The young lady who sat behind us at last Sunday’s hockey game remained silent through the first period, evidently spellbound. Then she remarked to her escort,  “I don’t know who these idiots are, but they certainly know how to skate.”
• The New Yorker, November 27, 1937

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Puckstruck is an undertaking of Stephen Smith’s. His stories about five-dollar bills and boy travel writers have appeared in Geist and McSweeney’s. Like legendary Montreal Canadiens’ winger Bob Gainey, he was born in Peterborough, Ontario, and took to the ice at an early age, where he soon failed to follow Gainey to the NHL. While his enthusiasm was never in doubt — a coach once worried that with his headlong approach to the game, he was going to injure himself — he won none of the Stanley Cups that Gainey collected, and no Conn Smythe trophies, not a one.

An award-winning reporter and sometime columnist, he sometimes refers to himself in the third-person. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, The Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, The Walrus, The Literary Review of Canada, The Kingston Whig-Standard, The Hockey News, Saturday Night, Quill & Quire, Outside, and The New York Times Magazine.

He has a book, too, also called Puckstruck. It’s his first. He shoots left.

In 2018, he was awarded the Society for International Hockey Research’s Brian McFarlane Award, which recognizes outstanding research and writing.

 

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