They stumble through the world in a special kind of misery. They watch and record the field, the rink. When the game is a good one, they splay their palsied fingers on the keyboard, digging for the heart of something. Sometimes they produce poetry.
Sportswriters drink whiskey neat, puff on dead-ends.
Sportswriters eat the wrong food. I set out to become one. Mixing stories from such places as Gindelwald Switzerland and Sudbury, Ontario, where a green wolf's head glowers over the hockey rink, Quarrington carves out a hockey beat that few would imagine ever existed. In the process, he takes a candid and off-beat look at the lives of young talents, such as Sean Burke and Bobby Joyce, and their enigmatic coach Dave King, as they thrash Russkies in Moscow, trash hotel rooms in Switzerland and bash everyone's preconceptions about hockey permanently out of shape. After Hometown Heroes, sports reporting will never be the same.