Pro: The Hockey Life of Danny Bolduc

Daniel George “Danny” Bolduc, born in Waterville, Maine, in 1953, is the state’s first-ever major league pro hockey player. Bolduc starred at Phillips Academy (Andover) and Harvard University, played on the 1976 United State Olympic hockey team, played in just under 200 games over parts of six seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL) and the defunct World Hockey Association (WHA), and played and coached in multiple seasons in affiliated professional minor leagues.

 

A closer examination of Bolduc’s hockey life reveals the significant strands that reflect the evolution of the hockey enterprise as a sport and a business in North America. Bolduc was a gifted individual born of Canadian heritage who used a game to which he was born culturally to advance socially by excelling and rising to the sport’s highest level. Bolduc chose education as a route to a professional career in hockey, as Bolduc attended prep school and college, a track commonly employed by American hockey players – but less so for the general population of Franco-Americans of his era, or for Canadians in professional hockey.

But for all of his successes and firsts, Bolduc's hockey life was not one of unbridled glory. While remarkable and trailblazing, his career was more workmanlike than transcendent, fraught with the typical setbacks and disappointments encountered by the vast majority of those who seek playing careers in professional sport.

The ultimate irony was that Bolduc, a scion of the 19th and 20th century Franco-Canadian migration to U.S., experienced, in the view of veteran Waterville Morning Sentinel sportswriter Tom Lizotte, a truncated pro career, consistently hampered by “the whole Canadian bias in that small world of professional hockey,” which showed “how difficult it was for an American to break through,” because of management and coaching personnel who were overwhelmingly native Canadian and products of the Canadian hockey developmental system.

To understand the factors that first promoted and ultimately hindered Bolduc’s career, this biography examines the establishment of the sport of hockey in North America and the differences in how the game form and enterprise evolved in Canada and the United States, as well as the origins and logic of Canadian hockey’s anti-Americanism and why the perceptions of American, European and Soviet hockey and its style of play were anathema to Canada’s hockey hierarchies, which resulted in systematic biases against players from the outside their system.

Playing hockey at the world’s highest level may not be the American dream, but it is indeed a dream held by a small but increasing number of Americans. By navigating a path fraught with barriers to his success, Bolduc made a game decidedly more native and dear to Canadians more mainstream American, more accessible to future American players and a more broadly acknowledged element of the American sporting experience.