National Hockey League - Hockey confidential: inside stories from people inside the games

I cannot tell a lie. When the publisher of the book you hold in your hands first suggested to me the title, Hockey Confidential, I was a little uncomfortable with what I thought might be the connotation. What if someone thinks its a tell-all bookthe latter-day hockey equivalent of Jim Boutons Ball Four? Or maybe even a personal career retrospective, spanning my more than 35 years covering and reporting on all things hockey? Because its neither, and I wouldnt want anyone to be misled.

Of course, anyone who has followed my career pathfrom covering junior hockey for the Sault Ste. Marie (Ontario) Star to editor-in-chief of The Hockey News to Toronto Star hockey columnist to becoming the original Hockey Insider on The Sports Network (TSN) to @TSNBobMcKenzie having more than 750,000 followers on Twitterwould know my body of work tends to run towards the more conventional or conservative side of the spectrum. Tell-all? I dont think so. And while there may come a day when Ill recount what will end up being more than four decades worth of personal and professional behind-the-scenes recollections in a book, this isnt it.

The truth, though, is I didnt have a better suggestion than Hockey Confidential. And if I did, Im not sure you would have bought A Bunch of Stories Bob Would Like to Tell. Not too catchy, now, is it? But if were being honest here, thats essentially what Hockey Confidential is: a collection of hockey stories I find compelling, stories I would like to share.

If you read my first book, Hockey Dad: True Confessions of a (Crazy?) Hockey Parent, youll see very quickly that this one is much different. Hockey Dad was an intensely personal first-person story about the good, the bad and the ugly of shepherding my two sons through the Canadian minor hockey system and beyond. For those who found Hockey Dad perhaps too narrow in its scopethat is, not dealing with stories from the NHL involving professional players and/or famous peopleyoull be heartened to know Hockey Confidential should have broader appeal. Some of the names in the stories I tell on these pages will be instantly recognizable as amongst the biggest in the game, including Don Cherry, John Tavares, P.K. Subban, Steven Stamkos, Connor McDavid, Mark Lindsay and Jari Byrski.

Mark Lindsay and Jari Byrski? Come again?

Well, thats one of a number of reasons why the full title of the bookHockey Confidential: Inside Stories from People Inside the Gameis actually an apt description. Mark Lindsay and Jari Byrski may not be household hockey names, but the fact that both work with and are well known to so many of the biggest stars and best players in the NHL means you should know themand their storiestoo.

Id like to think theres more to this book than just hockey, that it has a greater meaning or application beyond the obvious hockey angles. It certainly does for me. For a guy whose life more or less revolves around all things puck, and mine does, I have no doubt theres plenty here for the hardcore hockey fan: John Tavares talking about the essence of scoring goals; Brandon Prust making sense of what its really like to give or take punches in a hockey fight; and the colliding worlds of old and new in the growing debate on the place of advanced statisticsor #fancystats, as many have taken to calling them. But the longer Ive been in this business, the older (and wiser, Id like to think) I get, the more I think Ive learned. Perhaps the closer I get to realizing my own mortality, the more Ive come to appreciate and try to understand some grander or more universal themes of life and death and the meaning or purpose of our respective journeys.

To that end, the first chapter of this book is about hockey only to the extent that the subject is a well-known, dyed-in-the-wool hockey man who had a harrowing near-death experience and not only lived to talk about it publicly for the first time, but also offered a deeply personal perspective on how it impacted him and his view on the meaning of life.

Hockey Confidential, indeed.

Youll notice some other themes running through the book as well.

If life, and being around hockey, has taught me anything, its not what you take or get as much as what you leave or give. So whether its Mark Lindsays ability to heal with his hands, Karl Subbans passion for aiding those less fortunate than his famous sons or Byrskis dedication to giving kids the confidence he so dearly lacked in his own childhood in Poland, these are stories I wanted to share with you. Trite as it may sound, if Im going to go to the trouble of writing a book, I want it be a lasting legacy for my kids, who can pick it up long after Im gone and know what it was I believed in, what my core values were and what mattered to me.

Thats another common thread youll find running throughout this project: the value of family within a hockey contextan 80-year-old Don Cherry sharing precious moments with his son, Tim, at the rink; rock star Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip communing with his brothers in a lifelong love affair with the Boston Bruins; the patriarchs of the Subban and Tavares families emigrating from Jamaica and Portugal, respectively, to become household hockey names and raise great Canadian superstars; to say nothing of a teenaged Connor McDavid leaning on his family and support system, including the incomparable Bobby Orr, to help cope with the pressures of being tabbed as the Next Big Thing in hockey; as well as Sheldon Keefes dramatic personal struggle to leave behind a dark and troubled past to become a better man, son, brother, husband, father and hockey coach.

My original vision for this book was for it to be 25 to 40 chapters, 2,000 to 3,000 words each; but as I started telling some of the stories, they morphed into something entirely different11 chapters in total, ranging anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 words apiece. I started thinking of each chapter as its own mini-book, an opportunity to do something that is totally foreign to what my job has becomeand, really, something that flies totally in the face of where media
has gone.

Whether Im appearing on television (where a 40-second comment is now deemed to be a major oration) or Im on Twitter (tapping it out 140 characters at a time), its become an attention-deficit disorder world. Dont get me wrong; thats not necessarily a criticism as much as it might be a lament. Hey, Im as guilty as anyone of propagating the quick-hit, all-the-news-fit-to-print, so-long-as-its-in-140-or-fewer-characters news feed. One of the reasons I got into journalism in the first place was because I wanted to be a storyteller, and I fear Ive strayed from that, at least as the basis for what my job has become. My primary focus is to share news and information, and hopefully some perspective and insight along the way. The nature of the beast is that more output is better than less, but short is better than long, and really short is best of all. That isnt to say there arent good long-form storytellers in our business, because there are, but Ive either not had the opportunity to be one of them or wilfully neglected to do so. Until now, anyway.