Talking Hockey with Ed Park

Sometimes you gotta scratch that itch, and in this case it's with a Pulitzer finalist novelist.

Mar 17, 2026

At his newsletter, Ed Park has been writing some “notes on hockey” that I’ve been greatly enjoying because I am also a hockey fan and you don’t see enough deeply thoughtful writing about hockey. Park is specifically a fan of the Buffalo Sabres, a team that is about to break a historically bad streak of not making the playoffs. As a Chicago Blackhawks fan now more than a decade removed from when the team was relevant, I am choosing to live vicariously through the Sabres fans of the world.

Since this is my newsletter and it’s free and I can do what I want, and I wanted to talk about hockey with Ed Park, that’s what I did.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams and Personal Days, and the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis. His memoir, Three Tenses, is out this summer.

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John Warner: How ‘bout them Sabres? I don’t mean to jinx anything, but as of this typing the Sabres have a better than 98% chance of making the playoffs, which would end the longest playoff drought in NHL history. Even more immediately I just watched Alex Tuch power his way to a shorthanded five-hole goal to put the Sabres up 4-1 against the Lightning, against whom a victory would move the Sabres into first (though the Lightning have games at hand). Maybe don’t answer this if you’re the superstitious type, but it’s exciting, no?

Ed Park: I’m answering this an hour or so after the Sabres won that game—the most exciting Sabres game in recent memory; I’d argue it might stand as the best regular season game between any two teams this year. Things went loopy after that Tuch goal you mentioned. Tampa came right back and scored (in fact, the shot went off Tuch’s skate). Then they scored again. And again. And again. The second period closed, and then I was doing the dishes and missed two more Tampa goals at the top of the third. In other seasons, I’d say our goose was cooked, but as I reminded one of my sons, hockey games are 60 minutes long. The game was unbelievably exciting, full of fights—100 total penalty minutes were dispensed—and rich with reversals. Having scored the first three goals, the Sabres scored the last three as well, a sort of sandwich or palindrome, winning it 8-7. (Josh Doan scored the first and last goals of the game—another palindrome.) It reminded me that a great sports game is like a work of theater that only happens once. It can be rewatched but its full aesthetic import only occurs as it is happening in real time.

I’m superstitious when it comes to the Buffalo Bills—every game I’m like, Do I wear this T-shirt, this hat, these socks, to ensure the best result? It’s bonkers. But with the Sabres…I don’t know. I have no superstitions. I’m just enjoying this resurgence, which has been a long time coming.

John Warner: You grew up in Buffalo. Do you remember the genesis of your Sabres fandom?

Ed Park: Buffalo is snow country. I watched the Sabres on TV, and a couple times a season my dad would take me to a game. I just loved it. The great players were larger than life—in Buffalo there was the French Connection, spanning most of the ’70s. There were colorful players like Jim Schoenfeld and Jerry Korab. Lindy Ruff, now the coach, was a Sabre. I remember the 1980 Olympic game, and feeling proud that one of the players came to the Sabres. Mike Ramsey—we already had a player named Craig Ramsay. I guess even the names were interesting to me. Gerry Desjardins. My favorite caption, from a 3-1 loss in those bygone days, when only Don Luce scored for the Sabres, is still “Every which way but Luce.”

John Warner: I’m envious you got to watch the Sabres on TV as a kid. Blackhawks games were not broadcast in Chicago because the owners (Arthur and then Bill Wirtz) believed it devalued the in-person product, which is sort of insane, but the team stuck with it until 2007!

What was it like going to games at the “Aud”? My first Chicago Blackhawks games were at the Chicago Stadium which was cramped and kind of menacing and awesome. The corridors were incredibly tight, and the mezzanine felt like it loomed over the ice. Every game I went to as a kid I saw some St. Louis Blues or Minnesota North Stars fan get the shit kicked out of him before the Andy Frain ushers could come and break it up. The Aud famously had a Stanley Cup final game where the heat in the building generated fog on the ice. It had to be an interesting place.

