Future Greats and Heartbreaks

"The reason I like this book is that it reminds me of the kind of books I like writing and reading. Gare was able to become a scout, part of the personnel department for an NHL team the Columbus Blue Jackets – a really terrible team. He was able to participate in their scouting and their drafting over the course of the year. In the book he shows people, in a first-hand way, how scouting works and how pro sports work. Gare got to be a participant in this story in a way that few of us authors ever get to be. It makes for a really interesting and informative read for a hockey fan. Even if you’re not a fan of hockey, if you’re just a sports fan, there’s a lot that you can take from it about how players are evaluated that applies to baseball, football, basketball – to any team sport. It has become so scientific over the last decade and a half. Players are carefully assessed and tested. Hockey, like the other sports, has become a multibillion-dollar enterprise. So much money is riding on each one of these decisions. The best lesson is that everyone tries to be scientific and everyone tries to be thorough, but the most important thing is the most unknowable. You need to understand the heart of the player, understand how the player could work within the team. Some general managers draft players and select players and trade for players who don’t necessarily fit with their team culture. I don’t think fans understand how complicated it is to find the right guy, the person who has leadership ability, the player who can fit into a culture the team is trying to build. I don’t think the fans understand, but this book helps you to. I’ve known players, and I’ve known people who work in management. When you get close to the sport you get a glimpse of its particular internal culture, which is not unlike the culture of the military or the police. It’s a culture that basically exists for itself, and it runs hockey in its own way, defying outside pressure. Sports in general, and hockey in particular, here in Canada almost have a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to how they operate. It’s really quite fascinating to see the hold that professional sport has on everyone, from the average fan right up to the prime minister. What’s interesting about hockey, compared to the other team sports, is that it is intercultural. Obviously there’s the Canadian hockey culture, which dominates or at least tries to dominate. But then we have the culture of the Americans and the Russians and the Czechs and Swedes, who love the sport and who have things to add to it. It’s not dissimilar to what happened to soccer when the English let soccer go out into the world – the Italians and the Brazilians and the Argentineans took it over and changed it in their own way. The same thing plays out in hockey all the time. We Canadians don’t seem to want to let go of the sport because we’re afraid that if we let somebody improve it it won’t be our sport anymore – we will have lost something. When you’re a small country of 30 million people you have certain things you hold onto, and in Canada that’s hockey. There’s a long engrained idea that the Canadians are the try-harder school of hockey. I remember a Swedish player telling me: “We want to win the Stanley Cup, but a Canadian guy will kill you to win the Stanley Cup.” The ethos in Canada has always been about desire, effort. We think if we just try a little bit harder we’ll be the champions. The Americans and the Europeans are trying to find better strategies, better ways to play the game. I think they’re more technical and scientific than Canadians are about the sport."