The Last Season [Paperback]

Now that his hockey career is ending, what will become of his life?

Felix Batterinski grew up tough in Northern Ontario where hockey was the only way out of a life of grinding poverty. He got out and enjoyed fame as a hockey enforcer for the Philadelphia Flyers. But fame is fleeting.

Now in his thirties and at the end of his playing career, Felix tries to make a go of it as a player-coach for a Finnish club. As the lone Canadian on the team, he is an outsider with a reputation that takes on a life of its own. When a controversial play brings his comeback bid to a screeching halt, Felix is faced with his own obsolescence and begins a tragic descent into disillusion and despair.

Sports literature as good as it gets. [The Last Season] is so rich in meaning that to call it simply a hockey novel is misleading&. In giving Canadians Felix Batterinski, Roy MacGregor has shown them a vital part of themselves. Superbfar better than many Governor General's Award-winning novels since. Felix Batterinski grew up tough in Northern Ontario. After enjoying brief fame as an enforcer for the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers, he finds himself eking out a living as a player-coach in Finland. But a controversial play spells the end of his comeback bid, and Felix begins a tragic descent into disillusion and despair. MacGregor's description of this rural Ontario family is reminiscent of William Faulkner's descriptions of rural Mississippi families?-- the sense of foreboding, the family members bound together by dark secret, the mentally retarded relative, the clash of organized religion and the occult&. Clearly then,The Last Seasonis much more than a sports book. The best book of fiction on hockey. A classic Canadian novel. A compelling fable about violence, superstition, love and the shallowness of modern life.

Combining entries from her grandfathers diary with other reports and sources from the MacAlpine expedition, Karrams book tells alƒE