Lloyd Percival was an innovative and controversial Canadian sports pioneer and sports entrepreneur.

As an athlete his involvement included his participation in the Canadian junior tennis

Tennis

Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...

 finals, Canadian bantam Golden Gloves boxing

Boxing

Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...

 championship, and with the Canadian cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

 team which toured England in 1936. He coached track and field

Track and field

Track and field is a sport comprising various competitive athletic contests based around the activities of running, jumping and throwing. The name of the sport derives from the venue for the competitions: a stadium which features an oval running track surrounding a grassy area...

 and ice hockey

Ice hockey

Ice hockey, often referred to as hockey, is a team sport played on ice, in which skaters use wooden or composite sticks to shoot a hard rubber puck into their opponent's net. The game is played between two teams of six players each. Five members of each team skate up and down the ice trying to take...

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Early career

In 1941 he started his popular CBC radio

CBC Radio

CBC Radio generally refers to the English-language radio operations of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC operates a number of radio networks serving different audiences and programming niches, all of which are outlined below.-English:CBC Radio operates three English language...

 Sports College, with over three-quarters of a million students registered at one time. He began the Fitness Institute as a venture designed to pioneer sports/fitness testing and coaching techniques. Percival worked with many well-known Canadian athletes including golfer George Knudson

George Knudson

George Alfred Christian Knudson, CM was a Canadian professional golfer, who along with Mike Weir holds the record for the Canadian with the most wins on the PGA Tour, with eight career victories....

 and NHL goalie Dave Drained.
Queen Elizabeth II awarded him the Coronation Medal

Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal

The Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal was a commemorative medal made to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.-Issue:For Coronation and Jubilee medals, the practice up until 1977 was that United Kingdom authorities decided on a total number to be produced, then allocated a proportion to...

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The Hockey Handbook

Perhaps his most long lasting impact upon Canadian sports remains his publication, The Hockey Handbook. Originally published in 1951, and rejected at the time by one NHL coach as “the product of a three-year-old mind,” Lloyd Percival’s The Hockey Handbook went on to have an international impact. European coaches treated the book as the first analytical assessment of hockey skills, team play and conditioning. In fact, the Soviet hockey powers based their program on the Hockey Handbook. Anatoli Tarasov

Anatoli Tarasov

Anatoli Vladimirovitch Tarasov was an ice hockey coach, styled by Encyclopædia Britannica "the father of Russian hockey", who established the Soviet Union as "the dominant force in international competition"...

, the godfather of Soviet hockey once told Percival: “Your wonderful book …introduced us to the mysteries of Canadian hockey, I have read (it) like a schoolboy.”

Republising the handbook

In spring of 1974 Larry Sadler met with Lloyd Percival to discuss re-editing The Hockey Handbook. Percival agreed the time was ready for the update and the two men began to work on updating the book. The initiative stalled when Percival died suddenly in July of that same year. Undeterred, Sadler spent over 20 years continuing his quest to have The Hockey Handbook updated. Finally after convincing two friends, Wayne Major and Bob Thom, of the importance of the project the three men went to McClelland & Stewart Publishing and, after the parties consulted with the Percival family, the process began anew. In 1997, after 2 years, the work was completed, and The Hockey Handbook was re-published. The resource support team included such prominent hockey experts as Percival confidant Joe Taylor, former university and NHL coach Dave Chambers, power skating expert Marianne Watkins, sports therapist and chiropractor Dr. Tom Sawa and university coach and pro coach Don McKee. Nearly a half century after it was originally published, The Hockey Handbook remains in a class by itself. In all but one case the content was found, surprisingly, to be only in need of slight updating, so far ahead of its time was the content. The Training and Conditioning section and the Goaltending sections were the only areas which were considerably re-written. The conditioning portion was updated by Dr. Tom Sawa while Larry Sadler, one of Canada’s most innovative goaltending coaches, re-wrote the goaltending chapter.