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Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Hockey Goalie

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Hockey wasn't always the high-tech, indoor game that you see on TV today. It used to be contested on outdoor ponds, games at the mercy of weather conditions, cars surrounding the rink to provide illumination for night games. Bruce Valley learned the game under those conditions in the 50's with the Rye Seahawks playing goalie at the tender age of 14. He recounts those memories in his book Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Goalie. For anyone with a love of hockey and a sense of history, this is a great introspective read that takes you back to a simpler time in our collective history.

Valley grew up in Rye in the 40's, a small town on the east coast, struggling to survive in the post WWII era. One day as a youngster, he looked out the window of his house and saw something he had never seen before... a bunch of men skating on ice with sticks, batting around a little rubber disk. His father explained the game of hockey to him, and his life was never the same. Without much else to do in a cold New England winter, Valley took up the game with a passion. This adhoc game turned into an official team in an actual league, and the Rye Seahawks became a dominant force in the area. Valley ended up joining the team at the age of 14 for a two year stint towards the end of the team's existence. While the outdoor version of the game was drawing to a close, Valley continued to make hockey a critical part of his life and passion. Thru his eyes, you see a side of the game lost to today's youth, and a piece of history that was played out every winter in small towns all over the Northeast part of the country.

I really liked this book. Valley writes with a clarity that puts you right on the ice, temperatures close to zero, picking up the shovel to clear the ice for the next day's games. He supplements his stories with scans of actual news clippings that reported the game results, treating the team and the games as high-profile sports entertainment. All in all, it's an introspective look into what the game of hockey means to someone, coupled with a step back into nostalgia.

Seahawk takes you back to the days before artificial ice, curved sticks, facemasks and arenas with creature comforts for fans and players alike. It spins a tale about the game as played by an amateur team of WWII veterans who return home from the war to their small New Hampshire town of Rye with time on their hands and energy to burn. It is a firsthand account told by Bruce Valley who is uniquely qualified to tell the story. As a wide eyed young fan there in the very beginning to an excited teenager pressed into service as the team's goalie in its final years, Valley brings the town, the team and the game back to life. Now in his 60's, Valley wisely didn't depend on just his memory of the events 40 to 50 years ago but carefully researched his subject and blended that history with his own "confessions of an old goalie". The result is a book that is not only enjoyable to read but easy to put down for a few minutes to close your eyes and see in your mind the pictures that Valley has painted for you. Let there be no doubt that Seahawk is not just another autobiography by a pretender athlete/author. Valley is the real deal as a writer and has actually made a few pretty decent saves in the net through the years. I recommend this fun book to all the athletes out there who worry about the day they will be too old to play their sport. Valley proves that you are never too old.

Not knowing one end of a hockey stick from another, I was prepared to overlook this book about the sport. How wrong I was! In his sports memoir "Seahawk : Confessions of an Old Goalie", Mr. Valley writes simultaneously with a young boy's awe and an adult's maturity about the game he so clearly loves. Reflecting precisely and emotionally about his decades playing a game which has also been a consistent theme within his life, he writes with truly amazing clarity about his home town, including particularly vivid descriptions of New Hampshire's long cold winters and the stark Atlantic seacoast.

There is arguably no sport that retains as great a sense of its own history and as deep a culture as ice hockey. And there are few athletes who endure more of what others would call misery in order to play their game than hockey people. Bruce Valley is hockey people, and his memoir, Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Goalie, is a tribute to hockey and hockey people that reverberates on several levels.

On one hand, Seahawk is a family album of sorts, for a team and a time lost to history. It is the story of post war Rye, New Hampshire, a real-life Mystery, Alaska, and the town's hockey team, the Rye Seahawks, who played outdoors under makeshift strings of lights on a frozen pond, in front of passionate, devoted town folk fans. Valley was a 14 year old kid goalie, drafted into the ranks of a hard-bitten new Englander team of WWII veterans, and his book is a warm and sometimes harrowing homage to his time with the Seahawks in the waning days of a passing era.

But Seahawk is more than just a family album of a memoir, because in his heartfelt reflections on the game, the culture, and the people who play hockey--whether on frozen ponds or indoor rinks. Valley touches on the themes and truths that resonate in hockey people everywhere; the visceral excitement of the cold; the eerie beauty of a black ice pond under a midnight moon; and hockey's unique warrior code of the handshake line at the end of a violent and often brutal game.

