The Game

by Ken Dryden

  But today Larouche only looks sad and a little bewildered.

  The dressing room has lost the leisurely pace it had yesterday.

  Players assembly-line in and out of the showers, equipment bags get packed, checked, zipped, locked, and carted away, clothes get hurried on. We have just a few hours to do what can’t be done tomorrow; this show is packing up and moving on the road.

  Houle ices down a shoulder, Risebrough a knee that gives him more trouble than he wants to admit. Napier, Hughes, Jarvis, Shutt canvas the room for extra tickets for relatives and friends in Toronto. Tremblay picks up Shutt’s Coke, then Lafleur’s, and drinks them both, and with a wink, a laugh, and a devil-may-care leap, darts to the shower.

  Larocque and I pack our spare catching gloves, skates, and masks into our equipment bags. Lafleur, Shutt, and Larouche have gone; our corner of the room is vacated. Without looking up, I turn slightly towards him. “We had our meeting yesterday,” I tell him, my voice barely above a whisper. He stops a moment, and without looking up, he nods; and we go back to what we were doing.

  The Canadiens have two rules that are almost inviolable: the team must travel together, and the team must stay in the same hotel. It took me a long time before I would even ask about the flexibility of those rules. We play in Toronto only twice a year. My parents live in Toronto, and the few hours we have there each time we play are never enough to do all that should be done. A few years ago, I asked Bowman if I could leave Montreal early and stay at my parents’ house.

  He thought about it for a moment, then, after satisfying himself that he would give the same perk to anyone who asked, he agreed.

  I get dressed and walk to Bowman’s office, a small concrete block cubicle he shares with Ruel, across a corridor from the dressing room.

  He sits at his metal desk strewn with papers and equipment; Ruel, a few feet away, unlaces his skates. Bowman hands me my plane ticket, and tells me to be at Maple Leaf Gardens for an 11:30 skate tomorrow. I turn and start to leave, then stop. I am certain that I will be playing tomorrow—because of the way I played in Buffalo, because of the patterns of today’s practice, because I always play in Toronto. But Bowman hasn’t said, and won’t say unless I ask him. I ask him because I want to know. He says I am playing.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY

  “... [I]t 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) Toronto

  I wake up in my old room. The curtains are drawn tight, and though it must be mid-morning by now, the room is a deep gray. I feel for my glasses on a table beside the bed, then reach over my head and tug at one of the curtains, opening it a few inches. Light streams in over me.

  On the other side of the room, in the corner that is now lighted, I see a crib.

  To those not from Toronto, I have always said I grew up in Toronto, but I didn’t. I grew up in Islington, at the time a western suburb, now a mid-western suburb, of Toronto. When Toronto boomed after the Second World War, it was in places like Islington that it boomed. Uncramped by the city, houses, churches, schools, and parks suddenly spread out. Match-box bungalows became side-splits and ranch-style homes; schools one story high spread over large grassy playgrounds in a maze. Even the churches discarded city stone and an old-world style for blocks and bricks and a distinctive suburban look. This was the 1950s. TV was still a wonder, new chrome-covered cars drove on new clover-leafed expressways, and first-generation postwar parents moved from cities to suburbs to build a clean, healthy church-going, family-oriented, college-educated world for their children. We felt immensely privileged growing up when we did, where we did. We felt that in the 1950s, in Islington, a middle-class suburb when being middle-class and suburban was considered a virtue, there was no better place to be.

  My father, Murray Dryden, was seventeen years old, almost eighteen, when he left his family’s farm near the tiny village of Domain, Manitoba. It was October 1929, after the harvest, and he moved to Winnipeg, twenty-five miles north, to live with his aunt. There he hoped to earn enough money, the few hundred dollars he needed, to buy mushroom spawn for a one-acre plot he had prepared on the farm.

  But with little education, and economic times worsening to depression, he could find work only as a commission salesman, selling ladies’ silk stockings. He went door-to-door in Winnipeg that winter, earning only enough money to feed himself. When spring came, embarrassed by what he regarded as his own personal failure, he decided not to return to the farm, instead moving west to Saskatchewan. It was no better. Hitchhiking, busing from town to town, he found few buyers, and by fall he moved again. This time he went east, travelling by train across Northern Ontario, stopping in each town as he came to it, staying until he had earned enough money to pay his fare to the next one.

  In the spring of 1931, he arrived in Toronto. A few months later, he moved forty miles west and south to Hamilton.

