At a Glance
- Narration: Author-read at conversational pace, with no second voice credited for the players being quoted
- Themes: Dressing room folklore, grief and slapstick side by side, hockey as oral tradition
- Mood: Loose, affectionate, quick to laugh
- Verdict: Buy it for the storytelling, and expect the page to tell you almost nothing about the audio.
Hockey's best stories almost never happen during the game. They happen on buses, in hotel corridors, and on a front porch where somebody has left a captured alligator, and this audiobook is built entirely out of that second category. James Duthie has spent a career at TSN collecting them, and here he reads them out himself across nine hours and eighteen minutes. Sidney Crosby supplies the foreword. Everything after that is players talking about each other, which is the only route by which most of this material could ever have reached print or tape.
Is Certified Beauties Worth Your Time?
Nothing in the publisher's copy admits that this is a second volume. It calls the book 'a new collection', both series fields sit empty, and a buyer is left to work it out alone. One write-up settles the question and the narration question in the same breath, opening 'In this sequel to "Beauties"' before going on to describe more NHL stories, then naming Duthie as TSN's commentator and adding that 'It was a pleasure to listen to a voice, that I have been listening to for many years, narrate his own book'. That is the only place on this page where anybody addresses the recording at all, and the only place the earlier book gets a mention. Two useful facts, both supplied by a customer rather than by the people selling the product.
Self-narration is the production's central decision and it is the right one. These stories were gathered in Duthie's own voice, in his questions, from players who agreed to talk to him specifically, and a hired performer would have been impersonating the interviewer as well as the interviewees. The tradeoff is that no second voice is credited anywhere, so every player quoted arrives filtered through the same broadcaster's cadence for the full nine hours.
Certified is doing real work in that title. The description's opening move pairs 'great stories' with 'great characters', and the collection's organizing claim is that the second produces the first, that the sport generates this volume of anecdote because of the particular people it keeps together in one room. Accept the premise or not, it explains the selection principle plainly enough. Nothing here earns its place by having changed a season. Everything here earns its place because somebody could not stop retelling it, and the certification in the title turns out to be a stamp applied to the tellers rather than to the tales.
The Best Parts of Certified Beauties
Laughing and crying inside the same book is what the longest write-up here promises, and the running order it describes is worth knowing before you press play. It opens with 'I laughed, I cried, and I laughed again', then names the chapter responsible for the second of those: 'The chapter on Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau will have you bawling'. It goes on to place a closing chapter about Ray Whitney after it, so the collection ends on a laugh rather than on the grief. The description advertises the Gaudreau chapter and says nothing about where it falls or what follows it, and the sequencing turns out to be the thing that makes the whole structure survivable.
Bullet lists in publisher copy are usually filler. This one is the actual pitch. Brady and Matthew Tkachuk pulling pranks that nearly went badly wrong, a beer league team that had to skate against Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, the friendship of Darryl Sittler and Borje Salming and the story of Salming's last visit to Toronto, Sarah Nurse becoming a star during what the copy calls the chaos of Covid-19, a team of Canadian players the copy itself labels misfits turning disaster into gold in Riga, Kevin Bieksa catching a break at the worst imaginable moment, and Darcy Hordichuk depositing an alligator on Roberto Luongo's porch. Slapstick sits directly against loss here, an Olympic breakthrough sits directly against a beer league getting run over, and that adjacency is not sloppy curation. It is how dressing room storytelling has always worked.
Before You Commit to Certified Beauties
One entry filed in Canada raises the only substantive objection this page contains, and it is a fair one: the stories are already circulating. It reports having heard a number of them on Spitting Chiclets and 32 Thoughts, which is precisely the exposure a book assembled from an oral tradition has to survive. Anyone invested enough in this world to want the collection is also likely to have encountered its best material somewhere else first. The counter is a structural one. A story given a full chapter, with setup, aftermath and the teller's own hesitations left in, is a different object from the same story told in passing on a podcast, and this book is built on the longer form.
Vocabulary is the other tell. The description signs off by calling the book 'essential reading for every hockey fan', one entry reduces its whole verdict to two words, 'Good read', and a further entry filed in Canada the following January reports the experience at one remove, saying only that a husband enjoyed it. None of that reflects badly on the audio. What it means practically is that the visible enthusiasm on this page is enthusiasm for the anecdotes rather than for the performance of them, so a buyer weighing nine hours of listening against a printed copy gets almost no help from the column beneath the description.
The Right Listener for Certified Beauties
Press play if you follow the sport closely enough to recognize surnames without a program, and especially if the between-periods segment has ever held you longer than the period did. The copy assumes fluency and drops names without introduction, which is what keeps the pace moving, and the episodic build means you can stop after any story and lose nothing. Supporters of almost any franchise will find their own people somewhere across the running time, and the tone stays generous enough that rooting interest never turns into a barrier.
Give it a pass if you wanted tactics, analysis or a season narrative, because anecdote is the entire architecture and it deliberately builds toward nothing. Give it a pass too if the same material already reaches you weekly in podcast form. One more thing if the Gaudreau chapter is what tempts you: it arrives inside a book whose default register is comic, so the grief lands in a room that has spent hours laughing.
How long is the Certified Beauties audiobook, and can you listen in short bursts?
Just over nine hours, assembled from self-contained stories rather than a continuous narrative, which makes it unusually forgiving of interruption. Segment lengths are documented nowhere on the product page, so you find those out by starting.
Does the audiobook include the Sidney Crosby foreword and the Gaudreau chapter?
The description names both a foreword by Sidney Crosby and a chapter remembering Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau among the contents. Nothing indicates either was cut or condensed for the recording, though no unabridged marking sits in the metadata either.
Is it appropriate for younger hockey fans?
Nowhere on the page does a content advisory appear. Pranks, tributes and locker room humor are what the description promises, none of it obviously adult, though a parent is buying on inference rather than on anything published.
