The Game

by Ken Dryden

  More than one hundred and fifty families lived on 5th Avenue in the city block between Bannantyne and Verdun. It was a street of sixplexes, one beside the other, thirteen on each side of the street, each with two doors on the ground floor, a flight of outside stairs to a balcony and four more doors, two of which led to second-floor flats, the other two to inside stairs that connected to flats on the third floor. Inside, the flats were identical—a narrow hallway running from the front door to the back, and extending off it, a small sitting room, two small bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom on the other side near the back. For $22 a month, the Bowmans lived in one of the bottom flats; the landlord, as was the custom, lived in the other. Years later, Bowman and his friends would joke about living in Harlem, but the flats, while small, were well-built and well-maintained. Size, in fact, was little problem, for the children of Verdun spent most of their time outdoors.

  They spent it on the streets—in the 1930s and 1940s, streets largely empty of cars—or at Willibrord Park, where each winter the city of Verdun put up five outdoor rinks. On these rinks or in back alleys, from late November to late March, at noon, from school-end until dinner time, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays from morning to night, Bowman and his friends played hockey. In summer, they played baseball. It was a simple, invigorating life, the cliché childhood of Canadians of their generation. Years later, asked to remember his childhood, Bowman said simply that “everything was sports.”

  After playing his minor hockey in Verdun, at sixteen Bowman joined the Montreal Junior Canadiens. A left-winger, he was a good skater with a fine instinctive sense of the game, though surprisingly weak defensively, and in his first season scored the promising total of twenty goals. That year in the playoffs, the Juniors played Trois-Rivières. It was March 1951 and Bowman was seventeen. Ahead 5-1 in a game that would eliminate Trois Rivières, with thirty seconds remaining Bowman got a breakaway. Chasing him a few strides behind was Jean-Guy Talbot, a talented defenseman who would later play sixteen seasons in the NHL, three in St. Louis with Bowman as his coach. Talbot had played poorly, taking several costly penalties, and with his season about to end, he was frustrated and angry.

  He reached out and came down hard with his stick on Bowman’s shoulder. Bowman kept going. Talbot brought his stick down again, harder, this time on Bowman’s head. Bowman went down, his skull fractured, his career over.

  Talbot was suspended for a year, though his suspension was lifted the following November. Bowman, after a few anxious days in the hospital, slowly recovered. He tried playing again the following year, this time with a helmet, but found that he couldn’t play as he had before. Late in the fall, Frank Selke, then general manager of the Canadiens, sponsors of the Juniors, called him to his office and told him it wasn’t worth the risk to him or to the team for him to continue. Having just turned eighteen, Bowman decided to quit, accepting Selke’s offer to coach a midget-age team in Verdun. Years later, he held no bitterness. Uncertain of a professional career in the tightly competitive six-team NHL, he saw his injury as an opportunity to get a head start in a new life.

  For sixteen years, almost a coaching lifetime, he apprenticed coaching and supervising minor hockey teams in Verdun and recruit-ing players for Jr. A teams, coaching a Jr. B team, for two years assisting Sam Pollock with the Hull-Ottawa Juniors, moving to Peterborough to coach for three seasons, scouting eastern Canada for the Canadiens for two, coaching Omaha, his first professional team, for a few unhappy weeks, then returning to Montreal for two more years with the Juniors. At first, it was a rapid rise. Then, too young to advance beyond junior hockey, Bowman began a long and at times frustrating wait, moving sideways several times until much of his early promise seemed to have deserted him. But during this time, working with Selke and Pollock, he got immensely varied and valuable experience. So, early in 1966, a year before the NHL expanded from six teams to twelve, when Lynn Patrick, coach and general manager of the expansion St. Louis Blues, called and asked him to be his assistant, at thirty-three, Bowman was ready.

  Before twenty games had been played in the Blues’ first season, Patrick had stepped down as coach and Bowman had replaced him. In his first three years, the Blues finished first twice and third once in the expansion Western Division of the NHL, going to the Stanley Cup finals each time. In his fourth season, the team slipped to second and lost to expansion rival Minnesota in the quarter-finals of the playoffs.

  After an uncomfortable plane ride home from Minnesota, the next day Bowman met with Sid Salomon III, son of the principal owner of the team. In a stormy meeting, Salomon made it clear that he didn’t want Al Arbour as his coach the following year, Cliff Fletcher as Bowman’s assistant, or Tommy Woodcock as the team’s trainer. Bowman decided to resign. Little more than a year later, only Woodcock was still with the Blues, his job saved by a players’ protest.

  A few days after Bowman resigned, Henri Richard called Al MacNeil “incompétent,” the province of Quebec heard him say something quite different, and the Canadiens needed a new coach. At thirty-seven, Scotty Bowman returned to Montreal to take the job he had trained for during most of his life.

  If you ask the players who have played for Bowman if they like him, most will stand shocked, as if the thought never occurred to them, as if the question is somehow inappropriate, as if the answer is entirely self-evident. No, they will say, Scotty Bowman may be a lot of things, but he is not someone you like. A few, usually those who played for him the longest but who now no longer do so, might brighten and answer quickly, as if they had thought about it, maybe a lot about it, in the years since.

  “Yeah sure, I, I really respect the guy. I really admire him. He sure did a lot for me.”

  Scotty Bowman is not someone who is easy to like. He has no coach’s con about him. He does not slap backs, punch arms, or grab elbows. He doesn’t search eyes, spew out ingratiating blarney, or dis-arm with faint, enervating praise. He is shy and not very friendly. If he speaks to reporters or to a team, he talks business, and his eyes sweep several inches above their heads. If he speaks to you alone, as a few times each year you force him to, explaining something that is annoyingly unclear, you share three or four intimate, surprising minutes that bring you closer to him than you ever thought possible. Then, as if he suddenly remembers where he is and what he is doing, he cuts it off—

  “Yeah, yeah, is that it? Good, good”—and before you can answer, it’s over. And if, by chance, your path crosses his away from the rink, at first there will be several awkward “caught in the act” moments.

  Recovering, he may ask how you are, but if he does, he’ll blurt something about Tremblay’s rash or Lemaire’s injury before you can answer. And all the time you talk, one foot on the brake, the other on the accelerator, he lurches away, inch by inch. In the intimacy of a team, Bowman calls Bunny “Michel,” Sharty “Rick,” and Pointu

  “Guy.” Bo and Bird and Co and Shutty are Bob and Larry and Jacques and Steve. He doesn’t call anyone by his nickname.

  Abrupt, straightforward, without flair or charm, he seems cold and abrasive, sometimes obnoxious, controversial, but never colorful. He is not Vince Lombardi, tough and gruff with a heart of gold. 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,” but he doesn’t. He plays favorites. His favorites, while rarely feeling favored, are those who work and produce for him. He is complex, confusing, misunderstood, unclear in every way but one. He is a brilliant coach, the best of his time.

  He starts each season with a goal—the Stanley Cup—and he has no other. It is part of the Canadiens’ heritage passed from Selke to Pollock, through Dick Irvin, Blake, and Bowman, to the Richards, Béliveau, Lafleur, and the rest. A good season is a Stanley Cup; anything else is not. So in September, in November, in December, and in March, he never loses sight of May. With schizophrenic desperation/perspective, he treats each game as
an indicator, as a signpost, en route to May; yet he makes no compromise for any game. He sees an inextricable link between the months and games of a season—“You can’t turn it off and on,” he says, as other coaches say. But Bowman believes what he says, and practices it. Like his mentor, Sam Pollock, he lives with a conviction, what others, less strong, might call paranoia, that no matter how good the team is, it might never win another game. He can see in every game the beginning of a chain of events he cannot stop—a careless loss at home, a tougher game on the road, an injury, three games in four nights, Chartraw missing a plane, a sweep of winter sickness, an opponent on a hot streak, building pressure at home, a media scandal, a team that shows you less respect, then another, and another, and quickly several more.

  For someone of his obvious ability, Bowman seems a remarkable contradiction of strength and weakness, realism and insecurity; but he is not. As others have discovered, at the top, where Bowman is, strength, weakness, realism, and insecurity are really just symptoms of each other. So while he surely knows that we are better than any other team, if he has ever thought about it, he has done so only fleetingly and not without wincing at his own dangerous thought. For he knows that May is always ahead, and when May is over, September is never far away. With each Stanley Cup, we look for, and sometimes find, signs he is loosening up. But he has never really changed. We know that when two or three days of uncharacteristic pleasantness leave us talking to ourselves, as winger Jimmy Roberts once said, “It’s nothing that a loss won’t cure.”

