Fifty years?

Fifty years.

It's been a half-century as of 2020 since Bobby Orr did a Superman impression for the Boston Bruins, flying through the air just after scoring the Stanley Cup-winning goal in the final against the St. Louis Blues (pictured here). It was voted the greatest moment in NHL history a short time ago, and it probably hasn't been topped.

What's more, if you'll excuse the personal side of the picture, it's the team that turned me into a hockey fan. I had always been a Celtics fan from a distance of a few hundred miles as a kid, thanks to family ties, but knew nothing about hockey except from seeing the odd game on television out of New York. This crew pulled me in, and I'm still watching the game today.

The Boston Bruins of 1969-70 stole quite a few hearts and minds that year. Orr was the centerpiece of the team, but Phil Esposito was a superstar as well and the supporting cast had a ton of excellent players who knew how to fill their roles. Personality? Check. Toughness? Check. In a different era, that team probably would have won at least four Stanley Cups instead of the two it did capture (1970 and 1972). Circumstances didn't allow the group to stay together and fulfill its potential.

Author Thomas L. Whalen thought it was a good time to give those Bruins the once over. The resulting book is "Kooks and Degenerates on Ice," a line from a quote from backup goalie Eddie Johnston.

The Bruins had been the needy baby brother of the league for a good portion of the 1960s. Then Orr arrived as an 18-year-old sensation, and the Bruins completed one of the most one-sided trades in NHL history in picking up Esposito, Ken Hodge and Fred Stanfield. The other pieces came together soon enough, and the team needed to learn how to win in 1968-69 before preparing for takeoff a year later.

Whalen takes a mostly biographical approach to the task of looking back at that team. The regular season itself really gets little coverage here, with the stories of the key players reviewed. Then the book gets to the playoffs, which didn't offer too many dramatics. The Bruins won their last 10 games in racing through the Rangers, Blackhawks and Blues to the Cup.

Boston had enough to win again in 1972, but a number of forces combined to bring the Bruins back to the pack. The World Hockey Association came along and raided the team's roster for such players as Derek Sanderson, Gerry Cheevers and John McKenzie. Orr started to have severe knee problems a few years into his career, and after a while simply couldn't compensate for his injuries.

Whalen certainly did some serious homework for this project. The bibliography is a long one, with a variety of sources from books, magazines and newspapers cited. It's tough to argue with what's been written. Still, it's a relatively short book, and there's not much here that you'd call fresh information considering the $36 price tag.

Part of the problem is that this team hasn't been exactly ignored by hockey writers over the years. Esposito and Orr have written books on their hockey lives; Esposito in particular set records for honesty on his less-than-straight-and-narrow ways in his autobiography. Others such as Sanderson have done the same. If you had an interest in the subject, you probably have scratched that itch by now.

The book also wanders to cover the rest of the world's activities, such as the shootings at Kent State, the breakup of the Beatles, and Senator Ted Kennedy's driving accident. That doesn't include short biographies of opposing players like Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Brad Park, Jacques Plante, Tony Esposito and Glenn Hall. The Bruins' history also gets covered here. Eddie Shore's career gets quite a bit of unexpected coverage. It's not that the information is incorrect or boring; it just seems like padding to the main story about the Bruins.

It's probably worth noting that in the Kindle version I read, there were references to Wayne Gretsky and Gordy Howe. Let's hope the names were corrected for the printed version; they are correctly spelled in the index.

"Kooks and Degenerates on Ice" won't take you much time to read, at least, and it will provide an overview if you need a concise look at the subject of the 1969-70 Bruins. If you are looking for more than that, though - such as interviews with some of the principals as they look back for 50 years - you are liable to be disappointed.

I hate the Bruins. This will also be about ice cream.

As a sports fan of any sport, you find a team you love and everyone else is dead to you. Not that intensely but rivalries exists. The breakdown of the divisions in Hockey enables us to have multiple sets of rivals who we love to hate. I'm a Penguins fan. The Flyers and the Capitals are teams I will always root the worst for. I don't care if they have some great players. That's not how sports work.

You may be wondering then why I would be against the Bruins. They are no longer in the same division as the Penguins. I'm originally from Long Island. The Islanders were the hometown team but they haven't been good since the Eighties. When I was growing up the Rangers were the team New York cared about. I was brought into Hockey by a Devils fan. This is all very misleading, I understand. My point is even if I'm not a Hockey rival of the Bruins, as a person from New York I have been engineered to automatically think negative thoughts about all things Boston.

Also, when the Dropkick Murphys in their song Rose Tattoo sing the line "Black and Gold we wave the flag" I will always attribute that to the Penguins even though I know for a fact it is about the Bruins. You wore it first. We wear it better. Yours is also more yellow.

Why then would I choose to spend hours reading a book about a team I don't like? I love Hockey. I can spend many more paragraphs detailing what Hockey means to me but that will detract from the fact I'm here to talk about Kooks and Degenerates on Ice.

Reading this was similar to someone offering me Ice Cream. Let's say I told them that I was in the mood for chocolate but then was fed multiple bowls of vanilla. Over and over until I'm bursting. It's not what I wanted 100% but it was worth every single spoonful. Because what Thomas Whalen does here is not to simply tell you the story of one season of the Bruins but the story of Hockey itself. The history of the Bruins is the history of the NHL. Yes, the focal point of this book will bring us to the 1969-1970 Stanley Cup-winning season. It doesn't end there. It doesn't even start there.

I'm a sucker for exposition. Thomas starts the book by letting us know what was going on in the world which was great because I didn't come around until eighteen years afterward. Nixon as president is trying to pull us out of Vietnam. Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a lake which caused his passenger to drown and was a major scandal but not enough to do lasting damage to his reputation because he is a Kennedy. The Apollo 13 Incident occurred during this time. Muhammed Ali loses his titles and right to fight for refusing to be drafted to Vietnam on the grounds of religious beliefs. There are more movies, music, and sports references.

