The Shootout: A Roundtable Discussion on the NHL
The dog days of summer are here, but that won’t stop the Overtime writing crew to share their thoughts on the NHL in this roundtable discussion.
Author Archive: Ross Bonander
Ross Bonander is a freelance health writer and quotations editor. His work includes Hockey Talk, a collection of memorable hockey quotes and So So In Centerfield, an unusual collection of baseball quotes. He writes extensively for the Lymphoma Information Network.
Concussions: This is Your Brain on Hockey
Neurologists describe a concussion as a neurometabolic cascade. I hear that term and I fall into a dream of psychedelic waterfalls, of fireflies twinkling at twilight, of a seascape speckled by the starry-eyed blinking of the moonlight. All that could not be further from reality. Sure, sometimes people ‘see stars’ when concussed. Other times they black out. [...]
Avoiding a Midlife Crisis, On and Off the Ice
Few stock characters are as openly ridiculed or garner less sympathy than the adult male neck-deep in the sad trappings of a midlife crisis, despite the fact that such crises are gender-blind. The midlife crisis has been bunked, debunked, rebunked and bunked again. Even I’ve gotten into the act. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, [...]
Representing the Establishment: Donald Fehr as Fringe Labor Leader
In Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, sports journalist Howard Bryant notes that when Marvin Miller headed the baseball players union, the public was often sympathetic to his side. In taking on the owners, the former chief economist of the Steelworkers Union was “dismantling a historically [...]
O Say Can You Speed It Up? An Anthem is not an Audition
I’m not into Francis Scott Key. I mean I like that one hit he had, but the rest of his stuff—not for me. Plus I associate his name with a bad memory. In the 1990s I had a White House internship in the Clinton administration. After a night of drinking, my roommates and I were [...]
O My God Canada: Hockey Is Lost Without You
Only Canada could produce players raised on demanding codes that insist you earn your place with every shift.
Who Fights Cancer In A Lockout?
If you don’t know someone, or of someone, who is struggling with a cancer diagnosis or who has died of cancer, you are either too young or in a state of denial. Cancer is indiscriminate, incessant, and ubiquitous. In the United States, we’ve been hurling money at cancer for several decades. If President Nixon’s declaration [...]
Laboring Points: Between Prophets and Non-Prophets
A HOCKEY PROPHET In 1965– before league expansion and before the WHA, at a time when Clarence Campbell was still scoffing at the prospect of a league pool greater than six– Montreal Canadiens President J. David Molson got eerily prophetic for Sports Illustrated: Twenty or so years from now I can see two six-team leagues [...]
Ice to Canvas: Three Hockey Painters
In this media-soaked era, it’s refreshing to see there are still artists who apply their unique visions of hockey to canvas.