Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Hockey Goalie

by Bruce Valley

Book Overview

Seahawk is a history of a championship New England town hockey team composed of WWII veterans, and a memoir of a boy's lifelong connection to hockey. At the age of fourteen, the author became the Seahawks' goaltender. The Rye, NH Seahawks were a dominant club, and played for a New Hampshire Class B state championship and a New England Class B championship in the venerable Boston Garden. Explores aging while playing contact sports.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931807728
• ISBN13: 9781931807722
• Release Date: May 2023
• Publisher: Bruce L. Valley
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Back to a time when hockey (and many other things) were much more basic

Hockey wasn't always the high-tech, indoor game that you see on TV today. It used to be contested on outdoor ponds, games at the mercy of weather conditions, cars surrounding the rink to provide illumination for night games. Bruce Valley learned the game under those conditions in the 50's with the Rye Seahawks playing goalie at the tender age of 14. He recounts those memories in his book Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Goalie. For anyone with a love of hockey and a sense of history, this is a great introspective read that takes you back to a simpler time in our collective history. Valley grew up in Rye in the 40's, a small town on the east coast, struggling to survive in the post WWII era. One day as a youngster, he looked out the window of his house and saw something he had never seen before... a bunch of men skating on ice with sticks, batting around a little rubber disk. His father explained the game of hockey to him, and his life was never the same. Without much else to do in a cold New England winter, Valley took up the game with a passion. This adhoc game turned into an official team in an actual league, and the Rye Seahawks became a dominant force in the area. Valley ended up joining the team at the age of 14 for a two year stint towards the end of the team's existence. While the outdoor version of the game was drawing to a close, Valley continued to make hockey a critical part of his life and passion. Thru his eyes, you see a side of the game lost to today's youth, and a piece of history that was played out every winter in small towns all over the Northeast part of the country. I really liked this book. Valley writes with a clarity that puts you right on the ice, temperatures close to zero, picking up the shovel to clear the ice for the next day's games. He supplements his stories with scans of actual news clippings that reported the game results, treating the team and the games as high-profile sports entertainment. All in all, it's an introspective look into what the game of hockey means to someone, coupled with a step back into nostalgia.

Hockey, the old fashioned way.

Seahawk takes you back to the days before artificial ice, curved sticks, facemasks and arenas with creature comforts for fans and players alike. It spins a tale about the game as played by an amateur team of WWII veterans who return home from the war to their small New Hampshire town of Rye with time on their hands and energy to burn. It is a firsthand account told by Bruce Valley who is uniquely qualified to tell the story. As a wide eyed young fan there in the very beginning to an excited teenager pressed into service as the team's goalie in its final years, Valley brings the town, the team and the game back to life. Now in his 60's, Valley wisely didn't depend on just his memory of the events 40 to 50 years ago but carefully researched his subject and blended that history with his own "confessions of an old goalie". The result is a book that is not only enjoyable to read but easy to put down for a few minutes to close your eyes and see in your mind the pictures that Valley has painted for you. Let there be no doubt that Seahawk is not just another autobiography by a pretender athlete/author. Valley is the real deal as a writer and has actually made a few pretty decent saves in the net through the years. I recommend this fun book to all the athletes out there who worry about the day they will be too old to play their sport. Valley proves that you are never too old.

Review from Betsey Davis

Not knowing one end of a hockey stick from another, I was prepared to overlook this book about the sport. How wrong I was! In his sports memoir "Seahawk : Confessions of an Old Goalie", Mr. Valley writes simultaneously with a young boy's awe and an adult's maturity about the game he so clearly loves. Reflecting precisely and emotionally about his decades playing a game which has also been a consistent theme within his life, he writes with truly amazing clarity about his home town, including particularly vivid descriptions of New Hampshire's long cold winters and the stark Atlantic seacoast.

The goalie scores a winner

There is arguably no sport that retains as great a sense of its own history and as deep a culture as ice hockey. And there are few athletes who endure more of what others would call misery in order to play their game than hockey people. Bruce Valley is hockey people, and his memoir, Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Goalie, is a tribute to hockey and hockey people that reverberates on several levels. On one hand, Seahawk is a family album of sorts, for a team and a time lost to history. It is the story of post war Rye, New Hampshire, a real-life Mystery, Alaska, and the town's hockey team, the Rye Seahawks, who played outdoors under makeshift strings of lights on a frozen pond, in front of passionate, devoted town folk fans. Valley was a 14 year old kid goalie, drafted into the ranks of a hard-bitten new Englander team of WWII veterans, and his book is a warm and sometimes harrowing homage to his time with the Seahawks in the waning days of a passing era. But Seahawk is more than just a family album of a memoir, because in his heartfelt reflections on the game, the culture, and the people who play hockey--whether on frozen ponds or indoor rinks. Valley touches on the themes and truths that resonate in hockey people everywhere; the visceral excitement of the cold; the eerie beauty of a black ice pond under a midnight moon; and hockey's unique warrior code of the handshake line at the end of a violent and often brutal game. But Seahawks is, after all, the confessions of an old hockey goalie, and as much as it is a look back, it is also unmistakably the Old Goalie, now in his 60's and still playing the game, looking forward and coming to terms with the fact that there aren't a lot of games left. In Seahawks Bruce Valley spoke to the soul of hockey, and hockey players, but he succeeded, too, in speaking to a generation of men who have spent their lives playing any game and now see the last game looming on the horizon. In this case, the goalie scores.

Great Book for Old Hockey buffs

I originally bought and read this book on a whim a few months ago. The book does a great job capturing the rough and tumble world of small town New England Ice Hockey in the 1950's and 60's. It chronicles the author's experience playing goalie on the home town team representing Rye, New Hampshire in the New England league. The team skated mostly on out-door rinks constructed each Winter. It is a must read for any old time "pond -skaters" and Hockey buffs who participated in this type of Ice Hockey .....or even anyone who just wishes they had. The Author, Bruce Valley, now well past 60, still plays Ice Hockey occasionally with a "senior" (over 50) Ice Hockey Group, and shortly after reading the book I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time, and actually played with him in a pick-up game. Our team won and he actually made a few saves.........once again proving the old adage that "even a blind squirrel finds a few acorns"