Each of the six stories in Dave Bidini' s playful, irreverent new book takes a headlong run at the hockey dressing room, and each knocks the door down. What' s happening when the door opens next is anyone' s guess.

In one story, a chronic minor-leaguer discovers the wonders-- and the pitfalls-- of the game in Europe, both on and off the ice. In another, an NHLer is tight with his teammate, the league' s leading goalscorer, but dreams of getting MUCH tighter. A star on a losing streak turns to a magical salve to turn his game around. A conversation between two friends yields surprising facts about Joan, everyone' s favourite female goalie. A hundred bucks is all that stands between a hockey groupie and eternal happiness in 1950s Detroit. And finally, the eponymous ' Five Hole' itself speaks-- though it never reveals all of its secrets.

Full of sex, drugs and high-sticking, each of "The Five Hole Stories" runs its proverbial tongue down hockey' s seamy, steamy underbelly and then finds language to tell us what it tastes like. A scintillating look at hockey with its clothes off, in six ambitious poses.

On a hot summer's day in 1998, when Dave Bidini found himself watching Martha Stewart rather than the Stanley Cup playoffs, he knew that something was seriously amiss: The game he loved had crossed the line. It was now an entertainment, not a sport. A passionate hockey fan and rec player, Bidini immediately resolved to follow Canada's best export to the rest of the world, to find out whether the true game still existed elsewhere.

His quest took him to a rink on the eighth floor of a shopping mall in Hong Kong; to the gritty city of Harbin in Northern China, where a game much like hockey has been played for six hundred years; to Dubai in the desert of The United Arab Emirates, where hockey is brand-new and incredulous Bedouin drop by the Al Ain rink to wonder at the ice; and to Transylvania, where the game was introduced in the 1920s by a ten-second newsreel of Canadians chasing after a puck, and where it is now played as a vicarious war between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians. In "Tropic of Hockey," Bidini weaves hilarious stories of encounters with rinks and players of wildly different talents and experiences with tales of his travels and spot-on observations about the game and players.

On a hot summer's day in 1998, when Dave Bidini found himself watching Martha Stewart rather than the Stanley Cup playoffs, he knew that something was seriously amiss: The game he loved had crossed the line. It was now an entertainment, not a sport. A passionate hockey fan and rec player, Bidini immediately resolved to follow Canada's best export to the rest of the world, to find out whether the true game still existed elsewhere.
His quest took him to a rink on the eighth floor of a shopping mall in Hong Kong-a rink encircled by a fierce dragon-headed roller coaster-to the gritty city of Harbin in Northern China, where a game much like hockey has been played for six hundred years; to Dubai, in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, where hockey is brand-new, and incredulous Bedouin drop by the Al Ain rink to wonder at the ice; and to Transylvania, where the game was introduced in the 1920s by a ten-second newsreel of Canadians chasing after a puck, and where it is now played as a vicarious war between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians.
In TROPIC OF HOCKEY, Bidini weaves hilarious stories of encounters with odd-sized rinks and players of wildly different talents and experiences with tales of his travels and spot-on observations about the game and players in North America. And he discovers that the tropic of hockey connects players and fans around the world in a celebration of the game-not to mention the profanity, the exhilaration, and the moments of grace that enrich it.