  Not long ago, I asked him his most important job as coach. He sat quiet for a moment, his face unfurrowed and blank, thinking, then said simply, “To get the right players on the ice.” In an age of “systems” (a)nd “concepts” and fervid self-promotion, his answer may seem a little unsatisfying; but though misleadingly simple, it is how he coaches.

  No one has ever heard of a “Bowman system” as they have a “Shero system.” Fred Shero’s Flyers, a good but limited team, needed a system. To be effective, they needed to play just one way, and to play that way so well they could overcome any team. Bowman’s team is different. Immensely talented, immensely varied, it is a team literally good enough to play, and win, any style of game. For it, a system would be too confining, robbing the team of its unique feature—its flexibility. Further, Bowman understands, as Shero did, that the flip side of winning with a system is losing by that system. So Bowman, a pragmatist with the tools any pragmatist would envy, coaches with what he calls a “plan.”

  It starts with speed. It is the essence of the Canadiens’ game“(f)irewagon hockey” someone once called it—and Bowman understands speed. He knows that speed is disorienting, that, like an old man in a thirty-year-old’s world, it robs an opponent of coordination and control, stripping away skills, breaking down systems, making even the simplest tasks seem difficult. He knows that with Lafleur, Lemaire, Shutt, Lapointe, Gainey, and others, speed is an edge we have on everyone else; so Bowman hones that edge and uses it. His practices are in constant motion, shooting, passing, everything done on the go, with speed, every drill rooted in high-pace skating (in the Canada Cup and the Challenge Cup, when Bowman coached players from other teams, they tired quickly in early practices, unused to his pace). In games, he tells us in his earnest way to “throw speed at them.” Other teams forecheck, then fall back quickly to pick up their men, but Bowman frees his skaters to chase the puck in all but the defensive zone. In the 1976 Stanley Cup finals with the Flyers, in a high-pitched, impassioned voice, he reminded us repeatedly, “Don’t respect their speed.” He wanted to pressure the Flyers with all five men in their zone, unworried by 2-on-1 breaks that would sometimes result. He knew that against the Flyers, a methodical, even slow, team, our speed would let us recover easily.

  But speed is not enough. Quick players are often small, and in smaller rinks against bigger teams, are frequently subject to intimidating attack. Bowman knows that Lafleur, Lemaire, and Lapointe, players whose skills turn the Canadiens from a good team to a special one, must be made “comfortable,” as he puts it; they must be allowed to play without fear. So never farther than the players’ bench away, to balance and neutralize that fear, Bowman has Lupien and Chartraw, sometimes Cam Connor, in other years Pierre Bouchard, and of course, Larry Robinson. With a game-to-game core of fourteen or fifteen players, Bowman fine-tunes his line-up, choosing two or three from among the six or more available to find the “right mix,” as he calls it, for every game we play. He believes that a championship team needs all kinds of players, and that too many players of the same type, no matter how good, make any team vulnerable. So for games against the Flyers and the Bruins, and for many road games, he goes with a“(b)ig line-up”; for other games, different combinations which an opponent and the circumstances of a season make appropriate.

  It gives him the kind of flexibility that no other coach has. He knows that only a special set of circumstances can beat us, so he coaches as if preoccupied with minimizing those circumstances. He can do nothing to prevent slumps and injuries, but he can make sure that well-prepared replacements are ready when needed. We carry five or six extra players, more than any other team. It can be a problem at times, since players who play little complain often and disturb a team.

  But when a team is winning, these players say little, for few in the press or public will listen to them. And while Bowman maintains even stricter isolation from them—his attitude seems to be “If you don’t play the way I want you to, why should I speak to you?”—he keeps them around and uses them. He plays them occasionally, and gives them ice time with Ruel before and after practice, reminding the regulars that good players not out of sight, never out of mind, are only the barest margin away from playing more often. It is with these marginal players that Bowman feels he has the greatest impact.

