Scotty Quotes

“It didn’t matter if someone else scored more goals or had more points or was the league’s MVP; there might be many leaders on the team, but the Rocket was its spirit.”
― Ken Dryden, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other

“In the Canadiens’ dressing room, on a wall above the players’ lockers, is a line from John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields.” It reads: To you from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high.”
― Ken Dryden, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other

“He had to do his best, and depending on the game—a good night, a bad night, ahead or behind—he had to come up with a few things he hadn’t thought of before. He may have seemed only a cheerleader, even to himself, but in a tone, a gesture, a look in his eye, he needed to get across his message. And do it instantly. “You just played it by the seat of your pants,” he says about coaching those games in Verdun. On the rinks of Willibrord Park, he was learning to become a game coach.”
― Ken Dryden, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other

“In the off-season, it wasn’t games that the players missed—it was their teammates. It was the team.”
― Ken Dryden, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other

“But while Kravitz has a need to perform, with Sam you saw nothing. Things just got done. And when he wasn’t doing, he was thinking—he was doing things inside his head. In the rinks and parks of Snowdon, he learned that if you know everything about everything, people listen. And if you’re willing to do everything, people let you.”
― Ken Dryden, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other

“850 square feet. It’s what forced the Bowmans and everyone else on the Avenues outside. And it was these outdoor spaces—not the closed-in world of flats and row houses of Verdun—that defined them.”
― Ken Dryden, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other