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D'Arcy Jenish was granted unprecedented access to previously unpublished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.