The book, while being focussed on the 1970's team, has a habit of jumping around. While talking about players we learn everything about them. Where they are from, who they used to play for growing up, what their relatives thought about their talent. It's very informative and for people who like to do deep dives for facts they can tell others while drinking at sports bars, this is perfect. I may not be a Bruins fan but I have a ton of respect for the great revered players of the game. Many of them happen to have played for the Bruins. Who hasn't heard of Bobby Orr, Derek Sanderson, or Phil Esposito? These are people that modern players are being compared to. Art Ross was the first coach and eventually the long time General Manager of the team. Art Ross! As in the Art Ross Trophy.

I've been following Hockey since 2000. I've never been a major sports fan. I flirt with other sports but none give me the emotions that I get while watching Hockey. Something about it clicked with me. There is much I still have to learn about the sport. I'm not completely out of the loop but I didn't know the significance of who Art Ross actually was aside from a great player. Same with the others. To me, they were names. Statistics to be beaten. What was great about Whalen's book is that it felt like I was there watching these players reach the level of greatness that we know see them as. By learning their trials, tribulations, injuries, and anecdotes I feel personally connected to this team. I wanted them to win that cup. Their battle became my battle. When all the pieces fell into place it was like magic on ice.

One thing in the book which I noticed was that we would start to follow a player in the current time period then jump into their past and how they ended up on the Bruins. Then towards the ends of the chapters, they go even further into the future. Sometimes far into the future. The main time frame in this book is the lead up to that 1970's cup win but also the immediate years before and after. By throwing us some information about the late Eighties, Nineties, even the early Naughts I found myself doing some double-takes. These moments of information seem rushed, and disappear quickly among the flow the rest of our story takes.

The acceptable what-happened-after does come after the cup win and we watch the team deteriorate in the years after. Trades, a rival league, health issues, and financial grievances lead our heroes their separate ways. Many find their ways back to the Bruins in one role or another. Other fresher talent also fills in the gaps but it is obvious the great Big Bad Bruin team cannot be replaced.

This was a great book. I enjoyed learning about the players, coaches, and the history of the league. Thomas Whalen also did something I would not expect. He made me respect the Bruins.

On May 10, 1970 Bobby Orr scored the game winning goal in game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals, giving his Boston Bruins a series sweep over the St. Louis Blues and the Stanley Cup championship. Immediately after he shot the puck, he was tripped by a Blues defender, sending him airborne and creating one of the most famous photographs in sport history. The story of Orr, that team and the road to their championship is remembered in this book by Thomas J. Whalen.

This book has all the elements that are typical for a book about a championship team or season: there are game recaps, especially for the playoffs and all four games of the Finals. There are plenty of stories about players for the team featured. In this case, among the prominent Bruins from that club discussed are Orr, Phil Esposito, Derek Sanderson and Gerry Cheevers. Something that isn’t usually included in this type of book is player profiles from other teams. Whalen included profiles of such personalities as Glenn Hall and Bobby Hull, goaltender for the Blues and forward for the Chicago Blackhawks respectively. There is also a final look at the Bruins and the key players after that championship season.

All of these sections make for easy, entertaining reading. It does feel a bit choppy when describing the actual 1969-70 season as that is where many of the player profiles are placed in a random manner. Before this, there was much text about the social and political situation of 1970 along with a brief history of the Boston Bruins. This was good information that took about 25% of the book, but reading through this was worth the time, especially the Bruins history. That sets the tone for the wild season in which, in the words of Eddie Johnston, “a bunch of kooks and degenerates who get along” won the Stanley Cup.

Hockey fans will enjoy this book, especially Bruins fans, as a colorful team won one of the most prized trophies in sports with an iconic photo to capture the championship moment. The 50th anniversary of this team is remembered well in this book.

I wish to thank Rowman and Littlefield for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm going to round up from 3.5 to 4 on this one because of my personal enjoyment. I'm a big fan of the Bruins, not to mention of Boston and hockey in general. It was a great experience reading about events that I had previously known mostly through casual conversation with older folks. My issue is with the formatting/lack of sharp focus. Context is important, but the entire first chapter about the fine details of what was going on in 1970 and the second chapter about the history of the Bruins should have been condensed into a prologue, leaving more room in the body for the specific topic this book is meant to address. When chapter 7 closed with the very recent Bruins past, it felt strange that the "where are they now" style bit that followed was marked as simply another chapter instead of as an epilogue.

This was a well researched book on the history of the Boston Bruins, using the 1970 Stanley Cup win and Bobby Orr's The Goal as its center. In a relaxed style of writing, Whalen gives readers the highlights of the development of this Original Six team, including some of the more outrageous moments both on and off the ice. The focus is the 1969-1970 Stanley Cup winning team and Whalen gives us brief biographies of many of the major players, behind the scenes stories of practical jokes played, drama unfolding, and management decisions many fans may not have known about. There are some great stories: Stan Mikita's accidental discovery of what a curved blade could do, violence and mayhem among fighters on the ice, the famous stitched goalie mask. It was an entertaining read, although I often found the set up of the book a little difficult to follow. While describing the 1969-70 playoff games, particularly the final, Whalen would go on tangents on particular players, giving their biographies and stories about them- most of which were interesting, but they interrupted the flow of the narrative until there was almost none left. It might have been better to set up the final by describing the season overall and getting those stories and biographies in then, then allowing the focus on the playoffs and its impact on the Bruins and Boston to stand on its own. But overall a good book, and one hockey fans will enjoy.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review