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Over the course of the 1980-81 NHL hockey season, Canadian broadcaster and author Peter Gzowski traveled and lived with the Edmonton Oilers hockey club. The Game of Our Lives represents his "memoir" of the season, accompanied by his observations and reminiscences on hockey in general. Gzowski picked a good season, and a good team, for this type of work; the Oilers were the youngest team in the League, possessed a player (Wayne Gretzky) who was to become the greatest in the history of the game, and that season defeated the hallowed Montreal Canadiens in the playoffs.
Gzowski does an effective job of tracing the course of the Oilers' season, from its inauspicious beginnings to the tremendous finale. He discusses the "off-ice" aspects of a hockey player's life on the road and at home, and on occasion devotes several pages to discussing some the game's great players. However, what really makes the book more than simply another exercise in sports writing (a field that is not Gzowski's primary one, by the way) is his analysis of hockey as a vital Canadian cultural phenomenon. On page 83, remembering his youth in Galt, Ontario, he writes "[Hockey stars] belonged to us, as no other kind of hero ever could, at once more celebrated and more approachable because of what we shared. They were of us, playing the game of our lives." Such sentiments may seem maudlin, but Gzowski for the most part avoids this trap, giving his words about Canadian hockey a sense of enduring innocence.
On the face of it, The Game of Our Lives is about the Edmonton Oilers, 17 years ago, but it is also about hockey in general, and in particular its role in Canadian life. Much of what Gzowski writes remains current today, making The Game of Our Lives an engaging read even after all these years.
Reviewed by Patrick Conway on February 14, 1997. Photograph from Hockey -- not just a game, but a lifestyle.
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