  For the next eighteen years (except for four years during the war) he travelled Ontario, going door-to-door or store-to-store selling can openers, fertilizer, soda pop, washing machines, window boxes, men’s cosmetics (“Let Masculine Mask change your pimples to dimples”), ecclesiastical clothing—carrying one or two products at a time, a few months later dropping one or both for something that seemed certain to be better. In 1949 a new job took him to Toronto, and my father, my mother Margaret, my grandmother, my brother Dave, then eight years old, and I moved to Islington. Within weeks, my father quit his job and was out of work. He told no one, not even my mother. Each morning he would leave the house as if going to work, and instead spend the day searching through want-ads, pounding on doors, looking for a new job. He found one nearly a month later, selling concrete blocks. Later, he sold bricks and other building materials as well, selling on commission as he always insisted on (he dismissed salary salesmen as “nine-to-fivers”). After more than fifteen years selling the wrong products at the wrong time, he finally found the right ones. He hit the postwar construction boom just as it began, and rode it successfully for more than twenty years, retiring in 1972.

  Dave’s bed was where the crib is now. Mine was along the same wall, on the other side of an attic door. Above and behind our heads as we slept, we each had our own gallery of sports pictures. They were full-page color photos taken mostly from Sport magazine, pasted tightly together in horizontal rows, covering the wall from the top of our headboards to the ceiling. Most were of baseball or college football players, but there were some of boxers, golfers, tennis players, Olympic athletes, even a few hockey players. They stayed on that wall for many years, untorn, unreplaced, in time almost unnoticed. Then, in his mid-teens, Dave moved to a room of his own in the basement, and my light-green/dark-green room got painted blue, and no new pictures went up in their place.

  Now the room is lime-green, with whole sections of walls covered in orange, brown, and yellow floral wallpaper. After I left for Cornell more than thirteen years ago, and after a respectful wait, my sister Judy, four years younger, made this room hers. The curtains changed, the book cases and dressers changed, the beds changed, and new ones were put across the room beneath the windows at the back. Then she grew up and went away, and the crib came in, used and outgrown by one grandchild, ready for the few days a year that a second, Michael, comes to visit.

  There is one more thing—the light in the middle of the room that hung from the ceiling until it was forehead—high, the one I tied up and out of the way so I wouldn’t walk into it, has been untied and let down again.

  I get out of bed and pull back the curtains. It has snowed overnight and traces are still gently falling. For several minutes I stand there, my forehead pressed to the window, watching the snow, looking out at the backyards of the houses behind, where the Pritchards, the McLarens, and the Carpenters lived, and down below at the winter’s depth
of snow, and at the backyard where I spent my childhood.

  “Dryden’s Backyard.” That’s what it was called in our neighborhood. It was more than seventy feet long, paved curiously in red asphalt, fourty-five feet wide at “the big end,” gradually narrowing to thirty-five feet at the flower bed, to twenty-five feet at the porch—our center line—to fifteen feet at “the small end.” While Steve Shutt and Guy Lafleur were in Willowdale and Thurso on backyard rinks their fathers built, while Larry Robinson was on a frozen stream in Marvelville and Réjean Houle on a road in Rouyn under the only street light that his street had, I was here.

  It was an extraordinary place, like the first swimming pool on the block, except there were no others like it anywhere. Kids would come from many blocks away to play, mostly “the big guys,” friends of my brother, a year or two older than him, seven or eight years older than me. But that was never a problem. It was the first rule of the backyard that they had to let me play. To a friend who complained one day, Dave said simply, “If Ken doesn’t play, you don’t play.”

  We played “ball hockey” mostly, with a tennis ball, its bounce deadened by the cold. A few times, we got out a garden hose and flooded the backyard to use skates and pucks, but the big end was slightly lower than the small end, and the water pooled and froze unevenly. More important, we found that the more literal we tried to make our games, the less lifelike they became. We could move across the asphalt quickly and with great agility in rubber “billy” boots; we could shoot a tennis ball high and hard. But with skates on, with a puck, we were just kids. So after the first few weeks of the first year, we played only ball hockey.

  Depending on the day, the time, the weather, there might be any number of kids wanting to play, so we made up games any number could play. With four and less than nine, we played regular games, the first team scoring ten goals the winner. The two best players, who seemed always to know who they were, picked the teams and decided on ends.

  First choice of players got second choice of ends, and because the size of the big end made it more fun to play in, the small end was the choice to defend. Each team had a goalie—one with goalie pads, a catching glove, and a goalie stick; the other with only a baseball glove and a forward’s stick. When we had more than eight players, we divided into three or more teams for a round-robin tournament, each game to five.

  With fewer than four, it was more difficult. Sometimes we attempted a regular game, often we just played “shots,” each player being both shooter and goalie, standing in front of one net, shooting in turn at the other. Most often, however, we played “penalty shots.”

  In the late 1950s, the CBS network televised NHL games on Saturday afternoon. Before each game, there was a preview show in which a player from each of the teams involved that day would compete in two contests, one of which was a penalty-shot contest. The goalie they used each week was an assistant trainer for the Detroit Red Wings named Julian Klymquiw. Short and lefthanded, Klymquiw wore a clear plexiglass mask that arched in front of his face like a shield. None of us had ever heard of him, and his unlikely name made us a little doubtful at first. But it turned out that he was quite good, and most weeks he stopped the great majority of shots taken at him.