But Seahawks is, after all, the confessions of an old hockey goalie, and as much as it is a look back, it is also unmistakably the Old Goalie, now in his 60's and still playing the game, looking forward and coming to terms with the fact that there aren't a lot of games left.

In Seahawks Bruce Valley spoke to the soul of hockey, and hockey players, but he succeeded, too, in speaking to a generation of men who have spent their lives playing any game and now see the last game looming on the horizon.

In this case, the goalie scores.

Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Hockey Goalie is the personal memoir of a young man who was part of a championship New England town hockey team composed of World War II veterans during the late 1950s. Seahawk continues to relate the author's trials, travails, joys and foibles as he continued his passion for amateur hockey goaltending into the later years of life. "Why, when you can hop in your car and drive a civilized half hour to an indoor rink, dress out in cozy warmth, and play hockey in predictable weather conditions on perfect ice, would we shovel and build a rink, risking frost bite and possible immersion to play outdoors? Fair question. Answer: Because it's there. Because it's free. Because it's ours." A passionate testimony to the enduring joy of sports, highly recommended especially for anyone who loves to play hockey.

I originally bought and read this book on a whim a few months ago.
The book does a great job capturing the rough and tumble world of small town New England Ice Hockey in the 1950's and 60's. It chronicles the author's experience playing goalie on the home town team representing Rye, New Hampshire in the New England league. The team skated mostly on out-door rinks constructed each Winter. It is a must read for any old time "pond -skaters" and Hockey buffs who participated in this type of Ice Hockey .....or even anyone who just wishes they had.
The Author, Bruce Valley, now well past 60, still plays Ice Hockey occasionally with a "senior" (over 50) Ice Hockey Group, and shortly after reading the book I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time, and actually played with him in a pick-up game. Our team won and he actually made a few saves.........once again proving the old adage that "even a blind squirrel finds a few acorns"

Author Bruce Valley, in this labor of love, does a terrific job of describing both his time with the Rye Seahawks and subsequent years playing goalie. Valley has an obvious love of the game, and does a nice job of describing how the inevitable aging process affects us all. As a 42 year old used-to-be basketball player, I know full well the feeling of not being able to do physically what the mind wishes.

Thanks to author Valley. This one is recommended for all hockey fans as well as those interested in New Hampshire history. Enjoy!

Bruce Valley's style of writing brings you back to the days when life was simpler and hockey was more than a sport, it was a way of life. The "Confessions of an Old Hockey Goalie" are spoken with true emotions and genuine feelings. You can almost feel the bitter cold wind biting at your face as Bruce describes the action. He speaks of the passion and the drive that not only serves us well in sports but serve us well in life. I found the book to be well worth the read not only for the history of hockey in southern New Hampshire and but for the chance to go back in time and look at myself and remember all of those games of street hockey that I loved. Bruce's story is one that is repeated over and over, town after town. It may be told by different people and even revolve around a different sport but its underlying message is that the human spirit will live on!

SEAHAWK is a love story. It's about the love of hockey in its purest form: pond hockey, or "shinny" as it was called in Rye, New Hampshire in the 1940s, played outdoors on the most elemental of surfaces: "black ice". It's about how a group of World War II veterans who loved the game gave a small town a sense of pride and identity, starting a hockey team from scratch and turning it into a powerhouse that made it all the way to the Class B championships in Boston Garden. Finally, it's about one man's life-long passion for the game from his days as a fourteen-year-old goalie with the Seahawks to his debate about when it's time to hang up the pads.

Although author Bruce Valley is a former test pilot and an aerospace executive, he's also a poet and it shows in this memoir. He writes with profound emotion and insight about the hockey-playing war veterans he hero-worshipped when he was young, and admired even more when he grew up to understand the sacrifices they had made. He paints the depth of devotion required to keep a team going when Mother Nature repeatedly threw her worst at their home-made outdoor "pond". He vividly describes the wide-eyed fascination he felt when he saw his first game of "shinny" at age three and how that excitement has never left him. I often found myself reading with tears in my eyes, not an experience one usually associates with a book on the intense, hard-charging sport of hockey.

