The Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey

Hayward C. Blake is a high-school principal in Harbour Grace,
Newfoundland.

In this 1996 Governor General Award-nominated book, Roy MacGregor
explores the special relationship between fathers and sons within the
context of the game of hockey. We accompany Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier,
Marty McSorley, Paul Coffey, and their fathers on a tour of Europe
during the strike-shortened 1994–95 season. We visit with some of
hockey’s more memorable families (the Howes, the Dineens, the Hulls,
and the Drydens) and with the families of Native star Gino Odjick,
Russian sensation Alexei Yashin, 1972 hockey hero Paul Henderson, and
junior-hockey player Brad Hornung, who broke his neck in a 1987 hockey
game. We learn of the pressures that a whole province has placed on the
shoulders of Jean Béliveau, Guy Lafleur, and Alexandre Daigle. We
learn, too, of the difficult decisions that hockey parents sometimes
have to make (when Wayne Gretzky was 14, his parents appointed someone
else his legal guardian so that he could play hockey for a team more in
keeping with his talents). The Home Team is a first-rate account of a
uniquely Canadian game and its participants.