The Country and the Game

A joyful, beautifully written tribute to Canada's most salient features--hockey and highways.

In the waning days of the pandemic, sportswriter Ronnie Shuker stuffed his skates, sticks, and backpack into his faithful automobile, Gumpy, named for legendary goaltender Gumpy Worsley, and set off on a 30,000-mile, coast-to-coast-to-coast investigation of the many ways hockey touches the lives of Canadians.

From St. John's, home of hockey's most colorful father-son combo, to a frigid barn in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, and the world's largest hockey stick in Duncan, British Columbia, Shuker finds the people and places that make hockey an indelible part of the Canadian experience. He hits famous sites of hockey lore, from the cradle of the game in Windsor, Nova Scotia, to Brantford, Ontario, where streets, highways, schools, and much else bear the name Gretzky, to Vancouver, site of the infamous 1994 and 2011 Canucks riots. But he also finds the game in unlikely places--crash sites, greenhouses, houseboats, memorials, backyard halls of fame, even a Hutterite colony--where a seemingly endless and always engaging cast of characters, including pros, semipros, beer-league veterans, family, and fans, share unforgettable stories of how pucks have dented their lives.