cog: Odjick was, of course, an enforcer who enforced whatever it is that enforcers enforce in hockey. He doesn’t seem to have fought with Darren McCarty, though they were belligerents around the same time and had in common punching people named Grimson, Domi, and Probert, so you could map out the pain and damage that connected them without too much trouble.

If you know your way around hockey biographies, you’ll recognize this familiar refrain. For all the ferocity that Odjick brought to the ice, he was a genial soul off it — playful, “whip-smart,” kind, loyal. He cared about teammates; he wanted to win. I don’t doubt any of that, nor that Odjick was an inspiration to Indigenous youth: Gino does well in introducing the man and celebrating his merits. But it only amplifies the questions around NHL violence and its costs that the league has never really gotten around to answering, let alone dealing with. Not surprisingly, Johnston and Leech don’t take on the wider issue. But nor do they shy from the terrible outcomes that Odjick lived with. This is another chronicle of concussions, alcohol, painkillers, and mental health crises, another biography that, if anything, raises even more questions about NHL violence and NHL indifference.

In 2014, after he’d retired, Odjick told a concussion symposium that he realized he’d been addicted to getting punched in the head. “When you don’t get hit in the face for a while, it kind of bothers you. It made me feel alive, to get hit,” he said. “It was something I could never understand, myself. I felt the need to get hit.”

Dave Schultz made a career of punching and being punched right back in the torrid 1970s, twenty years before Darren McCarty’s or Gino Odjick’s fighting fists made it to the NHL. For his troubles, he ended up (as he’s said himself) “a fairly well-to-do folk hero.” We’re back on the other side here of hockey’s ledger: Schultz’s heroism was different from Guy Lafleur’s, one that reflected the darker edges where strategic brutality prevailed rather than the speed, skill, and romance of the game.

“The Hammer,” the fans called him in Philadelphia, where he was beloved as the ferocious face of a Flyers team that won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in the 1970s. Their secret wasn’t all maximal brutality, but partly it was. Schultz led the league in penalty minutes for three consecutive seasons. During the 1974–75 season, he spent almost eight hours in the penalty box, a record that still stands. “The word around was that I signed my name with my knuckles,” he wrote in 1981, a year after he’d retired. By then, Stan Fischler had come knocking, and together they produced The Hammer: Confessions of a Hockey Enforcer. For this one, they turned the pepper quotient to blast, devoting an entire chapter to Schultz’s former captain (and friend) in Philadelphia, Bobby Clarke, to expose him as a “dirty” player and accuse him of cowardice.

Schultz was only just getting started. He went hard at the Flyers’ legendary coach Fred Shero, denouncing the tactics of intimidation that he insisted on and dwelling on his “problem drinking,” its tolls and victims. Schultz further caught the hockey world’s attention by roundly repudiating the very violence that had defined his own career, calling for the NHL “to break dramatically from its past.”

“Hockey can be the most exciting sport on earth and the most artistic as well,” Schultz declared, “but only when properly played and administered. Tragically, it has degenerated into a sloppy, brawl-filled mess. I certainly do not deny my own contribution to the problem, which I have tried to spell out as clearly as possible in this book. I hope that I succeeded and that the NHL will, in the future, sell hockey, not blood.”

Schultz did, in his original Fischler-aided effort, offer a kind of rationale for the fighting he once did so lustily. He talked about “juices . . . flowing very fast” and “a sort of craziness” that overtook him. Fans loved the fights, and teammates approved. The brawling made him a celebrity. It all added up. When his wife, Cathy, wondered whether he wasn’t “detracting from the beauty of the game,” he played an Alec Wilkinson card. “You don’t play the game,” he told her. “You don’t know.” He recognized, too, that his upbringing in Saskatchewan factored in: “Given the proper climate for aggression, there was only one way for me to overcome my Mennonite background and that was to go completely wild in the other direction.”

Everybody deserves a second chance, I guess. Now, forty-four years later, at age seventy-six, Schultz is back with a well-crafted autobiography (co‑written with Dan Robson of The Athletic) to reverse course, explicitly disowning his previous renunciation. The time has come to clean up pepper of the past.

That’s only part of the story of Hammered: The Fight of My Life, and one that hasn’t really attracted much attention in what passes these days for hockey journalism. Here, now, it’s Schultz’s own alcoholism that’s at the fore as he resolves to get sober and maybe even make sense of all the hurt, guilt, and rage that he’s been carrying for sixty years. The whole book pulses with loss and pain. Schultz reveals, for the first time, that a neighbour sexually assaulted him when he was eleven. He confronts the “heavy finitude” of the deaths of his father, his brother, a granddaughter. He sifts the ashes of his marriage, his failings as a father. He gets help. None of it sounds easy.

It’s not the heart of the book, but as Schultz undertakes his journey “to remember the past and make it right,” he does eventually get around to the Fischler collaboration and why he came to regret it. Back in 1981, he was bitter about being traded —“discarded”— by the Flyers. He should have waited to write his first book, he says now. “I lacked insight and coping skills.”

Decrying hockey violence and condemning the NHL? Schultz doesn’t say explicitly that the anti-fighting manifesto was Fischler’s, though he does gesture that way. Mostly, he says, he worried about his young boys, what they thought of him and his legacy. As they grew up and started playing, the game connected father and sons. They’re not all good now, but good enough that Schultz is again ready to accept the role he played in his furious heyday.

He’s forgiven Fred Shero and doesn’t mind that the NHL didn’t heed him all those years ago. If anything, he’s leaning back into the punching — well, embracing it, along with his eternal Flyers teammates.

Hammered ends with a handy nine-page inventory of every fight that Schultz fought in the NHL, all 164 of them. In another appendix, he enthusiastically elects his own “Enforcer Hall of Fame.” Gino Odjick is in there (“understood his role and played it to the hilt”) along with Dave Brown (“threw left-handed bombs”), Harold Snepsts (“We had a few battles, but I respected him”), and Reg Fleming (“Sadly, his quality of life in later years suffered from CTE-related declines in his mental and physical health”).

For all the show of vulnerability, Schultz is a confident and convincing narrator of his own predicaments. Richard Holmes — that dean of biographers and friend of Ian McEwan — has said that empathy is the most valuable weapon a writer like him has. As readers of the lives of hockey players, maybe we can’t do what they be, but we can at least give them that.