Playing Overtime: A Celebration of Oldtimers' Hockey

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

With 1995 marking the 20th anniversary of the Canadian Oldtimers’
Hockey Association, Playing Overtime both commemorates the event and
serves as an unofficial history of hockey’s development in Canada and,
to a lesser extent, internationally.

Barris, a CBC radio and television host, the author of several hockey
books, and an oldtimer himself, interviewed 300 of the more than 80,000
oldtimers for this engaging and readable book.

The volume’s opening chapters explain how oldtimers’ hockey
evolved: Many youngsters longed to be NHL players, but few could

achieve their goal; as adults, a large number of the “unsuccessful”
found they wanted to re-experience hockey’s fun and camaraderie but
without competitive pressure and rough physical play. And so
Oldtimers’ Hockey, where desire counts more than skill, was created
for the over–35 crowd.

In the rest of the book, Barris writes anecdotally about the various
teams across Canada and the “characters” who populate them, such as
the “Flying Fathers” (priests who play for charity) and the “Ice
Owls” (legally blind players). Two eight-page sections of candid
black-and-white shots highlight the people and teams mentioned in the
text.

Playing Overtime captures the fun and friendship these men (and some
women) between the ages of 35 and 90 experience playing on oldtimers’
teams. After reading this sensitively yet passionately written book,
some hockey aficionados may go looking for their long-discarded
equipment. A must-purchase for public libraries.