Kooks and Degenerates on Ice

March 30, 2020
Whalen (When the Red Sox Ruled: Baseball’s First Dynasty, 1912–1918), a professor of social science at Boston University, thrillingly details the 1970 Stanley Cup championship season of the Boston Bruins. Whalen begins in 1967, when the NHL, responding to a growing interest in U.S. hockey, doubled the number of teams from the “Original Six” across the continent, detailing how Boston—which in 1924 had the first non-Canadian franchise—remained the hub of American hockey. He highlights the team’s colorful characters, whose on- and off-ice antics led one Bruins player to describe the team as “just a bunch of kooks and degenerates who get along”: the young defenseman Bobby Orr, “a human highlight reel—a Michael Jordan on ice”; the scoring champion Phil Esposito; and the perennial brawler and “wildly unpredictable” clutch scorer Derek Sanderson. Whalen vividly takes readers through the arc of the winning season, from early season struggles to the eventual Stanley Cup victory over the St. Louis Blues with Orr’s game-winning goal, captured in the famous flying Superman photo. This exciting slice of hockey history is an open-net goal for Bruins fans.

April 15, 2020
In 1969 and 1970, the Boston Bruins mesmerized hockey fans across the country. Led by charismatic young star Bobby Orr, the Bruins skated, brawled, and intimidated their way to Boston's first Stanley Cup in 29 seasons. Orr was the poster boy for the team, with his movie-star good looks and incredible speed. Whalen, a Boston University professor, knows Boston sports very well, especially the way Beantowners embrace their teams with a passion unmatched in few other cities. In this account of those two remarkable years, Whalen sets the larger cultural scene?a country awash in riots and Vietnam protests?and shows how the Bruins, at least for hockey fans, provided a respite from the sobering headlines. The text is replete with anecdotes and profiles of the players, who took the game seriously on the ice but were anything but serious off the ice. Forward Phil Esposito was often the ringleader of the locker-room shenanigans, ribbing Orr ceaselessly about his cover-boy fame. Longtime fans will cherish the memories, and younger hockey followers will find in the Bruins the genesis of the modern, speed-dominated game.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)