  So, during backyard games of “penalty shots,” we pretended to be Julian Klymquiw, not Terry Sawchuk or Glenn Hall. And before each of our contests began, we would perform the ritual that Klymquiw and announcer Bud Palmer performed each week:

  “Are you ready, Julian?”

  “Yes, Bud.”

  But the backyard also meant time alone. It was usually after dinner when the “big guys” had homework to do and I would turn on the floodlights at either end of the house and on the porch, and play. It was a private game. I would stand alone in the middle of the yard, a stick in my hands, a tennis ball in front of me, silent, still, then suddenly dash ahead, stickhandling furiously, dodging invisible obstacles for a shot on net. It was Maple Leaf Gardens filled to wildly cheering capacity, a tie game, seconds remaining. I was Frank Mahovlich, or Gordie Howe, I was anyone I wanted to be, and the voice in my head was that of Leafs broadcaster Foster Hewitt: “. . . there’s ten seconds left, Mahovlich, winding up at his own line, at center, eight seconds, seven, over the blueline, six—he winds up, he shoots, he scores!” The mesh that had been tied to the bottoms of our red metal goalposts until frozen in the ice had been ripped away to hang loose from the crossbars, whipped back like a flag in a stiff breeze. My arms and stick flew into the air, I screamed a scream inside my head, and collected my ball to do it again many times, for many minutes, the hero of all my own games.

  It was a glorious fantasy, and I always heard that voice. It was what made my fantasy seem almost real. For to us, who attended hockey games mostly on TV or radio, an NHL game, a Leafs game, was played with a voice. If I wanted to be Mahovlich or Howe, if I moved my body the way I had seen them move theirs and did nothing else, it would never quite work. But if I heard the voice that said their names while I was playing out that fantasy, I could believe it. Foster Hewitt could make me them.

  My friends and I played every day after school, sometimes during lunch and after dinner, but Saturday was always the big day. I would go to bed Friday night thinking of Saturday, waking up early, with none of the fuzziness I had other days. If it had snowed overnight, Dave and I, with shovels and scrapers, and soon joined by others, would pile the snow into flower beds or high against the back of the garage. Then at 9 a.m. the games would begin.

  There was one team in the big end, another in the small; third and fourth teams sat like birds on a telephone wire, waiting their turn on the wall that separated the big end from Carpenter’s backyard. Each team wore uniforms identical to the other. It was the Canadian mid-winter uniform of the time—long, heavy duffel coats in browns, grays, or blues; tuques in NHL team colors, pulled snug over ears under the watchful eye of mothers, here rolled up in some distinctive personal style; leather gloves, last year’s church gloves, now curling at the wrist and separating between fingers; black rubber “billy” boots over layers of heavy woolen socks for fit, the tops rolled down like “low cuts” for speed and style.

  Each game would begin with a faceoff, then wouldn’t stop again.

  Action moved quickly end to end, the ball bouncing and rolling, chased by a hacking, slashing scrum of sticks. We had sticks without tops on their blades—“toothpicks”; sticks with no blades at all— “stubs.” They broke piece by heart-breaking piece, often quickly, but still we used them. Only at the start of a season, at Christmas (Dave and I routinely exchanged sticks until one year he gave me a stick and I gave him a pair of socks) and once or twice more, would we get new ones. All except John Stedelbauer. His father owned a car dealership and during the hockey season gave away hockey sticks to his customers as a promotion.

  Stedelbauer got all the new sticks he needed, fortunately, as they weren’t very good. One year he broke nineteen of them.

  A goal would be scored, then another, and slowly the game would leapfrog to five. Bodies grew warm from exertion, fingers and toes went numb; noses ran, wiped by unconscious sleeves; coats loosened, tuques fell off; steam puffed from mouths and streamed from tuqueless heads.

  Sticks hacked and slashed; tennis balls stung. But in the euphoria of the game, the pain disappeared. Sitting on the wall that overlooked his backyard, Rick “Foster” Carpenter, younger and not very athletic, gave the play-by-play, but no one listened. Each of us had his own private game playing in his head. A fourth goal, then a fifth, a cheer, and the first game was over. Quickly, four duffel coats, four tuques, four pairs of weathered gloves and rubber “billy” boots would jump from the wall to replace the losers; and the second game would begin. We paused at noon while some went home and others ate the lunch that they had brought with them. At 6 p.m., the two or three who remained would leave. Eighteen hours later, after church, the next game would begin.

  When I think of the backyard, I think of my childhood; and when I think of
my childhood, I think of the backyard. It is the central image I have of that time, linking as it does all of its parts: father, mother, sister, friends; hockey, baseball, and Dave—big brother, idol, mentor, defender, and best friend. Yet it lasted only a few years. Dave was already twelve when the backyard was built; I was six. He and his friends played for three or four years, then stopped; I played longer but, without them, less often. Yet until moments ago, I had never remembered that.

  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.