A Letter From The Publisher, Feb. 24, 1975

CLEVELAND 105, PHILADELPHIA 102; STEELERS BLAST BILLS; SEAVER HURLS TWO-HITTER— such is the stuff of which basic sports reporting is made. As a weekly newsmagazine, however, TIME has never wanted to deliver to its readers a day-by-day account of what TV calls “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Rather, as Sport Writer Philip Taubman puts it, “our contribution can be to go into stories with more depth or come at them from another direction.” So it is with Taubman’s cover story this week on Goalie Bernie Parent of the Philadelphia Flyers, whose very special, harrowing job is examined as part of a long look at the often violent world of professional hockey. “The idea,” says Taubman, “is to get behind that fiber-glass mask and find out what makes a man like Bernie tick.”

To help Taubman find that out, we sent Toronto Bureau Chief Robert Lewis to cover Parent and his teammates on the road in Minneapolis, St. Louis and Philadelphia. Lewis and the Flyers quickly found a common ground. Like many of them, he began skating at the age of five in rural Waterloo, Quebec, and later played in a youth league. He turned to wordier pursuits when he proved too slow, small and contentious— he was a regular denizen of the penalty box— to continue in the sport. All the same, in the course of eight hours of interviews, Parent confided to Lewis various anxieties and ruminations that one might not expect of a hardened athlete.

Reporter-Researcher Jay Rosenstein checked Taubman’s manuscript and also weighed in with files on the boom in amateur hockey. Witnessing a Mites session in Rockland County, N.Y., Rosenstein was amazed to see six-year-old skaters wield a stick as surely as a crayon. Brooklyn-reared Rosenstein never played hockey as a boy; instead, he settled for watching the New York Rangers from cut-rate seats in the stratosphere of Madison Square Garden. Writer Taubman, though a seasoned Central Park skater and sometime impromptu stickman, claims he “really learned the game” from none other than Robert Lewis. Seems that when they were both correspondents at TIME’S Boston bureau from 1970 to 1972, Lewis brought a table-hockey game to town and spent countless hours trouncing his American-born colleagues.