Customer Reviews

Hockey Tonk: The Amazing Story of the Nashville Predators

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For anybody thinking about getting into sports management or becoming a professional athlete, this is a must read! It provides an insightful view of what is expected of professional athletes and how to successfully manage a pro organization. Being a successful athlete in this day and age goes well beyond just raw talent. Highly recommend this book for high school and college athletes.

Making hockey successful in the middle of the bible belt was no easy task, and this is a remarkable story of management excellence. Predators owner Craig Leipold and renowned management author Richard W. Oliver combine to tell an unforgettable story. It is a must for fans of good management as well as hockey.

This is a great story of hockey success in a city better known for its music industry than its stick handling. Craig Leipold tells an inspirational story of how he put the Nashville Predators organisation together from scratch in a very short time period.

The book, in my opinion, is let down in the way that the material is presented. There seems to be no logic in the way the story is told, both on a macro and micro level. On the larger scale the story seems to vaguely follow a kind of chronology, but there are regular jumps both backward and forward in time. On a smaller scale, I also found the paragraphs hard to follow, as they too would randomly criss-cross the chronological flow of the text.

In addition to the above criticism, I found the writing to be very dry, and without direction. Many chapters had no clear focus, and others had no climax when it was clear there should have been. One example of that was in a chapter where (if memory serves me correctly) the authors were setting the scene for a big game against Dallas, and the tension was clearly building towards game time where we were going to see if the Preds could defeat the Stars. As the tension was rising, the authors flippantly give away the final score line -in parenthesises no less- making one wonder where the chapter was really going in the first place.

These criticisms aside, the book is still a good read, and is engaging enough that in the end I felt an emotional attachment to the Predators, and I know that I'll think of them differently next time I watch them play (on TV of course!), and in some way consider myself a fan.