Some hockey-romance authors are hoping to write another reality into existence: one where hunky alpha males who play a violent sport are in touch with their feelings.Illustration by Heidi Berton
In Calgary, a hockey-mad city, it might not be all that unusual for book lovers to turn out to an evening of literary talk wearing the jerseys of their favourite team. But one night last winter, when Slow Burn Books, which specializes in romance novels, hosted an event called Hockey Night in Calgary, some readers showed up sporting merch of the Vancouver Warriors, a fictional NHL team from a novel by one of the featured authors.
Hockey romance – contemporary love stories in which at least one of the main characters plays hockey – may be one of the few literary genres that inspires the same kind of demonstrative passion as the game it is named after.
What’s not to love? The novels are smutty, escapist delights, built upon familiar tropes: fake dating, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers etc. The punning titles wink at you from clear across the bookstore: Forever Pucked, Dump and Chase, Big Stick. And they’re often bursting with Canadian content.
For generations, romance novels have been dismissed as lightweight, guilty pleasures. Certainly, the hockey-romance genre, which has been around for decades but exploded in recent years with the help of TikTok, Instagram, self-publishing and Amazon’s all-you-can-read Kindle Unlimited program, offers plenty of filthy thrills.
Hockey romance may be one of the few literary genres that inspires the same kind of demonstrative passion as the game it is named after.The Globe and Mail
But some of its authors are embedding something deeper in the fantasies, aiming for a subversive kind of wish fulfilment. Over the past few years, a reckoning has begun across the country over hockey’s notoriously toxic culture. In dreaming up fantasies of hunky alpha males who play a violent, dangerous sport but then, off the ice, are in touch with their feelings – or are gay, or vulnerable about their mental-health challenges – the authors, most of whom are women, are quietly trying to write a new reality into existence. Many readers say the genre turned them on to hockey itself. Might the novels help save our national game, making it more welcoming and inclusive?
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that hockey romance helped save Becka Mack. In 2018, her older brother, Joe, died unexpectedly. “I really struggled with the grief, and with my mental health,” she said recently, on the phone from her home in Ontario’s Niagara region. “I was chatting with my therapist, and I said I felt like I needed a kind of creative outlet. I remembered how much I used to love writing as a child.”
When the pandemic hit, Mack’s job as a kindergarten teacher – virtual lessons were virtually impossible – left her with plenty of free time. The words poured out of her, sometimes up to 10,000 a day, as she dreamed up a story about Carter Beckett, a one-night-stand specialist, owner of rock-hard abs and star of the fictional Vancouver Vipers of the NHL, who falls hard for a hot, petite phys-ed teacher named Olivia Parker. As she wrote, Mack shared new chapters on the online platform Wattpad, and readers offered supportive feedback. By the time she was done, she had amassed about 17,000 followers there.
In March, 2022, Mack self-published Consider Me, using her Wattpad following to help spread the word. She also put the novel on Kindle Unlimited, which pays writers according to the number of page-reads their work attracts. That platform alone accounted for about 75 per cent of her earnings from publishing. As word spread, spurred in part by influencers on TikTok, more readers came to the 500-plus-page novel, resulting in about 500,000 page reads a day, she says. Even at $0.004 a page, which was the reported going rate at the time, that adds up to about $2,000 a day.
Seven months later, Mack published a follow-up, Play With Me, featuring some of the characters from the first book, and then a third, Unravel Me, last August. During one especially good week, Mack says, Unravel Me pulled in about 17 million page-views on Kindle Unlimited alone. (That’s equivalent to 34,000 readers starting and finishing the 500-page book in a seven-day stretch. If you’re doing the math, that works out to about $85,000.)
Last fall she sold the U.K. and Commonwealth rights to the Playing for Keeps series to the Canadian and Australian divisions of Simon & Schuster. (She’s held on to the U.S. rights, so the series can stay on Kindle Unlimited there for the time being.)
Selling to an established publisher is the realization of “a dream that I had as a kid, being able to go into a store and see my books on a shelf,” says Mack. “But also, it takes a lot of pressure off. As an indie author, you are doing everything all by yourself. You’re marketing by yourself, you’re hiring cover designers and you’re formatting your books, or you’re paying a formatter to do it, you’re hiring editors, and everything is on you. So, it’s nice to have publishing partners at your back that are there to help and support you.”
Shortly after Simon & Schuster reissued the three books late last year, they landed together on The Globe’s Canadian bestseller fiction list. A fourth, Fall with Me, centred on one of Carter Beckett’s lecherous Viper teammates, will hit bookstores next month. A fifth is slated for next year.
