Before the Lights Go Out: A Season Inside a Game on the Brink
- ISBN-10
- 0771024215
- ISBN-13
- 9780771024214
- Category
- Sports & Recreation
- Pages
- 304
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-10-06
- Author
- Sean Fitz-Gerald
Description
A Globe and Mail Best Book A finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize A love letter to a sport that's losing itself, from one of our best sports writers. Hockey is approaching a state of crisis in Canada. It's become more expensive, more exclusive, and effectively off-limits to huge swaths of the potential sports-loving population. Youth registration numbers are stagnant; efforts to appeal to new Canadians are often grim at best; the game, increasingly, does not resemble the country of which it's for so long been an integral part. As a lifelong hockey fan and father of a young mixed-race son falling headlong in love with the game, Sean Fitz-Gerald wanted to get to the roots of these issues. His entry point: a season with the Peterborough Petes, a storied OHL team far from its former glory in a once-emblematic Canadian city that is finding itself on the wrong side of the country's changing demographics. Fitz-Gerald profiles the players, coaches and front office staff, a mix of world-class talents with NHL aspirations and Peterborough natives happy with more modest dreams. Through their experiences, their widely varied motivations and expectations, we get a rich, colourful understanding of who ends up playing hockey in Canada and why. Fitz-Gerald interweaves the action of the season with portraits of public figures who've shaped and been shaped by the game: authors who captured its spirit, politicians who exploited it, and broadcasters who try to embody and sell it. He finds his way into community meetings full of angry season ticket holders, as well as into sterile boardrooms full of the sport's institutional brain trust, unable to break away from the inertia of tradition and hopelessly at war with itself. Before the Lights Go Out is a moving, funny, yet unsettling picture of a sport at a crossroads. Fitz-Gerald's warm but rigorous journalistic approach reads, in the end, like a letter to a troubled friend: it's not too late to save hockey in this country, but who has the will to do it?
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2012-02-21
- 234 pages
- Paperback
- Turner Publishing Company
Similar books
-
When the Lights Go Out: A Novel
By Mary KubicaDon't miss Mary Kubica's twisty new thriller, Just the Nicest Couple! Look for these other pulse-pounding thrillers by New York Times bestselling author Mary Kubica: The Good Girl Pretty Baby Don't You Cry Every Last Lie The Other Mrs.
-
When the Lights Go Out: A Boy Given a Second Chance
By Ryan BoyleI have also learned that a horrific accident has given me an amazing gift. When the Lights Go Out is an expression of that gift.
-
After the Lights Go Out
By John VercherJohn Vercher, author of the Edgar and Anthony Award–nominated Three-Fifths, offers a gripping, psychologically astute, and explosive tour de force about race, entertainment, and healthcare in America, and about one man’s battle against ...
-
A Search for the Northern Lights
By Elizabeth Rusch, Izzi RuschAward-winning, marketing savvy, popular author known for science books.
-
Lights Out in Lincolnwood: A Novel
By Geoff RodkeyA mordantly funny, all-too-real novel in the vein of Tom Perotta and Emma Straub about a suburban American family who have to figure out how to survive themselves and their neighbors in the wake of a global calamity that upends all of ...
-
When the Lights Go Out
By Carys Bray'A powerful and truthful story about hope and how to find it' The Times 'A gem of a book' Emily Maitlis Emma's husband Chris is fretting about starvation and societal collapse.
-
Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath
By Ted Koppel"Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America's power grid is not only possible but likely--and that it would be devastating" and "examines a threat unique to our time and evaluates potential ways to prepare for a catastrophe"- ...
-
When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America
By David E. NyeIn When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in America from 1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as military tactic, social disruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political and ...
-
Earth Hour: A Lights-Out Event for Our Planet
By Nanette HeffernanUnfortunately, it can also have a big impact on our planet. Earth Hour--a worldwide movement in support of energy conservation and sustainability--takes place each March and is sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).
-
Don't Turn Out the Lights: A Novel
By Bernard MinierIn Bernard Minier's Don't Turn Out the Lights, you won’t see who’s coming after you. “You did nothing.” Christine Steinmeyer thought the anonymous suicide note she found in her mailbox on Christmas Eve wasn’t meant for her.