The Game

by Ken Dryden

  More than any coach I have had, Bowman has a complete and undistractible team focus. He has one loyalty—to the team; not to individual players on the team, though most coaches prefer to ignore the distinction (as most players do until they are traded or become free agents); not to fans or to anyone else. Most of us like to pretend the primacy of personal relationships in our work (then are unforgiving of those who let us down); Bowman doesn’t pretend. To him, loyalty is doing what you can and doing it well. If you don’t, and play less often or are traded away, it is not he who is being disloyal.

  He is uncompromising, unmellowing, unable to be finessed; he is beyond our control. Being a nice guy doesn’t count; going to optional practices, coming early, staying late, doesn’t count. As Pete Mahovlich, Cournoyer, and Henri Richard have discovered, what you have done before counts only until you can’t do it again. No politics, no favors, it is how you measure up to what you can do, how you help the team, how you perform—they are what count. It is thin comfort.

  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.

  A few weeks ago, the NHL all-stars played the Soviet National Team in the Challenge Cup in New York. While I had played against the Soviets only a few times in my career, I had done poorly enough in many games that there seemed a clear and disturbing pattern to my play. Simply, I began to wonder, as others did, if I was too big to cope with the quickness and dexterity of the Soviet game.

  I had always been able to adapt before. I had moved from Jr. B. (h)ockey to college hockey, from college to the National Team to the American League to the NHL. As a seven-year-old, I played against teenagers in backyard games. I had played against teams that had seemed too good—RAC, the Weston Dodgers, North Dakota, the Bruins in 1971. Many times, I was certain I would fail. Many times, I did not want to play, afraid of being humiliated if I did. But I always managed to cope, and found a way. This was different. This was not the first time I had played the Soviets. I knew exactly what I would face. And because I did, as if finally reaching the point where a coach would send me home, I was afraid I was up against something I could not handle.

  I arrived in New York with my teammates three days before the first game. I went directly to my room and set myself a schedule, determined not to repeat the mistake I had made three years earlier.

  The night before a New Year’s Eve game with the Soviet Central Army Team in 1975, I got away from the bustle of visitors who were arriving at our house and went to a downtown hotel. There, alone with myself for twenty-four hours, I built slowly for the game, and kept on building until the game and I became a fixation. I thought and worried and filled up with doubts, I could never get mentally free enough just to play, and while the great Soviet goaltender Tretiak stopped thirty-five shots, I stopped ten in a 3-3 tie.

  This time, I would do it differently. I would keep busy, always moving, never allowing a moment alone with myself, never a chance to dwell on other games, to think/worry about those ahead. I got up early, and walked around Manhattan, shopping, looking, always moving; I went to Madison Square Garden for practice, ate a quick lunch, and walked again; I went to a movie, to another movie, ate dinner, walked, went to another movie—then did the same the next day.

  We won the first game 4-2.

  Friday was a day off. I repeated Tuesday and Wednesday, blanking my mind, building up energy, comfortable, confident, getting ready for Saturday. After a good start, we were outplayed in the last two periods and lost 5-4. I spent Saturday night with teammates talking about the Sunday game. We talked about what we hadn’t done, and what we needed to do to win. I felt confident, comfortable, almost relaxed.

  Sunday morning, Bowman told me he was making a change. Bruins’(g)oalie Gerry Cheevers would play the deciding game.

  If the New Year’s Eve game was my most disappointing moment, this was the most crushing. (After moping in a catatonic sulk for several days, back in Montreal I sat in the dressing room slouched against the wall, jot-ting something on a piece of paper. Looking over at me, Risebrough asked Shutt beside him, “What’s he writing?” Shutt: “A suicide note.”) Friends and others found relief and vindication for me in the 6-0(l)oss and were surprised when I didn’t feel the same way. They didn’t understand. The third game was a game we had to win. Against a tough opponent, after a loss, it was my game, the kind Bowman always put me in, the one he knew I would deliver. A few days later, unable to keep to myself any longer, I went to Bowman and asked him why.

  He said that he and Ruel and the team’s general managers, Harry Sinden (Bruins), Bill Torrey (Islanders), and Cliff Fletcher (Flames), had talked at length about it and had made the decision jointly, hoping to give the team a spark that the second game had showed we needed. But Bowman, not hiding in that, said further that as coach, if he had insisted, he could probably have had his way. He didn’t insist, he said, because looking at all the circumstances, he didn’t feel certain enough. It was then that I understood for the first time.

  Each year when the season ends, Bowman invites me to spend a day or a weekend at his farm south of Montreal. And each year, I intend to go, but I never have. It is because other things come up and gradually I forget about it until the summer runs out, but in part, perhaps in larger part than I’m willing to admit, I don’t go because I’m afraid that knowing him better, and having him know me better, things might change. And I don’t want them to change. We are a good combination. Together we have shared four Stanley Cups and many other satisfying moments. I know that nothing would change, yet I don’t want to take that risk.

  As a goalie, I am in Bowman’s hands. I play when he says I play; I don’t play when he says I don’t. Much of my happiness, much of the mood I carry with me away from the rink, come from when and how often and against whom I play, and that depends on Bowman. It can be a helpless feeling for a player but with Bowman I am comfortable.

  We are in someone else’s hands in everything we do, but how often are any of us in hands that know us so well? Hands that insist we be as good as we can be, that tolerate nothing else, hands we trust.

  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.

  I like him.

  The forwards and defensemen take off their skate guards and go directly onto the ice. Larocque and I remain behind in a small dressing room to put on our skates and pads. By the time we get to the ice, the others are warmed up and anxious for practice to begin. The rink is cold, and I move stiffly thr
ough the skating drills, unable to get loose. Then, as I skate around one net and start up ice, out of nowhere, with only his usual warning, Chartraw wipes me out.

  It is not the first time. Rick Chartraw, a big slab-thick forward/defenseman, man-about-town, and designated team eccentric—“(a) classic,” in the language of the team—has the annoying habit of spinning out of control at almost any time, in almost any place. The only warning he gives is a sudden, though not surprised, “oops,” followed by the sound of furiously chopping skates as he tries to regain his balance.

  It is no use. Falling onto his back, out of control, he slides like a turtle on its shell until someone or something stops him. Several times it has been me, usually in pre-game warm-up; twice he has injured Pierre Larouche in practice, both times when Larouche was his linemate. No one is quite sure why it happens. Some think it is inner-ear trouble, others that one leg is shorter than the other. Knowing Sharty, most believe that, faced with a sudden rush of options, his mind blows.

  He gets up, apologizes as he always does—“Oops, sorry”—and skates off. More surprised than I should be, I pick myself up and get back in the drill. Before I get warm and loose, I am whistled into a net for shots.

  In more than an hour, I never catch up. The forwards and defensemen skate through drills to get warm and stay warm. I started out cold, and now, unable to move enough to get warm, I get colder. I wanted a good practice today. I wanted to sweep Sunday’s feeling uninterrupted into tomorrow’s game, to reconfirm that Sunday’s skills were still there. But too many pucks go in. When I’m playing well—today, tomorrow, practices, games, Leafs, Rangers, Flyers, it doesn’t matter—I put on my equipment and play. But when I’m not, when I stutter between bad games and good, desperate to make a connection between yesterday and today and tomorrow, each puck I don’t stop becomes important.

  In an endless panorama of games, practice is the routine, unseen link in a season. One practice a day every day with few exceptions from season-opening to season-end: an hour the day before the game, an hour and fifteen minutes or more on other days, twenty minutes the day of the game. It brings a team together, binds it, gives it practice at being a team; gives it a “team feeling.” Sometimes it is drudgery, sometimes pure remembered fun, usually it is just fast-paced emotion-less routine. But filling up time that easily can go astray (a few years ago, Bowman changed our practice time from 10 a.m. to noon to interrupt afternoons and discourage outside activities), it joins one day to the next to keep up the tempo of the season.

  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.

  Bowman blows his whistle; our bodies burst into motion, already in the rhythm of the next game. He lets us go, orchestrating with a loose, unfelt hand. “Between the lines,” “Two-on-ones,” “Line rushes out of both ends,” he shouts. Power plays, shots, in sixty minutes we never look at the clock. It’s the kind of high-energy pre-game practice Bowman wants. For me, lost at the start, trying to catch up, I survive unhurt, my usual goal at Verdun.

  Finally, Bowman blows his whistle again and we skate to one end of the ice for sonic skating drills. Larocque stands beside the boards, I stand near the middle of the ice beside Risebrough.

  Bowman yells “Blues!” and Lemaire, Shutt, and Lafleur, in light-blue sweaters, sprint down the ice to the other goal-line and back again. As they cross the blueline, straightening up to coast the final few feet, Bowman yells the name of another color and three more players sweatered in that color break forward as the blues had done.

  Larocque and I false start with each new group that is called. I skate faster than Larocque, but only marginally, and to compensate he stands near the boards, using their curvature to line up ahead of me without being detected. I move up so I am even with him. The first round through, I wait for Bowman to yell “Goalies!”; for every other round, the order set, from the corner of my eye I watch Larocque.

  When he starts, I go. I know that our respective speeds and wills are invariable. I know if I watch him and leave just a reflex behind, I will win. Bowman yells “Goalies!” and Larocque takes off. By the center line, I am even, but he stops before I expect him to, and at the turn he is ahead. By center, I am even again; at the blueline, straightening up, I coast to the end a few feet ahead.

  Larocque and I compete with each other constantly. We compete in scrimmages and skating drills, by win-loss records and goals against; by going to optional practices and by how often and how long we stay when practice ends. Our competition is undeclared, its results are known only to us; we say nothing to each other about it. But we know.

  We compete though we are teammates and share the same goals for the team. We are friendly, if a little guarded with each other, and personally compatible. We know that the team needs two capable goalies, we know that we need each other to avoid the sloppy complacence a season can bring. But only one goalie can play at a time, and if he plays well, the other may never play. It means I am happy when we win and happier if I have played; unhappy when we lose, less unhappy if I haven’t played. And if the game is close and I am not playing, I will forget myself and hope for Bunny without reservation. But if it is not, I want Bunny to play well, but not too well.

  At one time, I thought I could “beat him out” fully and completely, just as I’m sure at times he has thought the same thing. I thought I could play sufficiently better than he to monopolize more than sixty of our eighty games and force him somewhere else or into a permanently subservient role. I could not do either. After we had played together a year or two, I realized that I could stay ahead, but I could not win. And while each year on the second day of training camp the Montreal papers report what I tell them the day before—that I hope to play sixty games—and what Bunny tells them—that he hopes to play forty—we know we have reached a kind of competitive equilibrium at about 50-30. Yet still we compete. In the last few years, I have been the one on the defensive. As it has long been assumed, and is now confirmed, that I will soon retire, and as Larocque has shown himself a strong and competent goalie, clearly the Canadiens’ goalie of the future, that future is now uncomfortably close. I am a lame duck, and as more of the discretionary games go to Larocque to make him happy, my game total this year will be less than fifty for the first time.

  Bowman blows his whistle again, this time harder and longer, and practice is over.

  It is 1:13 p.m. The sun peeks through, the sweat that today did not come easily now feels good; our work day is over. We get on the bus and go to the seats we sat in on our way here. Chartraw skips to the back and lies down curled across the top of the seat like a back-window ornament.

  “Hey Sharty,” Shutt chirps, “your eyes light up when the brakes go on?”

  Chartraw ignores him, waving to the driver of the car behind us.

  “Câlisse, they always look that way,” Tremblay growls.

  “Hey Sharty, that’s it!” Robinson yells excitedly, remembering Chartraw’s most recent problems. “You’ve been skatin’ with your brakes on.”

  We read the newspapers we read before and talk about fishing trips and golf games still months away. The bus passes a
stylish coat and hat worn by a tall, slender body. The talk continues but heads turn like those at a tennis match, then snap back, disappointed. The stop light turns amber, then red, and the bus lurches to a halt. Lapointe looks out his window at the car below. Its driver, a well-dressed man of about fifty, stares diagonally past the front of the bus, waiting for the light to change. With his left hand, he distractedly rubs at his face, then his nose, finally picking at it more and more earnestly.

  “Ta-berr-nac,” Lapointe yells, “lookit this.”

  Instantly we rush to Lapointe’s side of the bus.

  “Ooh, oooh, that feels good,” someone moans.

  “Ta-berr-nac,” Lapointe exclaims again, “ya think his contact’s stuck?”

  The man continues. Finally he stops, looks down at his finger, ahead at the light, and gets ready to go. Just to be sure he doesn’t think he has gone unnoticed, several players bang at their windows. The man looks up. Looking down at him he sees a busful of laughing faces.

  Back at the Forum, we have only started to undress when the press come in. They spread around the room, looking for an angle for their stories on tomorrow’s game against the Leafs. Two reporters go to Napier, another to Hughes, both from Toronto, and both so young that returning home to play means something to them. In a few minutes, the reporter talking to Hughes walks over to Napier, and the two with Napier move across to Hughes. A fourth reporter is in the stick room with Lemaire, asking about his injured shoulder. As they talk, each reporter glances often at Larouche. Pierre Larouche, sitting quietly in one corner, stares blankly across the room. After a stretch of games in which he scored well and again seemed ready to become the regular he was supposed to be when he was traded here from Pittsburgh a year ago, last week he played poorly in consecutive road games in St. Louis and Chicago. He played well last Saturday at home against Minnesota, but Bowman didn’t dress him for the game in Buffalo. Today, while the regular lines wore their usual blue, yellow, orange, and green sweaters, Larouche wore black; the only other player in a black sweater was Chartraw. Now a reporter walks by and says something to him, but Larouche, staring straight ahead, says nothing. They are waiting for him to say what he has often said in similar circumstances, that he wants to be traded, that he is fed up with the way Bowman treats him.