Mar 1, 2021
Arizona State calculus professor
Scott Surgent ("The Complete World Hockey Association, 11th
Edition"; "The World Hockey Association Fact Book")
joins this week to discuss his personal passion project of
documenting everything statistical from the fascinatingly ephemeral
World Hockey Association - despite never having witness a single
game during its brief seven-year run (1972-79).
Like many young sports fans of
the 70s living outside of actual WHA markets (for as long as they
lasted), Surgent's first introduction to and ongoing understanding
of the upstart WHA was by way of laboring through the tiny
catch-all "scoreboard" agate of local newspaper sports sections -
where league standings, player transactions and a random box score
or two would qualify as "coverage."
Surgent would squint hard to
literally and figuratively read between the lines as to what the
WHA was all about - supplemented by an occasional wire service
article, usually about a team (or the league itself) in financial
trouble. Imagination and hearsay filled in the rest - until the
league's "merger" with the NHL in 1979, when everything WHA-related
seemingly vanished with it, as if nothing had ever
transpired.
By the early '90s, Surgent was
perplexed as to the continued absence of anything historical - let
alone definitive - from the league's statistical existence.
So he struck out on his own to literally set the record straight -
resulting in the first edition of "Complete" in
1995.
25 years and ten editions later,
Surgent's reference opus - all 526 glorious pages of it - is now
the go-to resource for anyone seeking authoritative certitude about
anything WHA.