Jay Atkinson - Ice Time: A Tale of Fathers, Sons, and Hometown Heroes

PRAISE FOR

ICE TIME

A nifty hat trick. [Atkinson] not only chronicles his old teams return to semi-glory, he also forges a three-generation link among his dead father, himself, and his five-year-old son whos just learning to skate, and he proves that you can go home againif you bring along your goalie pads.

Boston Globe

Its a memorable journey, part reportage, part memoir, all heart. Its also a book about hockey culture, everything from the early morning skates, to the bus rides, to the cramped locker rooms, to the bonds that last a lifetime. Atkinson knows it all.

Bill Reynolds, Providence Journal

Atkinson offers affecting elegies to small-town life. Admirably modest, blue-collar, and Northern to the core, Ice Time may make you long for snow before Thanksgiving, and ice on the lakes.

New York Times Book Review

H. G. Bissinger wrote the definitive high school football retrospective with 1990s Friday Night Lights. Bill Reynolds chronicled Chris Herrons high school basketball career in the critically acclaimed Fall River Dreams. That leaves high school baseball and hockey as sports waiting to be immortalized in the literary canon. Its time to cross hockey off the list.

Eagle Tribune

Until now, The Game by Ken Dryden pretty much stood alone in the annals of great hockey writing. Finally, stiff competition comes from New England author Atkinson, whose yearlong study of the high school hockey squad from his alma mater is a bona-fide masterstroke.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Anyone who has played a high-school sport will appreciate Atkinsons portrayal of the Rangers cabalistic world . A sensitive and beautiful book.

Boston Phoenix

The more I read of Ice Time, the more I was hooked. Far more than just a chronicle of a high school hockey season, Jay Atkinsons book is an evocative, bittersweet, poetic journey of a grown man trying, as we all try, not to recapture youth but to remember the splendor of it.

H. G. Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights

Atkinson is an unabashed proponent of the way life is lived and hockey is played in the small towns of New England.

Capital Times (Madison, WI)

With a style at turns wistful and profound, Atkinson observes the timeless passion of the players and the game.

Boston magazine

This is definitely a guy book, one that any would-be or any weekend warrior will appreciate, especially hockey players. But it also would make a good gift for the woman who lives with such a man, and has trouble understanding what force compels a 45-year-old man to leave his warm house at 11:30 on a winter night and drive twenty miles to skate in some smelly rink.

Buffalo News

[Atkinson] seamlessly weaves his past with current events, detailing the teams fortunes while lovingly recalling his own at that time of life.

Virginian-Pilot

Ice Time is a great read for anyone who savors emotionally charged writing, descriptive detail, and compelling, behind-the-scenes stories.

Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun

Following a young teams single season, [Ice Time] is an emotionally charged, heart-warming tale of personal triumphs, both on and off the ice, of friendship, loyalty, perseverance, and dedicated parents.

Library Journal

An artful class portrait of a town seen through the lens of a game, a tight-throated personal journey back into youth and a keen description of the life force that hockey can be.

Kirkus Reviews

In this affecting memoir, [Atkinson] recalls his own hockey-playing experiences (especially his late fathers Attaboy, Jay cheers, which echoed through nearly empty rinks) and attempts to evaluate the father hes been and will be for his young son.

Booklist

Jay Atkinson, in only his second book, has taken himself over the top. For those who have played a sport, andcuriouslyfor those who never have, this ice-smooth prose will resonate in memory for a long time. About the prose: For the most part, it is quiet, but there is a subtext that renders fatherson love and the hard price of victory, as well as the equally hard price of defeat. Somewhere in this book, you will find your heart joyously broken.

Harry Crews, author of A Childhood:
The Biography of a Place

For the friends of my youth

You dont have to be a seasoned tactician
to realize that your ass is cold.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

Contents

FOREWORD

1968

I HAD TWO UPBRINGINGS . Coming of age in Methuen, Massachusetts, a small, bowtie-shaped community on the New Hampshire border, my buddies and I went to public school, attended Mass on Sundays, and joined a benign paramilitary organization known as the Cub Scouts. For fun, sometimes we threw rocks at cars or rode around on our Stingray bicycles, singing Hey, hey, were the Monkees! Among the densely packed three deckers, in a neighborhood bounded by asphalt, we played football and baseball on the street, sewer cap to sewer cap. As far as we knew, this was life.

In the summer of 1968 just after I turned 11, my father got a new job and we moved across town to Central Street: larger, more well-appointed homes, vast lawns that doubled as playing fields, and within a half-mile radius, two small ponds and a tree-lined swamp. When the leaves fell off the trees and November passed into December, the swamp froze over, and I was introduced to a different world from the one I had known. Here the sport of choice was ice hockey (and when the ponds melted, street hockey). Dad bought me a pair of skates and a straight-bladed Victoriaville stick. I was in business.

But what sets hockey apart from sports like football and baseball is that you cant simply go out there and play. Of course youre welcome to try, in the sense that, theoretically, you can climb into the family jalopy and enter the Indy 500. Its just that your chances of being competitive are pretty slim. To excel at hockeyto sail over the ice throwing body checks, dodging your opponents, and blasting the puck into the netyou have to first master the rudiments of skating. An odd and esoteric skill, perhaps, but one thats completely necessary.

Most of the kids in my new neighborhood had been skating for two or three years, and some had been lacing up the blades even longer than that. They swooped across Lynchs swamp in graceful arcs, like they had a special dispensation to reduce gravity. Eventually I gained the courage to join them, wobbling around in a little half-circle as players from both teams whizzed past on either side. But there was something strangely invigorating about all that cold clear air, and the echo of sticks and pucks against the snow-padded hillside.