Win, Tie or Wrangle
Win, Tie, or Wrangle
The Inside Story of the Old Ottawa Senators
Winner of the "Brian McFarlane Award for Outstanding Research and Writing," presented by the Society for International Hockey Research, May 2009.
Paul Kitchen
Preface by Brian McFarlane
Foreword by Eugene Melnyk
6 X 9 inches, 416 pages
Archives of Canadian Arts, Culture, and Heritage"Paul Kitchen takes us back to an era that has always piqued the curiosity of hockey fans: an era when competing teams changed ends after every goal; when an early-day outdoor rink on the river might stretch for 400 feet; when dressing rooms were heated by coal-burning, pot-belly stoves, the coal supplied by the players themselves; when a player's spring skate might fly off his foot in the middle of a rush, sending him cart-wheeling to the ice; when he might be forced to stickhandle around an ice statue located in the middle of the rink...." — Brian Mcfarlane, from the preface
Entertaining and informative, Win, Tie, or Wrangle is the one and only definitive history of the original Ottawa Senators. Drawing on previously unexposed diaries, memoirs, hockey-club business records, and government files, Paul Kitchen tells the story of the capital's first hockey team from its birth in 1883 to its demise as the St. Louis Eagles in 1935.
The result is a richly detailed social history that fleshes out the players, the owners, and the fans of a team that captivated the public's attention and helped establish hockey as Canada's signal winter passion.
From boardroom wrangling to the Senators' on-ice exploits, from the challenges of the Great War and the Depression to the birth of professionalism and National Hockey League expansion, Kitchen sets the record straight in a volume that will appeal to history and hockey lovers alike.
"An impressively detailed history." — Doug Fischer, The Ottawa Citizen
Paul Kitchen
Author
A former librarian and executive director of the Canadian Library Association, Paul Kitchen is an Ottawa-based hockey historian and a past president of the Society for International Hockey Research.