Self-published books are always a gamble… some like Greg Enright’s Rocky Hockey: The Short but Wild Ride of the NHL’s Colorado Rockies (2023) are wonderfully written, accurate, and well-edited, and others, which I shall not name, are more frustrating reading experiences because of their historical inaccuracies and other mistakes, so I’m always skeptical when I come across a new self-published book. I’ve always believed that every player has a story to tell, whether they are superstars or fourth-liners barely able to shoot a puck. Some of the best storytellers in sports have been pluggers, grinders, and Mendoza-line aficionados. Take the great Bob Uecker, for instance; he parlayed the most pedestrian baseball playing career into a life-long broadcasting gig that even Johnny Carson could not resist asking about. Saskatchewan native George Pesut certainly wasn’t a star neither in the NHL nor the WHA, but he had a long career from which to draw his tales.

Pesut’s memoir is an interesting, honest, and sometimes flawed book. His hockey career can best be described as nomadic, as he suited up for a different team just about every season of his 21-year career. To say that he was basically a hired gun from the late 1970s until the early 1990s is an accurate way of describing his life as a pro. As a result, the seasons sometimes blend into one another, and so the book becomes unfortunately repetitive at times, but Pesut could hardly be blamed for this, since there really is no other way to describe such a long journeyman career. There is no shortage of raunchy tales involving booze, parties, pranks, and ladies. His journey from junior star, to NHL prospect, to full-time member of the Golden Seals, to part-time member of the WHA’s Calgary Cowboys is especially intriguing, since it is obviously the era of hockey that appeals to me most. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about how professional hockey was run in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, the book is quite revealing, even borderline shocking. You can practically scrape the sleaze off the pages with a knife. We have all heard stories about how sports are sometimes corrupt behind the scenes (hello, Alan Eagleson!), but those stories have nothing on the ones Pesut has to tell. Life as an import player certainly had its ups and downs, from playing in beautiful outdoor rinks in Switzerland and access to an unending string of puck bunnies, to questionable owners inking sponsorship deals with dictators to team physicians whose credentials mirror those of the infamous Dr. Nick Riviera (“Hi, Everybody!”).

Particularly interesting are Pesut’s takes on some of the coaches he endured during his career, namely Joe “The Crow” Crozier and Bill “Elmer Fudd” McCreary. I also enjoyed learning about how the Swiss Hockey League worked once upon a time, since international hockey is not something I’m terribly familiar with. What I would have loved to learn more about are the people who obviously played an important part of his life in Europe, but who are often pushed to the background here. For instance, his girlfriend Kissy is mentioned numerous times during a seven or eight year stretch of his career in Germany, but we don’t learn anything about her. The same goes for other women he mentions, such as Wicked Wanda. With a name like that, I can’t help but wonder why she earned that name. Finally, Pesut’s wife May, whom he married near the tail-end of his career, suddenly appears out of nowhere, and is barely described at all. We also don’t learn anything about Pesut’s life after retiring from hockey, which I felt was disappointing. I felt that a final chapter on Pesut’s life after hockey could have been inserted at the expense of some of the more repetitive sections about playing in Germany.

One final issue I have with the book regards the spelling and grammar found throughout. Names are too often misspelled, and run-on sentences are an annoying re-occurrence. Overall, the book could have used an editor’s touch to fix these mistakes, and cut down the length of the tome. At a whopping 512 pages, a few details could have been left out without hindering the overall tone of the book. Like I said before, the tales are very interesting, but they sometimes become bogged down in repetitive phrases and descriptions. If you can overlook these flaws, and you have an interest in 1970s hockey and life as an import player in Europe, the book will surely appeal to you.