What is it about hockey that causes people long past their athletic prime to don bulky equipment and risk their wellbeing in such a violent game? With just the right mix of candor and affection, that's the question longtime New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten ponders in his engaging memoir, The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game.
Paumgarten was raised in privileged circumstances on New York City's Upper East Side, coming to the sport as an eight-year-old playing in Central Park in the 1970s. Something about the game, not least the outlet it provided for his anger, grabbed him and wouldn't let him go. After returning to New York City following his graduation from Princeton University, he began a two-decades-long engagement with a succession of more than a dozen teams. Their games ranged from roller hockey on the Lower East Side to ice hockey above a parking lot at Chelsea Piers on the West Side, all of it adding up to a "cultish pastime."
Paumgarten is unafraid to visit the dark side of hockey, not least the casual homophobia. Despite his reservations about hockey's less admirable aspects, he wasn't reluctant to introduce his sons to the game. The Intangibles concludes with Paumgarten's wistful reflections as he considered, in his mid-40s, finally hanging up his skates and facing a "puckless life." He adroitly captures the internal struggle facing any aging athlete when it's time to abandon a beloved game for good. "I love these men," he writes, and thanks to the intimacy of this memoir, he allows readers to experience some of that love along with him. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer