The Game

by Ken Dryden

If it is true that a sports career prolongs adolescence, it is also true that when that career ends, it deposits a player into premature middle age. For, while he was always older than he seemed, he is suddenly younger than he feels. He feels old. His illusions about himself, fuelled by a public life, sent soaring then crashing, have disappeared just as those of contemporaries have come to full bloom. He is left bitter, or jealous; or perhaps he just knows too much. It is a life that is lived in one-quarter time. “Boy wonder,” “emerging star,” “middle-age problem,” “aging veteran,” all in ten short years, and now in his thirties and still a young man, he feels too old to start again.

there is achievement in having good seasons, and in not having bad. I just don’t want to be bad.

Many times, I have sensed in Bowman a personal loyalty beyond the team, but I have been mistaken. I always believed that he played me the way he did because he understood me. He played me often because I needed to play often to feel part of the team; he put me into a game after a bad game because he knew that the humiliation I felt wouldn’t go away until I played better; he played me on the road, when I was sick or injured, against the Islanders, Bruins, and Flyers because he knew I needed the exciting challenge that each offered. And when he talked to the press of my outside interests, he always spoke positively of them, as if he understood my need for distractions from the game, my need to scheme with myself to justify continuing in hockey, my need to pursue other things for their own sake. Two years ago, I allowed four goals in a first period against Vancouver, then was jeered by Forum fans the rest of the game. When I didn’t play at home for more than a month until we met the Bruins, I thought he had been protecting me, keeping me away from the Forum until we played a team against which I always played well. In fact, it was none of those things; it was nothing personal at all. I played often, I played after bad games, and against the league’s best teams when I was sick or injured, because I play well then, and because when I play well, the team is better off. It is because he understands me as a goalie that he plays me when he does; he does it for the team, not for me.

There are many successful ways to coach. There are autocrats and technocrats, mean SOBs and just plain folks. What makes Bowman’s style work is an understanding, the understanding that must exist between a coach and his team: he knows the most important thing to a team is to win; we know he does what he does to make us win.

What practice is not is a time to teach. In Europe, and in U.S. colleges and high schools, teams play fewer games and practice more often. With more days between games, they can vary the tempo of a season to create the right environment for practice. They can use practice for preparation and instruction, to develop team and individual skills. The Canadian tradition is different. We have never learned how to practice. We are told at an early age, and we believe, that only with game competition can we improve. So we play games, three games a week for much of our lives, and, preoccupied with the last game until preoccupied with the next, we have little energy and less attention span for anything else. Only when things go wrong do we interrupt ourselves and focus on specific parts of our game—on power plays, faceoffs, forechecking, breakout patterns. The rest of the time, our conditioning and skills building gradually from seasonal causes, we move through practice less to improve than to sustain what we already have.

The backyard was not a training ground. In all the time I spent there, I don’t remember ever thinking I would be an NHL goalie, or even hoping I could be one. In backyard games, I dreamed I was Sawchuk or Hall, Mahovlich or Howe; I never dreamed I would be like them. There seemed no connection between the backyard and Maple Leaf Gardens; there seemed no way to get to there from here. If we ever thought about that, it never concerned us; we just played. It was here in the backyard that we learned hockey. It was here we got close to it, we got inside it, and it got inside us. It was here that our inextricable bond with the game was made. Many years have now passed, the game has grown up and been complicated by things outside it, yet still the backyard remains untouched, unchanged, my unseverable link to that time, and that game.

Yet while those around him dreamed of playing in the NHL, Houle did not. Not until later when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. I asked him why. He paused a moment, choosing his words carefully as if unsure I would understand. “You see, working-class people have no confidence,” he said in his quiet, straightforward way. “It just takes a while to get some.” Later, he explained it to me another way, and in doing so told much about himself. “I never dream of something I cannot be,” he said.

What does Houle do for a hockey team? Any team, even a great team, has many more Réjean Houles than it has Lafleurs and Robinsons. Grinders, muckers, travailleurs, they form the base of any team; they do the kinds of diligent, disciplined, unspectacular things that every team must do before it can do the rest. But more than that, players like Houle make it fun to be on a team; it is a rare skill.

