If you remember where you were in August 1988 upon hearing the news that Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington had sold Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings, you may be a Canadian hockey fan of a certain rage.

I was a rookie on the Montreal Gazette sports desk back then, and that was the angriest I ever saw veteran sports columnist Red Fisher over the next two decades. Not because of the deal.

Fisher had known for months that it was about to go down, and had what was supposed to be a sensational scoop about it sitting stealthily in his computer.

But he'd been asked to hold off and assured by Oilers general manager Glen Sather -- a close friend -- that he'd be tipped off in time to break the story. Gretzky's tears at the surreal news conference in Edmonton where the deal was announced might have been suspect (he was beaming in Los Angeles a few hours later with new boss Bruce McNall), but Fisher's eyes burned with a genuine sense of betrayal for weeks.

Which brings us to this season's reading list (hankies not included) for the sports buff on your holiday gift list.

Gretzky's Tears: Hockey, Canada, and the Day Everything Changed

By Stephen Brunt, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 255 pages, $34.95

I'd Trade Him Again: On Gretzky, Politics and the Pursuit of the Perfect Deal

By Terry McConnell and J'lyn Nye, Fenn Publishing Co. Ltd., 304 pages, $32.95

Stephen Brunt's No. 1 bestseller from 2006, Searching for Bobby Orr, was an insightful account of the life of the greatest and possibly the shiest puck chaser ever to lace 'em up. Now he takes an equally penetrating look at the sport's chattiest poster boy, a nine-time National Hockey League MVP whose move to the West Coast transformed the game by triggering a burst of salary inflation and creating an illusory audience for hockey in the lucrative southwestern U.S. market. (Sadly, there is nothing illusory about the NHL's dogged reluctance to pay its greatest ambassador the $8.2 million US Gretzky is owed from his abruptly truncated turn as coach of the unloved Phoenix Coyotes.)

Brunt, an acclaimed Globe and Mail columnist, chronicles the Great One's ascent and on-ice decline, along with the spectacular reversals of fortune suffered by the fatally flawed "hero capitalists" who bought and sold him as an appreciating and then depreciating asset: Nelson Skalbania, Pocklington and McNall.

Edmonton journalists McConnell and Nye focus on Pocklington and McNall, a cordial con and smuggled-coin man who would be sentenced five years later to 70 months on conspiracy and fraud charges.

Pocklington, a union-busting sometime philanthropist who helped engineer the brutal ouster of Joe Clark as the federal Tory leader, was arrested last March in California and indicted for bankruptcy fraud in the U.S. He spent a night in jail before Sather could bail him out, pending trial. Two minutes for lying so good.

Playing with Fire

By Theo Fleury with Kirstie McLellan Day, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 322 pages, $32.99

Released in October, this second, far more candid biography of the former Calgary Flames fireplug has received extensive coverage (and became the top seller on Amazon.ca) for graphically confirming what was already widely believed in the hockey world: Like former Moose Jaw Warriors teammate Sheldon Kennedy, who went public more than a decade ago, Fleury claims to have been abused by former junior coach and convicted felon Graham James.

Put that together with the chaotic childhood Fleury suffered, and you find a certain internal logic and inevitability to the issues -- booze, cocaine, gambling and legendary infidelity -- that derailed what should have been a Hall of Fame career.

The surprisingly credible comeback attempt the 41-year-old made this fall with the Flames is consistent with the optimism at the end of the book about having turned his life around. Here's hoping.

The Original Curse

By Sean Deveney, McGraw Hill, 242 pages, $30.95

Major League Baseball has long promulgated the improbable notion that the sport's rampant gambling problems in the early part of the 20th century were limited to Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other members of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, who were banned from the game forever after conspiring to lose that year's World Series.

Deveney, a reporter for Sporting News, makes a convincing case based largely on long-forgotten documents at the Chicago History Museum that the 1918 series was also fixed, with the Chicago Cubs rolling over for Babe Ruth's Boston Red Sox.

Wondering about the title? The Cubs haven't won the series since 1908; they haven't even been in it since 1945. If their rotten karma stems from 1918, it predates the famous Curse of the Bambino, which began two years later when the Red Sox sold Ruth to the Yankees.

Earl Fowler is a Times Colonist copy editor with a backhand that scurries like a wounded marmot.