For four decades, Gare Joyce has profiled hockey’s icons and obscurities, but he’s saved the strangest and funniest stories for Portrait of a Hockey Scribe.
A memoir tracking a child’s worship of sportswriters, Portrait of a Hockey Scribe is a cautionary tale about getting exactly what you want — for Joyce, a seat in Maple Leaf Gardens’ press box.
Joyce spares himself no embarrassment in cataloging his persistently humbling beginnings — from washing out in journalism school to working a dead-end job at a tabloid. After quitting the business and working as the Shamrock Tavern’s doorman, Joyce gets back in the game writing on spec for a sports monthly. The apprenticeship was rife with blunders, but it also landed him lunch with King Clancy and Wendel Clark at the Gardens and a private audience in the executive office of the new NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. In a few short years, The Globe and Mail hired Joyce as its hockey columnist even though he had only ever seen a half dozen live NHL games.
This book takes readers behind the scenes: with Larry Murphy, when he was Leafs fans’ scapegoat, and Pat Burns, when his firing loomed, to the last games at the Boston Garden and the Forum. These, however, are all a prelude for the final puck drop at the Gardens, when memories flood back and, with them, regrets about the price a scribe pays for a free seat on press row.