While other players, in their roles, constantly battle the tension between team and self (it is surely good for Larry Robinson to score a goal; if the team is ahead and the score is close, it may not be good for the team that he try), simply put, what’s good for Bob Gainey is good for the team; and vice versa. In many ways he is like former basketball star Bill Bradley. Without virtuoso individual skills, team play becomes both virtue and necessity, and what others understand as unselfishness is really cold-eyed realism—he simply knows what works best, for the team and for him.

Only slowly did it come to me: I had been irrelevant; I couldn’t even lose the game.

What BU was, what the Bruins are now, is a good opponent, a rare and treasured thing for any team or player. For a good opponent defines a player or a team. By forcing you to be as good as you can be, such an opponent stretches the boundaries of your emotional and playing experience, giving you your highest highs and lowest lows; your best and worst and hardest moments. When you get to an age or to a moment that causes you to look back, you realize how important that is. After years of games and feelings, it is only those boundaries, those special highs and lows, that remain; the rest, with nothing special to distinguish them one from another, gradually just disappear.

It all has to do with the way we look at free time. Constantly preoccupied with time and keeping ourselves busy (we have come to answer the ritual question, “How are you?” with what we apparently equate with good health, “Busy”), we treat non-school, non-sleeping or non-eating time, unbudgeted free time, with suspicion and no little fear. For while it may offer opportunity to learn and do new things, we worry that the time we once spent reading, kicking a ball, or mindlessly coddling a puck might be used destructively, in front of TV, or “getting into trouble” in endless ways. So we organize free time, scheduling it into lessons—ballet, piano, French—into organizations, teams, and clubs, fragmenting it into impossible-to-be-boring segments, creating in ourselves a mental metabolism geared to moving on, making free time distinctly unfree.

When I watch a modern suburban player, I feel the same as I do when I hear Donnie Osmond or René Simard sing a love song. I hear a skillful voice, I see closed eyes and pleading outstretched fingers, but I hear and see only fourteen-year-old boys who can’t tell me anything. Hockey has left the river and will never return. But like the “street,” like an “ivory tower,” the river is less a physical place than an attitude, a metaphor for unstructured, unorganized time alone. And if the game no longer needs the place, it needs the attitude. It is the rare player like Lafleur who reminds us.

“Sports” had become “Sports Inc.” With big money now to be made in sports, big money would be made, and the attitude changed. “Cities” became “markets,” “games” became “products,” “sports” part of the “entertainment business,” fighting for “entertainment dollars.” Owners sold civic pride, appealed to civic vanity, got civic concessions, moved into civic monuments; blamed civic pride, left. Players adopted pinstripe suits and permanented hair. Money, once only a practical imperative, a vehicle to let them as adults play what as little boys they could play for nothing, was now a reason itself to play. Sports became a means to something else, a player’s commitment distracted and suspect; money a motivation, so the motivation.

The NHL theory of violence goes something like this: Hockey is by its nature a violent game. Played in an area confined by boards and unbreakable glass, by players carrying sticks travelling at speeds approaching thirty miles per hour, collisions occur, and because they occur, the rules specifically permit them, with only some exceptions. But whether legal or illegal, accidental or not, such collisions can cause violent feelings, and violent feelings with a stick in your hands are dangerous, potentially lethal feelings. It is crucial, therefore, that these feelings be vented quickly before anger and frustration explode into savage overreaction, channelled towards, if not desirable, at least more tolerable, directions. In essence, this is Freud’s “drive-discharge” theory of human aggression.

The NHL is wrong. The reports of Ziegler’s scouts notwithstanding, there is much visual evidence to the contrary. But more to the point, the NHL is wrong because if Freud was right, anthropologist Desmond Morris is also right. As Morris believes, anger released, though sometimes therapeutic, is sometimes inflammatory; that is, by fighting, two players may get violent feelings out of their systems, or, by fighting they may create new violent feelings to make further release (more fighting) necessary. If Freud was right, the NHL is also wrong, believing as it does that fighting and stick-swinging represent the only channels by which violent feelings can be released. Anger and frustration can be released within the rules, by skating faster, by shooting harder, by doing relentless, dogged violence on an opponent’s mind, as Bjorn Borg, Pete Rose, and Bob Gainey do. If Freud was right and anger released is anger spent, then a right hook given is a body-check missed, and by permitting fighting, the NHL discourages determined, inspired play as retaliation.

The NHL theory of violence is nothing more than original violence tolerated and accepted, in time turned into custom, into spectacle, into tactic, and finally into theory.