Ed Park: I was slightly too young to have seen the game you mention (vs. the Flyers in 1975), though I slipped it into my novel [Same Bed Different Dreams]—it’s like something out of a dream or nightmare. Not only was there dense fog, but there was a bat flying around, which one of the players killed with his stick. (I also wrote a short story called “The Odd,” set after the demolition of the arena in 2009, in the collection Buffalo Noir.)

I loved going to games with my dad. Just a couple a season. We sat in the blue seats, fairly up there, below the orange section. A couple times, if it was a school night, I’d bring my homework, so I could study during the intermissions. I loved getting the NHL magazine at the Aud, called Goal. It was $2.

I do remember a game against the North Stars, a lopsided victory for the Sabres. It went up to 9-2, I think, and the crowd was going wild. At one point, in frustration, the Minnesota goalie crashed his stick onto the head of one of the Sabres who’d fallen in front of the net, and the crowd went even more nuts. (I put this in my novel, too.) Of course, decades later, when that franchise had moved and become the Dallas Stars, they would get their revenge—the infamous Stanley Cup game, wherein Brett Hull’s skate was in Dominik Hasek’s crease, but the goal was allowed. (I put this in my novel, too.)

I’m old enough that I actually saw a Buffalo Braves basketball game at the Aud, before the team was sold in 1976—that was fun, and I’m a little sad the city didn’t carry an NBA team for longer.

John Warner: Did you play hockey?

Ed Park: Yes. I learned to skate pretty young, and played hockey as a kid through the eighth grade, and then a little just for fun in college, intramurally. I can still envision the rinks that I played in, still remember the names of stick manufacturers: Titan and Sherwood, Koho and Victoriaville. I think about the “Armadillo thumb” on old hockey gloves, with the picture of an armadillo.

Both of my kids played hockey here in New York for a while, and both still love to watch it—they root for the Sabres, of course. (We’ve gone to some Rangers games.) They’re actually far more on top of the data and the trades and all that stuff than I am.

John Warner: I feel like the availability of information/content has made fandom more taxing in a way. We had to make do with a newspaper box score or a few minutes of highlights on the local news. I remember getting in trouble for spending too much time on the sportsline phone service where you could call to get real-time scores for like 99-cents a minute. I listened to a lot of hockey on the radio and would have to conjure the images in my mind based on what I’d seen at live games. Like when Doug Wilson ripped a slapshot, I went to some past image of a Doug Wilson slapshot and inserted it.

I don’t have a ton of nostalgia for those days. The accessibility is awesome - I was split-screening the Hawks/Stars with that Sabres/Lightning game because of how crazy the latter got - but there was something about investing my imagination into my fandom that’s very different from today where everything is available or we’re even expected to start betting on every outcome in real time.

Ed Park: Ha, I love that—I still enjoy listening to a game on the radio if I’m driving or walking somewhere. Speaking of the radio, there’s a great anecdote in the biography of Scotty Bowman (written by none other than Ken Dryden) that I like—this is from my review in Bookforum:

As a six-year-old, Bowman’s favorite hockey team, curiously, was the Bruins, whose exploits he caught via Boston’s WHDH on the family radio. Young Scotty would follow the first-period action, then dutifully go to bed; his father would listen to the rest, writing out playmakers’ names for him to study in the morning. (Dryden notes that the announcer would call home games live, and “recreated road games from accounts he was sent via telegraph.”)

There’s something to be said about not knowing everything all the time, and all the betting stuff isn’t great. The genie might be too far out of the bottle at this point.

John Warner: You’re public with your hockey fandom. It’s in your books, and truthfully you’ve been writing a series of hockey observations at your newsletter that betray more than fandom, you’re a true connoisseur. What is it that draws you to the sport?

Ed Park: I recently re-read an essay that Faulkner wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1955—they sent him to a Rangers-Habs game, and it’s a tremendous piece, actually. When I first read it years ago, it seemed to verge on self parody. But now I love how he’s assembling his thoughts as they occur, as he’s watching the smoke from a thousand cigars accumulate above him. And he has this interesting paragraph where he notes women watching breathlessly, and thinks this speaks to the erotic brawling nature of the game, the “rapid, hard, close physical contact,” with sticks that can break bones, knife-blade skates, the possibility that “actual male blood could flow.” Then he reverses himself—it’s not about the violence at all, he writes, but “the excitement of speed and grace, with the puck for catalyst, to give it reason, meaning.”

