They Don't Play Hockey in Heaven: A Dream, a Team, and My Comeback Season

Eight years after his college hockey career ended and two years after a successful brain surgery, Baker, a writer for U.S. Weekly, decided to try to play professional hockey for the first time. After working out at recreational rinks, he made the jump to a low-level minor-league team as an emergency goalie, in the oil-town of Bakersfield, Calif., (surprisingly, a hockey hotbed), for a team willing to take him on in the name of research. In a style that is equal parts George Plimpton-gonzo and Rocky Balboa-triumphalism, the author spends much of the book chronicling the culture of the team and his intense desire to play on it. Indeed, he gets almost no ice time; the story derives its suspense not from the question""how he will play?"" but the question""will they ever let him play?"". Yet Baker's account maintains a powerful narrative thrust, thanks to the neat structure of a professional sports season and the author's appealing psychological candor. Baker also shows great range--the characters on his team are colorful and the descriptions of life at the lowest echelons of professional sports are as poignant as they are startling. Though he lets in a few cheap lines (he has a tendency toward the maudlin as well as toward locker-room and self-help cliches, and he mentions his brain tumor so often it starts to feel calculating), the narrative remains touching and surprisingly effective.