By the age of ten Eric Zweig was already a budding sports fanatic who was filling his school news books with game reports instead of current events. He has been writing professionally about sports and sports history since graduating from Trent University in 1985 with a degree in Political Studies. His articles have been printed in the New York Times as well as numerous Canadian publications including The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald and Canada's History Magazine (formerly The Beaver). He has also been a writer/producer with CBC Radio Sports and TSN SportsRadio. Eric has published more than 40 books about hockey and history for adults and children (See the link below to ericzweig.com for a full list of books) including the bestselling adult titles Stanley Cup the Complete History (Firefly, 2018) and Hockey Hall of Fame True Stories (Firefly, 2022). His first book, Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada, (Lester Publishing, 1992) was an historical novel set in the early days of professional hockey. While most of his work has been non-fiction, he is also the author of a Y/A historical fiction called Fever Season (Dundurn Press, 2009) about the Spanish Flu Epidemic and the cancelled Stanley Cup series of 1919. He worked with Dan Diamond and Associates (consulting publisher to the National Hockey League) from 1996 to 2018. In addition to his “behind the scenes” work with TSN and CBC, Eric has also been an on-air guest on dozens of television and radio programs and has often appeared on CTV News Channel. In the fall of 2017, he appeared in the documentary "NHL: 100" commemorating 100 years of NHL history. Eric is a member of the Society for International Hockey Research and the Society for American Baseball Research. A former member of the Toronto Blue Jays grounds crew, he still has a champagne bottle from the club’s first American League East Division title celebration in 1985.
See below re: school visits.
For adults, talks also tend to be informal. Power-point images to be used when appropriate.
My expertise is in early hockey history and the history of the Stanley Cup. This can be tailored to a specific audience. I do look to leave lots of time for questions and interaction with the audience.
My presentations tend to be somewhat informal and low-tech. I like to emphasize to schoolchildren that writing does not just mean thinking up creative stories. Most of the writing we do in our lives – for school or for work – will be non-fiction. Though I have written two novels, and can speak to that too, for me, working mostly on historical non-fiction, writing can be like detective work. In talking about research, I always explain how the Internet can make this so much easier … but that a researcher has to be very careful about what type of sources to use. I like to leave a lot of time for questions.
