Searching for Bobby Orr [Paperback]

Stephen Brunt, in Searching For Bobby Orr, writes:

“Professional sport itself, because it was so obvious, so visible, had always been looked to for signs of changing times, but anyone seeking the true societal cutting edge was bound to be disappointed. For the most part, this one aspect of popular culture lagged behind the rest.”

Yet Brunt has written a book predicated on the notion that this state of affairs was turned on its head the day, to quote Brunt, “Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston and then told the world he’d rather be called Muhammad Ali.” From that day on, professional athletes no longer “represented and reinforced the status quo.”
The trio responsible for this transformation, for both reflecting and shaping the social culture of the 1960s, consisted of Ali, Bobby Orr, and Joe Namath. Only Namath was the master of his own destiny. Ali and Orr reinvented their sports by charging them with a new kind of free movement and power, but both were shackled by, and powerless against, the media-savvy greed of others who controlled their every minute outside the the ring and the arena.
Ali and Orr were blessed with extraordinary talent and the will to apply it through techniques that were untraditional and even counterintuitive in their hidebound sports; as Brunt puts it, they “embodied the idea that it didn’t have to be as it had always been.” Their near-complete disavowal of orthodoxy jibed perfectly with the rise of the counterculture during their prime years in the 1960s and early ’70s, making them engines and symbols of upheaval, change, revolution.
Small-town boys with extremely limited personal experience when they turned pro, undereducated and more or less functionally illiterate, they were both also virtually blank slates outside of their games-easy prey for manipulative hustlers.
Brunt has created a terrific portrait of Alan Eagleson as he was in his early days: a hyperactive, bombastic schlenter who stumbled upon an athletic gold mine and was shrewd enough to learn from the best examples how to exploit it. He slavishly imitated the tactics of American media manipulators such as Ali’s Nation of Islam handlers, and incessantly compared the oppressed plight of Canadian hockey players to the shackle-breaking ascent of American football, baseball, and basketball players.
The media coverage Eagleson assiduously courted for Orr trained him “how to play a character named Bobby Orr,” while Eagleson won over public support by asking how they could tolerate knowing that this greatest of all hockey players was making a fraction of the money his sports peers like Namath and Wilt Chamberlain were making. Incidentally, his insistence on breaking the NHL’s secretiveness about player salaries also effected a revolution in sports reporting: “Writers who in the past would have shied away from financial matters, believing that their role was to cover the game and only the game . . . were beginning to take a larger interest in what transpired in the boardrooms. For [them] . . . Eagleson was a godsend.”
It wasn’t just salaries and journalism Eagleson transformed, either:

“Eagleson was one of the first to understand that you could take a player-or, more specifically, the idea of a player-and turn it into all kinds of income-generating opportunities, one piled on top of another, each spreading the brand name, each building equity.”

Under Eagleson’s direction, Orr broke through “to a place where the game that defined him was only part of the story.” But this breakthrough did not mean Orr transcended hockey the way Ali transcended boxing. Brunt attributes this to a number of factors. One was Orr himself: he had no personal substance; there was nothing behind that character of “Bobby Orr”. When the inevitable betrayal came, as it did for Ali, Orr had nothing like Ali’s shining faith to cope with the bitter disillusionment. A second factor was Eagleson’s egomaniacal hogging of the spotlight. A third was hockey’s persistently marginal status in the sports-oriented consciousness of the American media and public. And a fourth factor was that Canada’s brand of mythicising-“the fantasy of one nation united around a puck”-casts our hockey gods as hockey gods only, impossible to take seriously as social revolutionaries. (That Quebeckers elevated Rocket Richard to the status of a social hero is just further proof of their distinctness as a nation within Canada.)
Brunt is a sports writer, not a sports analyst. His text moves briskly, and he rarely makes writerly mistakes (other than having the Red Army hockey team “walk off the ice” while wearing skates). Searching For Bobby Orr is, however, infuriatingly saddled with footnotes evidently intended to explain to American readers the identities of Juliette, the Dionne Quints, Foster Hewitt, Conn Smythe, John Diefenbaker, and Carl Brewer. If they don’t already know who these people are, why are they reading a book about Bobby Orr?
“The entire experience of being black changed for millions of people because of Ali,” said baseball player Reggie Jackson. “He not only changed all of sports forever,” adds George Lois, “he went on to change America.” And somewhere in Boston, a bitter Bobby Orr made sure his sons grew up without ever learning to skate.
James Roots (Books in Canada)

Praise for Facing Ali: The Opposition Weighs In:

• National Bestseller
• A Globe and mail Best Book
• A Sports Illustrated Book of the Year

“These are men of substance, worth getting to know. Brunt does them justice, but the author has done something even more impressive: He has found something new to report about Muhammad Ali.”
–Sports Illustrated

“Stephen Brunt takes us for a rare and sometimes painful sit in the loser’s corner, where, as all observers of tragedy know, the most revealing stories take place.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“Facing Ali is a work of wit and insight. It goes the distance.”
–The Vancouver Sun


From the Hardcover edition.