It sounded very familiar; and so too did the prescriptions: improved technique, more imaginative team play, team play based on offense not defense, on ball control and speed, better conditioning and better finishing around the net. And to make it all possible, increased emphasis should be placed on the national team at the expense of “the interminable league program,” as one newspaper put it, to give players more time to play together, as the Hungarians and others insisted on. Change a few of the terms, colloquialize the language slightly, and it might have been written in Canada, about hockey, in 1972 or since. The Canadian and English reactions were similar, perhaps because they came from countries sharing a common culture for many years, and sharing parallel traditions in their respective sports. But that is only part of the story. Everyone, every country, has a watershed moment like this sometime, about something. The point is, what happens next? With all that had been learned, what happened to English soccer in the more than twenty-five years since? I am told by my friend and others that the stereotype English style remains, that even with its greater pace and stamina, the essence of the game has not changed. Indeed, if anything the gap in global styles has widened. But why? For more than twenty-five years, the English have seen the problem and understood it as well as it can be understood, always with the will to bring about the necessary changes. So what stops them?...

Yet it was out of this slow and static style that the priority skills of our game emerged, and in many ways have never changed. Offensively, it was skating and stickhandling; defensively, bodychecking. Bodychecking had not been a feature of the original game, but made its appearance soon after. I have found no explanation for it, yet using other circumstantial evidence, a reasonable hypothesis emerges. It had to do with an often small ice surface (though the Victoria Rink was of contemporary North American dimensions, 200 feet by 85 feet, many early rinks were a curling-size; 112 feet by 58 feet), cluttered with eighteen players, then fourteen, many of them out-of-season rugby players used to body contact, their hockey skills new and primitive, their equipment clumsy; the unavoidable result would be frequent if inadvertent collisions. But, inadvertent or not, early players soon discovered that in a puck carrier’s game, collisions were effective deterrents. So from accidents emerged our basic defensive strategy. As for skating and stickhandling, with no forward pass there was no other way to advance the puck. Skating was the fundamental skill, of course, but speed (which itself might take a player around or between opponents) was not yet a consistent tactic. Instead, it was by stickhandling that scoring chances were earned.

Yet there is a fatalism about Canadians that extends beyond hockey. To a child of celebrated parents (England and France’s progeny), raised in the shadow of a southern colossus (America’s neighbor), others have always seemed to do things bigger and better; others always would. So, never precocious, never rebellious, reasonably content, we ride their coattails and do pretty well. In hockey, now that we’ve been caught from behind, we wonder why it took so long.

I knew that the dominance of the Canadiens would diminish. Nobody could sustain the pace of fifteen Stanley Cups in twenty-four years. Pollock and Bowman were gone. The farm system had been built during a sponsorship time when teams could sign up kids almost at birth, and when every Canadian kid wanted to play for the Canadiens or the Leafs, and when every non-Canadian kid, every American or European, didn’t matter. When sponsorship ended in 1969, and a universal draft of players forced kids to play with whichever team chose them, the Canadiens already had enough players in their system to trade their surplus for future draft picks to teams desperate to compete and survive. But by 1979, all that was coming to an end. The next generation of great players was getting spread around through the draft.

When the WHA disappeared in 1979, the players lost their leverage. There was no free agency within the NHL; the players had no place else to go. Salaries flattened out. There was no reason for the owners to pay more. Except for Gretzky. When the next great superstar comes along, he is always some close variation of the superstar before. So, on the salary scale, he gets slotted in roughly where his predecessor had been. But Gretzky wasn’t a close variation. He was a lot better. Certainly, he would get paid more. It would be unconscionable if he didn’t. But how much more? The goodness of an owner’s heart does not generate the same result as a gun to his head. And Gretzky had no gun. Still, he got more money, but not a lot more. The impact on the rest of the league was modest. Gretzky was Gretzky. Nobody compared with him on the ice. Nobody’s contract could compare to his off the ice. Then came Lemieux. He wasn’t Gretzky, but he was close enough to Gretzky that he could be compared to him and for his contract to reflect that. Then what about Messier? He wasn’t Gretzky, but maybe he was a little like Lemieux, and maybe Jari Kurri was a little like Messier, and maybe Brett Hull and Cam Neely were like Kurri. With his unprecedented play, Gretzky had created a Neverland beyond the oceans, but it was too far away, inaccessible to anyone else. It took Lemieux to build the bridge to it, making it possible for the rest of the league to follow.