Mack says she’s heard from many readers who had no interest in hockey before reading her books and are now fans of the sport. “They’ll often tell you that, you know, you sparked them to sit down with their boyfriend or their husband, or their dad, and actually watch a game.”
At first blush – and there are plenty of scenes to make readers blush – a number of her characters come off as unrepentant womanizers. But as the series progresses, Mack says, readers come to understand that the group of men she’s writing about “is actually very emotionally in tune with their feelings. They’re very big on mental health and supporting each other. There’s lots of ‘I love you’s’ between the men. … We see it’s okay to cry, it’s okay for men to feel things.”
Mack grew up playing hockey, and her two brothers played competitively. Her husband still plays in a couple of beer leagues; she knows the culture well. “I am very aware that there’s a stigma surrounding men’s mental health and that men are not in this position where they often feel comfortable asking for help and displaying emotions. We’ve seen that in the NHL, where unfortunately some players have even lost their lives to that. That is what’s really important to me, because my brother died due to his mental health.”
Mack recognizes men aren’t a large part of her readership. But women have told her they appreciate her male characters, her vision of what might be. “I do hope it sparks some conversation.”
Like Mack, Rachel Reid began writing to fill a void, both in herself and what she saw in the world. In the summer of 2016, she was busy running her company, the Dartmouth-based Power Promotional Concepts, and raising two young boys with her husband, with not much time for herself. Back in her 20s, she’d been in an all-girl garage punk band, the Stolen Minks. She yearned for a creative outlet that could fit into her lifestyle.
So, one night, as she was sitting on the bed of her six year-old son – he’d insisted she not leave until he fell asleep – she pulled out her iPad and began to write. “I just had this idea about a closeted NHL player,” she recalled. “I’ve always been a hockey fan, but I’ve had mixed feelings about the NHL and hockey culture in general.” (The sport is notoriously unwelcoming to gay boys and men, which may help explain why no openly gay man has ever played in the NHL.) Game Changer, a spicy tale about the captain of the New York Admirals and the smoothie barista he woos, was an attempt to write something she wanted to see happen in real life.
When Reid heard that Carina Press, an imprint of Harlequin, was going to publish the novel in the fall of 2018, she was quietly thrilled with the prospect that it might upset traditional hockey fans.
But something unexpected happened. “My parents got excited about me having a book published, and got all their friends to read it,” said Reid. “That included some pretty gruff, older men who love hockey. And I got some pretty positive feedback from them.” It seemed to her that they’d never before considered the possibility there might be players in the NHL who are gay.
She hopes that, when a player does eventually come out, “maybe some of these guys will be more mentally prepared for it and not react terribly.”
Reid is now working on her ninth hockey romance, about two former pro teammates who reunite in a small town in Nova Scotia. She finds it easier to write about Canada, she says. And she harbours an aspiration that maybe someday Nova Scotia could be “the new Cornwall [U.K.] – one of these places that are depicted in romance novels all the time.”
Like Mack, Reid has heard from many readers who were introduced to hockey by her novels and have since become big fans of the sport. Some have sent her photos of themselves at NHL games wearing T-shirts she sells, with the logo of a team from the Game Changers series, the Ottawa Centaurs, on the front.
One of her biggest fans, though, is a hockey veteran. Lexi LaFleur Brown, the North Bay-born wife of former pro J.T. Brown, has tens of thousands of followers on social media, where she spills truths about life as a hockey wife (in one recent TikTok, she answered a fan’s question about the myth that players refrain from “hanky panky” during the playoffs) and jokingly fact-checks some of the more popular hockey romances.
Now, she’s bringing that expertise to a rom-com of her own. In April, Harlequin’s Canary Street Press signed LaFleur Brown to a two-book deal, the first of which will be published next winter. In a TikTok video, she promised the novel would contain “no misogyny, plenty of jokes, and [would be] hockey accurate right down to the homoerotic, in-game butt spankings.”
“Part of what really makes me excited about hockey romance is that people are reading these books and falling in love with hockey,” she said in a recent interview, from her home in Seattle. “These are people from all different sorts of backgrounds. So it’s diversifying the hockey fan base.”
She and her husband have always worked, she said, to “make hockey a safer space … more inclusive and more diverse. So that’s the lens of my book too.”
Yes, LaFleur Brown acknowledges her novel is something of a dream. Still, “I think if we’re creating this fantasy in these books and fans are reading it and they’re loving that, then let’s bring that energy into the actual sport. That’s really my goal and that’s what I hope. And that’s what I’ve seen these books do.”