Scotty Davidson

A forgotten hockey great finally gets his due

Scotty Davidson was hard-living, hard-punching, and high-scoring. He was also a Canadian hero twice over, as captain of the first Toronto team to win the Stanley Cup and as a volunteer soldier who fought bravely in the First World War. Yet most Canadians do not know his name, and those who do are unlikely to know his true story. As Matthew Walthert discovered while working on this first major biography of Davidson, most previous accounts, especially of his death on the Western Front, are riddled with myths and errors.

Walthert has scoured the archives, tracked down living relatives, and travelled to battlefields in France and Belgium to uncover the authentic story of Scotty Davidson's life and death. He vividly portrays the winger's on-ice brilliance in hockey's rough-and-tumble early days, and sorts fact from fiction in Davidson's final moments, with a narrative as authoritative as it is compulsively readable.