Canadian university offers class on hockey literature

[Champ]

VICTORIA, British Columbia (AP) — A University of Victoria English professor has stick-handled his way through academe to create what may be Canada's — or even the world's — only college course on hockey literature.

The puck drops in January for "Hockey Literature and the Canadian Psyche," a second-year English offering by Doug Beardsley, whose previous classes have been largely in Holocaust literature and postmodern Canadian poetry.

Not every prospective student made the cut for the class, which was limited to 40 and runs three hours — appropriately divided into three periods.

"There is a national emptiness in the country" because hockey is "so much a part of us" that its absence, for Canadians, is "like losing a limb," said Beardsley, who has written two hockey books.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/hockey/2004-10-29-puck-lit_x.htm