HOT CORNER
A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed.
What: “Tropic of Hockey: My Search For The Game In Unlikely Places”
Author: Dave Bidini
Publisher: The Lyons Press
Price: $24.95
Canadian Dave Bidini is just your average musician who decided to write books. He has been able to combine his love of travel with his colorful writing style. After writing his first book “On a Cold Road” in 1998, which created a buzz in Canada in the late 1990s, Bidini returned to playing rhythm guitar for his Canadian rock band. But while on tour in the Deep South, Bidini was outside Athens, Ga., when he got the idea of writing about hockey played in unusual places.
Bidini is not a great hockey player, with his most recent playing experience coming against musicians around Toronto, but he gives a fresh look at places where hockey is still a sport and not entertainment.
Bidini ended up finding people playing the sport in unexpected places, from the eighth floor of a shopping mall in Hong Kong to the desert of the United Arab Emirates. Bidini’s humor makes every story enjoyable. You can’t help but laugh out loud reading the chapter titled “Bobby Clarke’s Teeth” about his trip to China. Bidini does a good job of describing the word game he played with the few players who spoke English. The Chinese players surprised Bidini with their knowledge of the Montreal Canadiens, Steve Yzerman and the old Russian Army team. Bidini ended up learning the hard way not to underestimate a couple of elderly Chinese men on the ice. In his last game with his new Chinese friends, Bidini suffered a five-inch welt when an older Chinese player knocked out his wind with a stick to his ribs.
Whenever Bidini found a new location to play, he looked for anything tied to traditional hockey.
One of his most favorite things to learn were the names of some of the players he found playing in the tropics of hockey.
How could you not like Precious and Jewel Rabena, two sisters on a girls’ Mega Wingers team in Manila? Or Brambillo, a Finnish player he found competing in a tournament in Dubai?