Tiger: A Hockey Story

Janet Money is a writer and policy analyst for the Canadian Cystic
Fibrosis Foundation in Toronto.

When Dave Williams was tried in 1977 for possession of an offensive weapon (a hockey stick) and assault after an incident during a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens, he did not take the stand — he and his lawyer felt that the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey player would only have made things worse for himself through his blunt honesty.

“I could have told the court a few things about the realities of life for a hockey player and no doubt...I would probably have hanged myself.” Williams was acquitted.

In Tiger Williams does take the stand, describing the realities of life for a hockey player who had to fight, figuratively and literally, to get to the top of his profession.

Among those realities is Williams’s assertion that while no coach ever told him to attack an opposing player, he always knew what he was supposed to do: intimidate the opposition and protect his more gifted teammates. The poverty of Williams’s prairie youth is a particularly harsh reality and the author is open about his jealousy and hatred for more privileged kids.

Williams provides an insider’s view of junior hockey in western Canada and professional hockey both in the minor leagues and in the National Hockey League. He offers his own explanations of why the Leafs backed away from the verge of greatness they approached in 1978 and why the Vancouver Canucks, to whom he was traded in 1980, flopped after reaching the 1982 Stanley Cup finals.

Williams also suggests that this book’s impending publication was a factor in his being traded to Detroit in 1984.

The tried and true formula of an athlete’s auto-biography being ghost-written in the first person is tried and true because it works. Tiger: A Hockey Story is no exception. James Lawton has shaped the story, not only through his third-person introductory passages for each chapter but through his silent editorial work. Lawton has left enough of the expletives and crudities and Tiger-flavour to make sure Williams’s voice and personality come through loud and clear. One could only wish that dates could have been provided more often throughout the narrative — one tends to get lost from season to season.

The book traces the career of one of the most pugnacious and durable players in modern hockey. It is at times self-righteous but always forthright. The so-called “goon” style of hockey has come and gone, and Tiger Williams has survived: this book shows the determination that has made his longevity possible. On the ice, Williams has never pulled punches. Neither does he in this book.