The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

Book Overview

Now that his hockey career is ending, what will become of his life?

Felix Batterinski grew up tough in Northern Ontario where hockey was the only way out of a life of grinding poverty. He got out and enjoyed fame as a hockey "enforcer" for the Philadelphia Flyers. But fame is fleeting.

Now in his thirties and at the end of his playing career, Felix tries to make a go of it as a player-coach for a Finnish club. As the lone Canadian...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1459706862
• ISBN13: 9781459706866
• Release Date: December 2012
• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

"The Last Season"- capturing Canada's progress

'The Last Season' is an absolute masterpiece, a book with terrific sociological impact. Roy MacGregor's first-person account is of Felix Batterinski, a man out of his element. Escaping the Ontario backwoods town of Pomerania as a teenager to play junior hockey, Batterinski reaches the apex of his playing career as a 'goon' with the "Broad Street Bullies" Philadelphia Flyers' teams of the 1970s. He declines as a player, and must resort to taking a position as a player-coach of a Finnish club, but his plan to put his own stamp on European hockey ends, as all things in his life inevitably do, in irrevocable disaster, and the 'system' leaves him for waste. MacGregor captures social change in Canada (and North America) from 1960 through the 1980s with his account of Batterinski's life, from his youth to his time with Philadelphia and Los Angeles, to the Finnish disaster. Batterinski's foreboding, which the reader becomes attuned to is also stunning, and in many ways, the novel reminds one of William Faulkner... rural families, the mentally handicapped relative, the dark binding secrets.