Perhaps the author's most poetic passages deal with the ice itself, and how "great expanses of natural black ice have an unfathomable allure for hockey players. Black ice presents at once an object of beauty, a territory to be explored, and a means of vigorous exercise. It is available only seasonally in certain places. For those who choose to live in a cold region, black ice symbolizes where we live and who we are." The descriptions of the players' struggle to maintain a playable ice surface for their scheduled games is one of almost superhuman devotion and effort. Before they went to work, the team members would shovel snow off the pond, scrape the ice and flood it with water, hoping the day would be cold enough to freeze it into a smooth, glassy finish. After work, they often had to shovel more snow before they could begin the game. Following every hard-fought game, those same men scraped the ice and flooded it again. (The Zamboni had yet to be invented.) This cycle continued throughout the hockey season.

SEAHAWK includes some intriguing moments of hockey history, such as the game played against the Berlin Maroons, "a legendary team of fiery, long-haired, non-English-speaking French Canadians." The teen-aged Mr. Valley is in goal warming up when one of his defensemen asks, "Ever seen a slap shot?" The young goalie says no so the defenseman suggests he skate over to the other end of the rink where "two or three of the Maroon forwards were striking at the puck with a high and violent, golflike swing. The shots looked like bullets, some passing right through the chicken-wire barricade behind the goal....It suddenly seemed probable that my life would end sometime that night." Fortunately, the new shooting concept was still highly inaccurate, and none of the slap shots came anywhere near the goal so Mr. Valley lived to play another game.

Vintage photographs and newspaper clippings describing the Seahawks' games add visual and historical interest to the book. The description of old-fashioned hockey equipment is enough to make a modern-day hockey mom envy the price tag but cringe at the lack of protection it offered. (Helmets? Facemasks? No one even considered wearing them.)

The heart of SEAHAWK, however, is Mr. Valley's passion for the game. He traces it from those early days of skating around the periphery of the "rink" on double-bladed skates to returning to Rye for games with the "Rye Remnant", the former Seahawks and sons of Seahawks who cannot resist the lure of natural black ice. He journeys back to his hometown and stops by Eel Pond. "There they were, far off in the southwest corner of the great pond, where the ice was perhaps smoothest or the treed shoreline offered some protection from the wind. A group of bright hockey jerseys, predominantly red or blue, moved back and forth, cutting, weaving, and waving sticks for passes. No sound traversed the distance. The scene was silent. The day brightened. Hockey lived on in Rye."

When Mr. Valley presents a speech to the hockey team at his alma mater, the Naval Academy, he's asked why he continues to pit himself against players one-third his age. He answers simply, "Because I can." The truth is that he plays because he can't bear to give up something at once so pure, so elemental, so comradely.

For those who love hockey, this book is a must-read.

Like hockey? Interested in local sports history? Any yes to either of those, and I'd recommend Bruce Valley's new book, "Seahawk: Confessions of a Hockey Goalie."

Valley picks words like a painter picks colors: he selects each one carefully and, often times, perfectly. His writing is full of enlightening realizations that apply to everyone, not just sports fans or hockey aficionados. Still, the book is meant for hockey fans, and fans of the game in its simplest form - on the pond.

The book is a quick read, at fewer than 100 pages, and it appreciates the historical aspects of life, the game of hockey and the New England area. Valley's narrative voice brings the reader on the ice, behind his goalie mask, fitting the cover of the book well. His description and imagery are luxuries for those obsessed with hockey and all of its beautiful nuances.

There are incredible photographs of hockey players in the 1950s placed at the opening of each chapter and after the text, there are lots of old newspaper clippings about Valley's team, the Rye Seahawks.

The Seahawks weren't a professional team; they were a beloved group of local veterans coming back from World War II who served as the main source of entertainment for adults and children alike. Valley played goalie for two years with the team, starting when he was only 14, but followed them throughout his childhood.

Valley talks about hockey towns and how Rye fit into that idea decades ago. He addresses his love for the game and how he feels about it now. One particular chapter that stuck with me was about his decision to hang up the pads and move on. It really resonates with any hockey player who loved the game as a teenager but stopped playing once the competition grew to unattainable levels.

The book is for old-time hockey; it's for history and war veterans. Valley's words are a tribute to New Hampshire hockey.