Overtime: The Legend of Guy Lafleur

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta,
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914, and co-editor of The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt.

“You know as well as I,” an aging businessman recently told Lafleur,
“that they’ll never leave you alone. That’s the way we are in
Quebec. You must know that. When we love someone, we try to devour
him.” This book, then, is not simply about the exploits of one of our
favorite sports heroes; it is about Quebec, and love, and the
ambivalence of wanting and not wanting to be devoured.

We no longer expect the biographies of our hockey heroes to be
embellished accounts of their most memorable games. The simple “he
shoots, he scores” approach expired with Ken Dryden’s The Game. Now
we want to know that men like Lafleur have souls as well as hearts. And
in this case the soul is bared: his brooding, solitary nature, his
family upbringing, the pressure of being a hockey player in Quebec, the
seeming commercial cupidity of the Canadiens organization, the demands
of stardom, his unstable marriage, the worry and frustration, and the
poetic temperament of a deeply sensitive person.

The athletic thrills and spills are almost forgotten under the weight
of so much personal angst. And yet, the book is very good—not only
because it is well written, ingeniously organized, and always engaging;
but because it is salutary as well. Is it too much to expect that some
humanity will return to this magnificent sport? Or too much to hope that
sports journalists will learn to distinguish between the important and
the trivial, the real and the imagained? Or that we, as fans, might be
less fanatical and more fair-minded in our devotion to the game? Perhaps
not. Certainly, reading this excellent book—the biography of a truly
great hockey player—could help to achieve those ends.