The Game Quotes

“I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves—like a goalie moves, like I move; I don’t tell it to move or how to move or where, I don’t know it’s moving, I don’t feel it move—yet it moves. And when my eyes watch the puck, I see things I don’t know I’m seeing. I see Larson and Nedomansky as they come on the ice, I see them away from the puck unthreatening and uninvolved. I see something in the way a shooter holds his stick, in the way his body angles and turns, in the way he’s being checked, in what he’s done before that tells me what he’ll do—and my body moves. I let it move. I trust it and the unconscious mind that moves it.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was. The “golden age of sports,” the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“When you are a presence, there are many things you need not do, for it is simply understood you can do them. So you don’t do them. You don’t risk what you need not risk, you let others’ imaginations do them for you, for they do them better than you can. Like the man who opens his mouth to prove he’s a fool, often the more you do, the more you look like everyone else.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“Ya writin’ a book? Hey great. Need some help? Want some of my quips? Hey, we could do it together. We’d quip ’em to death. Give ’em quiplash hee hee hee.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“Because the demands of a goalie are mostly mental, it means that for a goalie the biggest enemy is himself.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“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.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“We are allowed one image, one angle; everything must fit. So normal in one thing begins to look like normal in the rest. Unlike the Greeks, who gave their gods human imperfections, for us every flaw is a fatal flaw. It has only to be found, and it will be found.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“But if I have one lasting image of him, it is from off the ice—wearing a patchwork sports jacket, the kind Heywood Hale Broun might wear, a rough, tweed fedora on his head, pushed up and punched around to look a certain way, a cigar in his teeth, a day’s growth of beard, a big picket-fence grin, and saying in a too-loud voice with a too-loud laugh, “Hey, who has more fun than people?” (In all the years I heard him say it, I never had an answer.)”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“For each of us, it’s a race, a short, quick race we don’t know we’re in until we start to lose.”
― Ken Dryden, 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.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“In the 1970s, only two players could dominate a game. One was Orr, the other Bobby Clarke. Clarke, a fierce, driven man, did it by the unrelenting mood he gave to a game, a mood so strong it penetrated his team and stayed on the ice even when he did not. Orr did it another way.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“While a team needs all kinds of players with all kinds of skills to win, it needs prototypes, strong, dependable prototypes, as examples of what you want your team to be. If you want it to be quick and opportunistic, you need a Lafleur and a Shutt, so that those who can be quick are encouraged to try, and those who cannot will move faster than they otherwise might.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“Asked how it finally happened, he answered quickly, “I was lucky,” then stopped himself, and quietly started again. “No, not lucky,” he said. “Lucky’s a funny word, eh?” and pausing while I nodded, he continued again, “I was given the chance to prove I was good enough.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“But, check and checkmate—the currency of the celebrity is attention, and each angry attack only means more attention for him.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“It is part of the painful process of history that people are always made by the world they reject and that the rage at it they express is in large measure rage at themselves. —Fouad Ajami (reviewing V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey)”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“In the middle of the third period, the message board flashed again—“Un Nouveau Gouvernement.” No longer afraid to hope, thousands stood up and cheered and the Forum organist played the PQ anthem. And when they stood and cheered, thousands of others who had always stood and cheered with them stayed seated and did not cheer. At that moment, people who had sat together for many years in the tight community of season-ticket holders learned something about each other that they had not known before. The last few minutes of the game were very difficult. The mood in the Forum had changed.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“I know that pucks are now shot faster by more fast shooters. I know that players train harder and longer, and receive better coaching. I know that in any way an athlete can be measured--in strength, in speed, in height or distance jumped--he is immensely superior to the one who performed twenty years ago. But measured against a memory, he has no chance. I know what I feel.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“It is easy to say that a fan can stay at home, or at home he can change a channel and watch something else. But it isn't as simple as that. A sports fan loves his sport. A fan in Toronto loves hockey, and if the Leafs are bad, he loses something he loves and has no way to replace the loss.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“But life on the road comes at a price. The energy it gives, the freedom you feel, it takes away, and more—twenty-six weeks a season, eighty games, from bus to plane to bus to hotel to bus to arena to bus to plane, to a leagueful of cities three times a week. A rhythm like any other rhythm, it is one you get used to; except this one is always changing and you never do. Like a skillful runner in a distance race, it sets the pace and plays with you; going slower than you want it to, speeding up before you are ready, gradually wearing you down, until after four games in five nights in four different cities, you are weak and vulnerable, and it sprints away from you.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“His players don’t sit around telling hateful-affectionate stories about him. Someone might say of him, as former Packers great Henry Jordan once said of Lombardi, “He treats us all the same—like dogs,”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“Once I didn’t. Once, as I was told I should, I kept a “book” on all the players I knew, with notes about wrist shots, slap shots, backhands, quick releases or slow, glove side or stick side, high or low; about forehand dekes or backhand dekes, and before a game, I would memorize and rehearse all that was there. But when my body prepared for Thompson’s backhand before I knew it was Thompson, I realized that what was in my book, and more, was stored away in my mind and muscles as nerve impulses, ready, able to move my body before I could.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“As for the Wings, I wanted to tighten some already painfully tight screws, to force on them the kind of cruel question no one should have to answer: am I willing to go through what surely I must, for something I will surely never get?”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“Yet, in fact, both were deeply sensitive and very much alike, Frank keeping everything inside, Pete letting it out, and steamrollering it before it could bother him.”
― Ken Dryden, The Game

“For there is a life there, and in destiny and romance there is no room for life. Painted as they are with broad brush strokes, vivid and lush, they find shape and pattern only with distance. The person who lives them is too close. He feels sweat as well as triumph. He understands what others see, but feels none of it himself”
― Ken Dryden, The Game