Hockey Finally Has the Great Books It Deserves

Pity the Canadian book reviewer in the autumn of 1980. An American publisher has announced, with some fanfare, a forthcoming title about the national pastime—the Canadian national pastime. Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League promises to tell the story of Cleo Birdwell’s debut season with the New York Rangers. Of course, as a Canadian in good standing, you know that no woman has ever played in the NHL; there is no Cleo Birdwell. But the people behind the book are committed to the bit. At the Canadian Booksellers Association convention, held that summer in Toronto, a leggy model impersonated Birdwell, signing advance copies in a Rangers jersey. “She’s tough and sexy,” the book’s publisher whispered to a Globe and Mail reporter.

Clearly this book demands attention. Perhaps the charade might even provide a welcome distraction after Canada’s rather unmiraculous sixth-place finish at Lake Placid. But what awaits within its pages confounds. The on-ice action is overshadowed by ever more elaborate accounts of Birdwell’s sexual adventures. In the course of one season, she sleeps with the Rangers’ head coach, the Rangers’ general manager, a former Rangers player, and one very jet-lagged tennis star. This is an incomplete list. In the brutal assessment of one critic in Calgary, Amazons is “little more than hardcover softcore porn that will disappoint hockey fans and heavy breathers alike.”

But Amazons wasn’t smut, or not exactly. Its author was Don DeLillo. His publisher took pains to guard this secret, but there was no disguising his writing from those who already admired it. Colin McEnroe, reviewing the book for the Hartford Courant, seems to have been the first to identify DeLillo’s authorship in print. “ ‘Amazons’ is not only his book,” he wrote. “It’s his best book.”

DeLillo did not share this appraisal. Although the book sold well—better, in fact, than any of his previous novels—he would not allow it to be republished. Even after the breakout success of White Noise in 1985, it never appeared in his official bibliography. Amazons soon faded into obscurity.

I first learned of its existence in 2006, when the writer Keith Gessen published an essay in The New York Times Book Review titled “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” Gessen wrote of his dismay that hockey had not produced a literature as rich as that of boxing or baseball. “Where is the Chekhov of the Chicago Blackhawks?” he asked. “Who is the Stendhal of the stick to the groin?” On the shelf dedicated to immortal hockey books, Gessen placed just two volumes: Ken Dryden’s melancholy 1983 memoir, The Game, about his final season with the dynastic Montreal Canadiens, and DeLillo’s Amazons.

Hockey and literature were two pursuits struggling to find an audience; perhaps, Gessen ventured, they could help each other. “What is needed now, for the sake of both hockey and literature, is more hockey literature,” he wrote. “Not just books about hockey, like ‘The Game,’ but also books not about hockey, like ‘Amazons’—which is not about hockey in just the right way.”

Gessen may have been only half serious, but two decades after his essay appeared, something like his modest proposal has come to pass. The Intangibles, a new memoir by the New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten, is a worthy successor to The Game, no less so for describing a career played in bruising beer leagues. The success of Heated Rivalry on HBO Max has made Rachel Reid’s queer-romance series, from which it was adapted, into a publishing juggernaut. Hockey erotica, once a fringe category, has become a cottage industry.

Following that unlikely turn of events—and a January story in the Times positing DeLillo as the genre’s unlikely inventor—his editor and agent entreated him to allow Amazons back into print. DeLillo acquiesced. After 46 years, Cleo Birdwell is finally making her curtain call.

Amazons was not DeLillo’s first foray into the world of sport. That distinction belongs to End Zone, his heady 1972 novel about college football and the madness of mutual assured destruction. Later, in the prologue to Underworld (1997), he turned to baseball, with his panoramic account of Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world.” In those pages, too, nuclear war hangs in the air; the White House announced on the same day in 1951 that the Soviet Union had conducted a bomb test.

The tone of Amazons is zanier, more absurd, untroubled by nuclear annihilation. If anything hangs in the air, it’s the reek of the hockey bag. Cleo Birdwell is the pride of Badger, Ohio, which she describes as a small, straightforward town where “the school was on School Street, the bank was on Bank Street, the river ran by River Road.” But Cleo is not an ingenue; she’s a hockey player. No amount of towel snapping or jock talk seems capable of making her blush. On the contrary, she’s a wry raconteur of her teammates’ puerile antics. One player, Eric Torkleson, has such an enormous member that it becomes an honorary Ranger, known as Torkle. “A player would say, ‘How’s Torkle doing today?’ Or, ‘Who’s playing Torkle in the movie version?’ Or, ‘Is it true Torkle’s being asked to endorse Jimmy Carter?’ ”

The book is as sex-drenched as the Calgary reviewer warned. But sex functions less as titillation and more as the engine of the satire. Its object, mostly, is the American male. Cleo is frank, confident, liberated; her lovers are neurotic and narcissistic. One, the Rangers’ general manager, is unable to perform after Cleo makes an offhanded Watergate joke. How could he, having been reminded of this great blow to the male ego? “We lost our manhood, our sense of pride and honor, our belief in God and Dick Nixon, our deepest dreams, hopes, and ambitions.” (In an earlier scene, the GM has been deflated by intrusive thoughts of Torkle.)

