Sports Illustrated - Sports Illustrated Hockey Talk: From Hat Tricks to Headshots and Everything In-Between

Copyright 2011 Time Inc.
S PORTS I LLUSTRATED and SI are registered trademarks of Time Inc. Used under license.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Sports illustrated hockey talk : from hat tricks to headshots and everything in-between / the editors of Sports illustrated ; foreword by Kostya Kennedy
eISBN: 978-0-7710-8323-5

1. HockeyMiscellanea. 2. National Hockey LeagueMiscellanea. 3. Hockey playersMiscellanea.

GV847.S66 2011 796.96264 C2011-905210-5

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937873

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FOREWORD
BY KOSTYA KENNEDY

THE ETHOS DOESNT CHANGE. BACKYARD PONDS become Pee Wee rinks, then junior-league barns, and finally, glossy, 20,000-seat arenas. Years and generations pass. The NHL extends further and deeper into the international landscape. Theres money to be made. And still hockey remains rooted in its hardiness and humility, in an appetite for hard work, a constancy of purpose, a willingness to absorb and play through pain, a determination, above all, to do whatever may be needed to help your team win. This is where the soul of the game resides.

Hockeys magnificent moments invariably come after a series of unseen and unglamorous ones. Sidney Crosbys Golden Goal relived and freshly examined in Michael Farbers exquisite story Eight Seconds () was not scored simply by dint of some isolated sleight of hand, but because of a sequence of decidedly blue-collar (if sophisticated) efforts. For Crosby, the praise that he gets around the rink is worth as much as the latest endorsement dollar. No one works harder than Sidney, any coach or teammate will tell you. And it takes only a short time watching him to see that this is true.

Bobby Orr had the ethos too, of course. For all his spectacular skills, the rushes and weaves and feints that changed the sport forever, Orrs greatness was buttressed by the honored values of his craft: He could knock a guy flat. He could go into any corner against anyone (or even two of anyone) and come out with the puck on the blade of his stick. He played, and willed his team to victory, on knees that he could barely stand on. Those are the virtues that cling to Orr and that have made him still elusive, still inscrutable () a living legend.

The pinnacle Orr moment endures in part because it lives in black and white, the classic hockey photograph. Orr is soaring, horizontal to the ice, after scoring the winning goal of the 1970 Stanley Cup finals. The power of the photo is not just in the fact that he scored, nor in his apparent jubilation, but also in the knowledge that in the next frame Orr, whod been tripped into the air by a Blues defenseman, will land hard on the Boston Garden ice.

In the most thrilling of hockey highlights, pain is just a breath away. In hockey, nothing comes for free.

WE WRITE ABOUT THE GREAT ONES OF COURSE. Crosby and Orr and Wayne Gretzky, Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe. They each elevated themselves by some mixture of, in the words of Herbert Warren Wind describing Richard (