It’s deliciously overwrought but I think he captures both the danger and the pure frictionless finesse of the game. I love those goals where a player flies down the ice and then, at the last moment, doesn’t even really have to shoot—he just places the puck on the right path. And it’s all done in two, three seconds.

John Warner: The rap on hockey has always been that it’s “hard to watch” if you don’t understand the game, but once you do, it is for me, by far the most amazing sport because of that tension between chaos and inevitability. My favorite moments are when you’re watching and you just know that a goal is coming, that the arrangement of players on the ice and the specific capabilities of those players add up to what feels like a foregone conclusion. Quinn Hughes’ goal against Sweden in the Olympic semis is one of those moments. I was watching it at my desk while pretending to work, and as Hughes took the puck on the left boards and curled to the middle I said out loud, “That’s a goal,” three or four beats before he even shot the puck. I don’t know that there’s any other sport that works like this. Soccer, I guess, relies on similar patterns of coordinated activity, but it doesn’t have hockey’s speed. With hockey, on just about every goal you could rewind the 30 seconds before and find half a dozen moments where even a tiny change in activity would have derailed the outcome.

Like that Brett Hull goal in triple OT, right before Hull corralls the puck, a Sabres player skates between him and Hasek, kicking Hasek’s glove as he’s reaching it towards Hull. Without that player’s specific action, Hasek might have extended his arm far enough to smother the shot.

Or maybe not.

Ed Park: I’m not going to even look at that. [Laughter.] I know what you mean—at times, goals really do feel fated. Of course, you can say that with other team sports, but hockey feels different than football (where there’s so much time between plays) and basketball (where many baskets are going to be scored) because of the speed. Even as the Sabres were at 4-1 last night, I wasn’t entirely comfortable. Each of those subsequent Tampa goals, you could see what triggered it—I’m thinking especially of a missed opportunity by Noah Ostlund of getting the puck out of the zone. He was just a split second too slow, and I thought: oh no. The Lightning picked his pocket and scored. And for the Sabres, Tuch’s aforementioned short-handed goal had that feeling of inevitability—he was perfectly positioned along the boards as the Sabres were prying it out of their zone, and when the time came, it wasn’t so much of a shot as a gesture. The puck just continued along with the energy he had built up behind it.

I too have heard people complain that hockey is hard to watch, but the contrast of the dark puck against the bright ice feels perfectly viewable to me, and the rules aren’t overly complex.

John Warner: I’m wondering how much your pleasure in the U.S. Men’s hockey gold medal was diminished by Kash Patel whooping it up in the locker room and the seizing of the moment by Trump and the willingness of the players to go along with it all. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of the political orientations of pro hockey players or even casual players - I had guys in my men’s league who heard I taught college ask if I was a communist - but I don’t know, it was a bummer. Does this stuff matter for you?

Ed Park: It does—but like you, I wasn’t really surprised. I actually didn’t see the video for a while, so I had a sliver of time to enjoy the victory without politics crashing down on it, though of course everything in the Olympics has political resonance. (I flashed back to the Four Nations tournament from last year, the fights right at the beginning of the U.S.-Canada game.) I mulled about it a bit here.

John Warner: I thought those fights were cringe. Like why do I care about Matthew Tkachuk and Brandon Hagel swinging at each other? It makes me a bit hesitant to confess my fandom. Once while on a panel I outed myself as a hockey fan and one of my co-panelists reacted like I’d confessed to a crime, they couldn’t reconcile someone at a literary event also being a hockey fan. Have you ever experienced that kind of judgment?

Ed Park: I don’t think so—but I don’t care! Hockey is the best sport—for me, the mausoleum of all hope and desire. (As for Hagel, he got fined for some alarming violence against Rasmus Dahlin in the Sabres-Lightning game.) Anyway, John, next time someone does that to you, hit them with some Faulkner:

Then it was filled with motion, speed. To the innocent, who had never seen it before, it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers—a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.

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