Men who aren’t trying to sleep with Cleo are usually trying to persuade her to sell something—the rank commercialization of sport is one of the novel’s many prescient targets. Cleo is asked to hawk a sensual whirlpool bath called the Primal Vortex and a snack food called Amazons, especially formulated for “every age, every size, every make of woman.” She refuses both endorsements. In the middle of the Rangers’ season, Hughes Tool, the conglomerate that owns the team, hires a Saudi national to run it, hoping to push through a business deal with “men in the Gulf.” DeLillo seems to have anticipated our age of sportswashing, too.

To be clear, Amazons is not a lost masterpiece. Some scenes drag, like runaway SNL sketches. The dialogue, although generally hilarious, can take on a rim-shot quality, as if DeLillo were doing Dangerfield. A sportswriter confesses to Cleo that his ex-wife is now a lesbian. “Who is she a lesbian with?” she asks. “Paine, Webber, Jackson and Curtis. She’s a financial analyst.” Robert Gottlieb, DeLillo’s editor at the time, turned down Amazons. You wonder how the man who convinced Joseph Heller that Catch‑22 sounded funnier than Catch‑18 might have sharpened this manuscript.

[From the May 1973 issue: “The Bucky Wunderlick Story,” by Don DeLillo]

As for the hockey quotient, some fans may wish that DeLillo had set more of the novel between the boards. But Amazons is like Dickie Dunn’s newspaper accounts of the Charlestown Chiefs in Slap Shot : It captures the spirit of the thing. The locker-room banter, at once clever and cretinous; the relentless travel to frozen, past-their-prime cities; the vicious play of the Philadelphia Flyers and the bloodlust of their fans (“screaming made-up and never-before-heard obscenities, as though they were overwhelmed by a massive thyroid deficiency”); the otherworldly allure of a sport conducted, improbably, on a sheet of ice. “In a way it is the most romantic game,” the Rangers’ head coach, Jean-Paul Larousse, says. “There is a lightness, a speed without effort. It is the skates.”

It was lightness and speed that drew Nick Paumgarten to hockey. On land, he was ungainly: “You run like a goof,” his brother once told him. “But on the ice the hobbles fell away. With skates on my feet, I could glide, swerve, cut, and feel for a few seconds at least that I’d broken the code, whatever it was.”

Paumgarten grew up playing hockey in New York City. His junior career petered out in prep school, but for much of his adult life, he’s competed in Manhattan’s beer leagues. He’s played on ragtag teams with only-in–New York linemates: creative types, a master crane rigger, a guy who used to be Woody Allen’s super. Some are ringers fresh out of college; others are graybeards holding on for one more season of glory. Not that there is much glory to be had when the puck drops at 11:30 p.m. on the far west side. “We did it for no one but ourselves, and really it was more like we were doing it to ourselves,” he writes in The Intangibles. “It was more destructive than constructive: murderous to our daylight ambitions and obligations, hard on the joints, and maybe equally hard on our families and friends.”

So why do it? For fellowship, for laughs, for escape, for the spirit of the thing. To find what hockey players call the absolute beauties, like-minded men who play the right way: “with a commitment not just to proper comportment and teamwork but also to sticking around for postgame beers and high- and low-minded banter. A sense of humor, a sense of absurdity.”

The Intangibles, the team that gives the memoir its name, plays the right way. It has some elite skaters but also plenty of grinders, the guys you can count on to show up, hustle, and, if necessary, intimidate the opposition, like the maniacal Flyers of old. The license to exact a measure of retribution for a cheap shot or a high stick, for running up the score or running your mouth—this, too, is part of hockey’s ethos, and its appeal to men arriving at the rink from jobs, white collar or blue, that may offer fewer opportunities to administer just deserts.

Paumgarten himself is not above such belligerent displays. “On the ice,” he writes, “in this realm circumscribed by boards and Plexiglas and patrolled by men in stripes, an artificial universe where you dart around in a suit of armor, with wings on your feet and levers in your hands, it is a privilege and a joy to shove and slash and tell people to fuck off, to be a jerk to strangers, without it being in any way an actionable affront.”

Someone tell Keith Gessen: We have found the Stendhal of the stick to the groin. Though I suspect he already knows this. One of the Intangibles is a writer, referred to only as Keith, who often composes arch postgame emails, recording for posterity the team’s triumphs and follies. I’m pretty sure I recognize the voice.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “An Absolute Beauty.”