James Duthie

I don't do the play-by-play.

I'm the guy who talks in the intermissions and before the game and after the game.

And I would hear stories from guys.

And they would be, you know, hockey breeds great stories.

And...

And there came a point in time where I sort of said to myself, I have this great collection of stories that I've heard.

And quite often they'll tell you stories that, you know, they wouldn't necessarily tell in an interview, right?

So they'd never been sort of said publicly before.

And so I thought, what if I could do a book that was just great stories?

It wasn't like a typical hockey autobiography where you'd get the entire person's life and you might get three or four really amazing stories in there, but the rest would all be details of his life and career.

What if I could cut all that stuff out and just have the great stories?

And so that's sort of what I set out to do.

I had some already in the back of my mind.

I reached out to players and so on and so forth.

My selling point would just be, could you just tell me one great story that if you were sitting around with teammates or your buddies in a bar after your career or during your career, just tell me one great story, the story that, you know, players tell each other that maybe they don't usually share with the media.

And that was the idea.

And there was no rules to it.

It could be something that happened in a game.

Could be about a trade like the Kevin Weeks kill race story.

It could be something that happened in peewee or minor hockey.