One to Remember

One To Remember by Ken Reid is a fantastic hockey book!
Though I'm not a sports fan, I love sports stories.
I do love the Philadelphia Flyers though but am not an AVID fan.
This book is inspiring, engaging, full of ups and downs, but mostly it's just a reminder of dreams coming true, and dreams being put to the side and picking yourself up to forge new dreams.
A must for any hockey fan, but honestly, this book is for anyway. Written so well (like a puck floating effortlessly on the ice).
Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for this ARC.
Publishes in Sep 2020.

Wayne Gretzky holds the record for most goals in the National Hockey League, scoring 894 in the regular season, and a further 122 in the playoffs. "One to Remember" however, focuses on guys who are precisely 1,015 goals behind The Great One in the record books. Ken Reid interviewed 39 players who scored a single goal in the NHL during their hockey careers, and this book tells their stories.

Reid takes care to point out that scoring even one goal in the NHL puts these guys in a rather exclusive club, something which less than 5000 people have achieved in the more than 100 years of the league’s existence, and the book covers a range of feelings about their membership of the one goal club. Some are just happy to have made it to the league at all, some were highly touted prospects who, for one reason or another, didn’t pan out, some had their career cut short by injury and some were goalies who just happened to benefit from a lucky bounce. But one thing they all seem to have in common is that they can describe their goal in almost perfect detail, knowing who they were on the ice with and which goaltender they scored on. And you can understand why!

"One to Remember" is an enjoyable, easy read, which shines a light on players who most hockey history books would overlook, but who all have interesting stories to tell.

Anyone who has picked up a hockey stick and taken a shot at the net dreams of that shot going into the goal in an NHL game. This book by Ken Reid tells the story of 39 players who accomplished that feat once, then never did so again. It is a follow-up to his previous book about the stories of players who appeared in one NHL game.

Like that book, the stories are entertaining, varied and reflect the personality of the man telling the story. The time frame is wide spread – from the 1960’s to the present and every position is covered. There is a section devoted to goalies who scored a goal (but only one, so Ron Hextall and Martin Brodeur are not included), including the first goalie credited with a goal, Billy Smith of the New York Islanders. Other chapter subjects include first round draft choices and players whose careers were cut short by injury.

One characteristic this book has that is very good is that while reading the stories, they come across as authentic and the reader will feel like he or she is there talking to the man reliving that one goal. Sometimes the goal brings back great memories, sometimes it really doesn’t mean that much to the man. It was interested to learn that several of these players haven’t kept the puck from that first goal. In fact, one of them used the puck unknowingly while playing pond hockey with his son and ended up losing it when it sank to the bottom when an errant shot ended up in a section of the pond that wasn’t frozen.

Something else that one might expect is that none of these players, except possibly for the goalies, are household names. As a result, many of the stories are ones in which they remember their time in juniors, the minor leagues or overseas just as fondly as their time in the NHL and the goal he scored. Sometimes this can be a whirlwind experience, as was the case for Damian Surma, who in just a matter of hours was called up to the NHL, scored a goal, separated his shoulder and was demoted back to the minors. That was one of the better stories in the book to me.

That story is just one example of the type of material one should expect when reading Reid’s collection of interviews of the “one goal club.” As is the case with most collections of stories and interviews, some are much better than others, but they all are told with the memory of an event that these men have in common – that they all scored exactly one goal during their time in the National Hockey League.

I wish to thank ECW Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.