LONDON, UK – There have been few constants in the world of British ice hockey over the last forty years, but there is one little piece of history that celebrates a landmark birthday this month.
Precisely A5 in size and just under 200 pages long, The Ice Hockey Annual is a much treasured part of the fabric of the game in this country. Its author Stewart Roberts is one of the few independent journalists who have stuck with the sport through its highs and lows.
Technology has changed since Roberts first produced the Annual in 1976 inspired by the Ice Hockey World Annual by Bob Giddens. The first front cover featured the Ayr Bruins from west Scotland, including then netminder Jim Graves who went on to play for Nottingham Panthers and Streatham Redskins, and now famously runs Rockies Sports bar in Belfast.
Pre-internet it truly was an unenviable task to put together such a comprehensive review of what has always been a minority sport.
“Looking back it was a struggle, but I had youth and enthusiasm on my side” explains Roberts.
“One of the hardest parts was typing it all up on a manual typewriter onto a stencil. Hands up, who remembers stencils? Not many readers, I’ll bet”
“As for information, I was closely involved with the organisation of the game in those days. This gave me a wide network of contacts so I was able to get much of the news first-hand.”
“Time was also a problem as I had a full-time job for the first 20 years. They were long days back then.”
The Annual contains reviews of every league in the UK and is packed with statistics, photographs and interesting quotes from the previous season. It is unlike anything else available to British Hockey fans and Roberts maintains that early changes to its format shaped the annual to its present much loved state.
“The best feedback I’ve had was when I handed the Annual over to a publishing firm, Crowood Press, in the 1980s” he admits.
“They showed me how to improve the layout and gave me a lot of other useful tips. Much the same layout is still used today”
The Annual is now in full colour and the true survivor of printed hockey media in this country. Magazines such as the Ice Hockey News Review and Powerplay have long since vanished from the shelves and the sport pretty much relies on club news and fan based contributions as resource for information.
“The lack of a regular, independent national news magazine, either in print or online, is definitely a big loss for the sport” maintains Roberts, who has in the past written about hockey for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times and has reported on several World Championships for the Daily Telegraph.
“But I appreciate that producing a weekly publication is a much bigger ask than bringing one out once a year. I guess the clubs and their fans are happy to rely on their local papers and websites for news.”
While most of the content in the annual is factual rather than opinion based, Roberts does of course include his own opinions and states objectives he believes the sport should seek to achieve. Given the sensitive nature of some within British hockey to any perceived slight, one might think the veteran journalist may think to tread carefully, but he believes that it is not an issue.
“No one’s blackened my eye yet but of course my opinions have irritated a few people over the years” he says.
“My targets have usually been our governing body – or should that be bodies? I’ve had run-ins with them all, going back to the BIHA’s boss, Bunny Ahearne”
“I was especially disliked by the Superleague who I still feel did the sport a huge disservice by throwing out almost all the British players and replacing them with imports. But that was nearly 20 years ago and now all team sports suffer from this”
“I can’t recall any club refusing to sell the books on this basis. In any case, I usually sell the Annuals through the supporters clubs, and the fans and players only complain if they spot a typo – plenty of those, inevitably”
“I don’t think ice hockey fans and clubs are any more sensitive than people in any other walk of life.”
Stewart Roberts
That said, there is certainly a core of British hockey fans and even players who look back misty eyed at times gone by and almost thumb their noses at the current state of the game. The Heineken era of the late eighties and early nineties was a period Stewart was prominently involved with the sport and he believes there are very good reasons for this sentiment.
“The Heineken era of the 1980s coincided with the largest programme of rink building ever seen in this country – around 30 rinks in a dozen years” he explains.
“So almost every fan was new to the sport and they were like kids with a new toy. Heineken and the other ‘blue chip’ sponsors like Norwich Union helped to promote it. And the teams were staffed by Brits with free-wheeling, high scoring games. It wasn’t nearly as professional as today’s game but it was a lot more fun.”
Since those days British hockey has lurched from a boom and bust mentality to a relatively stable existence at present. The top three leagues exist as separate entities with little collaboration but are at least still operating with decent and committed fan bases.
Roberts and his little book have outlasted the Durham dynasty, the Superleague experiment and the ill-fated BNL. They have seen the regional powerbases move from places like the North East to the Midlands, the Scottish clubs mix and match with different leagues over the years and of course the relatively recent expansion of the game to cities like Belfast, Coventry and Glasgow.
The Ice Hockey Annual is a survivor in a sport where few have survived unscathed or kept their name. So perhaps Roberts is a man worth listening to when he points out where the game needs to be heading.
“I’ve always been optimistic about our sport, or I wouldn’t still be writing about it” he admits.
“It’s a great night out for all the family. But it will always be a minority sport as it relies on an expensive, specialist surface, ice”
“What frustrates me is how divided the sport is. If only everyone would pull together, British ice hockey could be so much greater than the sum of its parts”
“We have an ambitious ‘top league’, the Elite; a worthwhile second tier, the English Premier; a largely amateur National League; a huge junior system; and a well-constructed national teams programme”
“We need a strong governing body to pull all this together, with a well-paid Chief Exec. and a National Coaching Director”
“Government finance (Sport England and the like) for this would be available if only our various bodies could bring themselves to follow sensible governance rules and it was good to hear Tony Hand MBE saying much the same earlier this year.”
In 2013, Roberts was inducted into the British Hockey Hall of Fame for his valuable contribution to the sport over the years. It put the former Brighton Tigers fan alongside some of the sports greats.
“It’s a great honour to be in the Hall of Fame, especially to be alongside my heroes of the printed ice hockey word, Vic Batchelder of Ice Hockey News Review, and Bob Giddens, the editor of Ice Hockey World way back” he explains.
“It’s really nice that our Hall of Fame recognises those of us who sit quietly behind a keyboard as well as those who risk life and limb rushing up and down a slippery surface, stopping at nothing just to put a small object into a net”
“I received an impressive framed certificate which is hanging proudly in my home.”
And so to the future, and the 40th Ice Hockey Annual came out this week to the reading pleasure of many in the game. It includes all of the usual features that make it such a popular publication, but the obvious question is why its editor and his team of contributors continue to put in such effort. For Roberts his reasons are personal:
“Simply, I enjoy ice hockey, and I love the satisfaction of putting the book together and knowing that people like reading it.”
“The Annual is not a one-man band. It wouldn’t be possible without my generous advertisers and numerous contributors and I am grateful to them all”
You can buy The Ice Hockey Annual online at its official website. Spread the word and make sure fellow fans and those new to the sport get to read this fine book of British hockey.
Contact the author: david.carr@prohockeynews.com
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