Lords of the Rinks: The Emergence of the National Hockey League 1875-1936/les Yeux De Maurice Richard: Une Histoire Culturelle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
J.C.-K. Wong, Lords of the Rinks: The Emergence of the National Hockey League 1875- 1936 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 330pp. Cloth. $65 (£40). ISBN 0-8020-3725-9; Paper. $32.95 (£18). ISBN 0-80208520-2. B. Melancon, Les Yeux de Maurice Richard: Une histoire culturelle (Montreal: Fides, 2006), 288pp. Trade paperback. $29.95 (£13.00). ISBN: 2-7621-2681-9; 978-2-7621-2681-5. Writing about ice hockey in Canada means writing in the shadow of mythology. Although Canadians have long regarded hockey as essential to Canadian identity, until recently there was very little critical writing on the sport. Hockey books consisted primarily of hagiographies and popular histories repackaging the same old stories about the game's nebulous importance to the nation. For this reason, both John Chi-Kit Wong's Lords of the Rinks: The Emergence of the National Hockey League 1875-1936 and BenoIt Melancon's Les yeux de Maurice Richard: Une histoire culturelle are a welcome addition to the literature. The two books differ greatly in their approaches. Wong's book is a very detailed historical account of the early days of organised and professional hockey, while Melancon intelligently applies the tools of literary criticism to examine how a single hockey player from Montreal has been mythologised in the decades since his retirement. For many hockey players and fans, true success means winning the Stanley Cup, and it is with the first awarding of that trophy that Lords of the Rinks begins. At that time (1894) the players were all amateurs, but there were paying spectators and a profit to be made from those gentlemen who played for the love of it. Wong notes that '[d]espite the sentimentality later generations have for the first Stanley Cup, there is one unmistakable but often overlooked facet of this first match. It was a commercial undertaking' (p. 3). Thus, Wong's historical study entails a de-mythologising of the amateur hockey structures and organisations that grew into the professional National Hockey League, Canada's preferred brand of hockey. Wong is the first historian to have gained access to the National Hockey League's jealousy guarded archives, and it is in this regard that his book is most valuable. The result of this archival research is an often very meticulous account of early league meetings and quibbling over hot topics such as whether Canadian or US referees should officiate at games, or what percentage of the gate proceeds a visiting team should receive. In other words, this is a specialised book that will appeal primarily to the hockey historian or those interested in labour relations or other business aspects of professional sports. This is not to suggest that Wong loses himself in boardroom minutiae. He always considers the broader context, analysing the effects of occurrences such as the Athletic Wars (where advocates of British-style sporting amateurism pitted themselves against those who preferred US-style professionalism), the First World War, and the burgeoning postwar stateside economy on where and how Canada plays hockey. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".