  Once he remarked to me that Guy Lafleur seemed obsessed always to do better; that while he was a good team player, being the foremost player in the league carried with it a larger responsibility, and that for him anything less than a scoring title was not enough. Bowman feels much the same way about the team’s other exceptional players—about Gainey, Robinson, Savard, Lapointe, Shutt, Cournoyer, Lemaire. He believes that while he can set a constructive tone for the team, and can prepare these players physically and tactically, reminding them from time to time to their annoyance that they are not playing as they can, ultimately what drives them is them.

  Not so the marginal player. Young players whose styles are not yet set, older players on the other side of their careers, their egos battered until they’re willing to listen: these players are vulnerable and can be manipulated. So Bowman manipulates them—Tremblay, Chartraw, Larouche, Larocque, and others—sometimes cruelly. Benching them, ignoring them for long periods of time, he makes them worry, and makes them wonder why. Then the team hits injuries or a slump and he uncovers them again. He works them hard in practice, watching them, telling the press how hard and well they are working, making them feel they are earning their place in the team. Given a chance, usually at home, they give back an inspired game. A few games later, the inspiration fades, and it all starts again. He holds them by their emotional strings, often for many years, manipulating them until he gets out of them what he thinks is there; then, when he gets it, when he feels it is grooved into place, he stops.

  “He’s not honest,” they often complain, though translating “hon-nête” too literally they mean, in part, that he isn’t “fair.” Several times each has asked to be traded, but it won’t happen. Bowman knows that a championship team needs two goalies capable of winning a Stanley Cup; that it needs Chartraw’s versatility and toughness, Tremblay’s infectious enthusiasm, the prodigal goal-scoring of Larouche. In important games, when each team fixes on the other team’s best, holding them in check, it is often the quality and readiness of the rest that make the crushing difference. In the third game of the 1976 finals against the Flyers, Chartraw made that difference; two years later, Tremblay scored two
goals and Larouche one in a 4-1 Stanley Cup winning game against the Bruins. It is all part of getting “the right players on the ice.” Bowman knows the enormous strength he has, and squanders none of it.

  On a team of talented, tough-minded, egotistical players, Bowman is the boss. His captains—earlier Henri Richard, now Cournoyer—(h)ave no special role. A few years ago, he formed a committee of the senior players on the team—Lemaire, Savard, Lapointe, Cournoyer, Roberts, Pete Mahovlich, and me (“the Magnificent 7” the others called us) to meet with him periodically to discuss the team. We held one meeting. (That we had only one meeting didn’t surprise us; that he formed the committee did.)

  Unmistakably, and to an extent that may surprise even him, Bowman is in charge. Not Grundman, not Pollock before him—in distant upstairs offices, with technical authority, we feel little contact with them. It is Bowman who sets the tone and mood for the team. He may say less than he seems to say (when asked, most players admit to their own surprise they “never really had any problem with him”), but his presence, belligerent, nagging, and demanding, like a conscience that never shuts up, is constant. And every so often, when some internal threshold is passed, he will blurt out something in his acerbic, biting way, to others usually, but really to all of us. Just words we’ve all heard before from others, but coming as they do without malice, with nothing in them that can be for his benefit, we hear them as words that might be right, and probably are. It is what he says and what he might say that make us fear him. It is his hair-trigger sense of outrage at those who don’t measure up; and the feeling, the fear we all share, that at any moment that outrage will be directed at us.

  He knows each of us too well; he leaves us no place to hide. He knows that we are strong, and are weak; that we can be selfish and lazy, that we can eat too much and drink too much, that we will always look for the easy way out, and when we find it, that we will use it. He knows that each of us comes with a stable of excuses, “crutches” he calls them, ready to use whenever we need them. The team with the fewest crutches will win, Bowman believes. So he inserts himself into our minds, and anticipates these crutches—practice times, travel schedule, hotel, the menu for our team meal—then systematically kicks them away, leaving us with no way out if we lose. And when we don’t lose, we get our revenge, we pretend that we did it ourselves. We want him to have no part of it; and he lets us. He never challenges the integrity of the team. Just as he will allow no player to stand above the team, he will not stand above it either. The team must believe in itself.