by Ken Dryden
If we ever thought about that, it never concerned us; we just played. It was here in the backyard that we learned hockey. It was here we got close to it, we got inside it, and it got inside us. It was here that our inextricable bond with the game was made. Many years have now passed, the game has grown up and been complicated by things outside it, yet still the backyard remains untouched, unchanged, my unseverable link to that time, and that game.
Seventeen years after we played in the backyard for the first time, my father took a train to Montreal, hoping that something special might happen. He went to see a game between the Canadiens and the Buffalo Sabres, and in the middle of the second period, Canadiens’(g)oalie Rogie Vachon was injured and had to leave the ice. I had been called up from the Voyageurs less than two weeks before, and was sent in to replace him. As I skated to the net, Sabres coach Punch Imlach motioned his goalie, Joe Daley, to the bench, and Dave skated out in his place. It was like it had been all those times before.
I didn’t enjoy that game very much. I had played only two previous NHL games, and seeing Dave in the other end was a distraction I didn’t want or need. And while I became more comfortable as the game went on, I was surprised and disappointed that I didn’t feel more. All those hours we had spent in the backyard, all our childhood fantasies, the different routes we had taken, the different careers we had seemed destined for; then, years later, Montreal, the Forum, our father in the stands—the unexpected climax. Yet try as I did, I couldn’t feel that way. I could sense the curious excitement of the crowd, I could feel its huge vicarious pleasure, but my own excitement was vague, it had no edge to it, as if somehow it wasn’t new; as if in fact we had done it before.
When the game was over, proud and relieved we shook hands at center ice. A few hours later, I began to feel differently. What had surprised and disappointed me earlier, I found exciting and reassuring. It really had been no different. Those backyard games, the times we stood at opposite ends of the yard, the times we dreamed we were Sawchuk and Hall, we were Sawchuk and Hall, there had been a connection, we just never knew it.
Now, when the snow melts in the spring, the backyard looks like an old abandoned runway. The red of the asphalt has been worn away to gray, roots from nearby poplar trees have heaved and cracked its surface and clusters of tall grass have pushed their way through. Along the base of the bank that rose to McLaren’s backyard, the concrete block wall that was our “boards,” the target of balls and pucks in winter and baseballs in summer, has slowly pitched forward from the pressure of the bank, and soon will fall. Over much of the big end, where games opened up and skills were freed and given their chance, a huge compost heap lies like an ancient earthwork under the snow, growing faster each year than my father can use it. And a few feet from it, up against the back of the garage and under its eaves where I can’t quite see it, a net, red with rust, its mesh completely gone; the other one loaned away years ago and not yet returned. It has been twenty years since Dave played here for the last time; fifteen years since I did.
With no children or grandchildren to use it, fixing it up, restoring it as a monument to ourselves, doesn’t seem right. Still, it’s the most vivid memory I have of my childhood, and now when I come home, when I stand at this window and look out at the backyard as I sometimes do, I don’t like to see it without its snow.
I go downstairs. My father is out on an errand; my mother is in the kitchen ironing, waiting for me before beginning her breakfast.
Outside, the snow has stopped and sun streams in, filling the room. I get the cereal, my mother makes the toast, and with no place to go and nothing to do until my father picks me up an hour from now, it is a rare relaxed time for the two of us. It is how it is with my mother.
While my brother, my sister, my father, and I rush around always in search of something, my mother, at home, seems to have found it. I can read it in the letters that she writes to us each week. In her small, clear, legible handwriting, unhurried, she tells us about her days—(a)bout my father’s projects; the dinners and functions they attend; her church groups and bridge club (“I had punk cards,” she always says); the news from Judy in Vancouver and Dave in Edmonton—always in the same even, tranquil tone.
I think my mother has always known the life she wanted to live.
Like most women of her generation, it was to get married and have a family, and to raise that family and make a home for it. She was a kindergarten teacher when she was young; later she ran the office for my father’s business out of our house, always making sure we were fed, dressed, and ready, no matter the hour, for whatever it was we had to do. Soft-spoken and gentle, she has always stayed in the background, but she has a strength and a will about her that seem surprising, though they show themselves manifestly in her family.
While at times it has not been easy for her, to a remarkable extent the life that she set out for herself is the life she has lived. Now, as we talk, hearing her as she sounds in her letters, with three children raised, educated, and married; with grandchildren, and more time for herself, she seems deeply content.
She asks me about Sarah and Michael and talks of her trip to Montreal to visit us when my father goes away. I tell her of my meeting with Courtois and Grundman, matter-of-factly at first, then rambling on into things I never intended to say, building up a case I no longer need to build, pausing, breaking my own silences until, with nothing more to say but no place to stop, I shrug and leave it at that.
She tells me that she thinks it is a “wise” decision. Sounding more sure than I am, I go on about my plans for the fall—taking my bar exams, writing a book, or doing unspecified “other things.” With a nod and a murmur, my mother fills in the blanks.
My father arrives home, I pack up my bag, and we get ready to go. I shouldn’t have come home this time. In the right frame of mind to wander through my past, I’m in the wrong frame of mind to dwell on it, and as I leave, I feel a strange melancholy, as if something that was always there is gone. My life had always moved ahead in easy, comfortable sequence, from grade to grade and age group to age group, from elementary school to high school to university to law school, from Islington to Ithaca to Winnipeg to Montreal, hockey always at my side to smooth away the changes. But now I am at the end of something, and for the first time I find myself looking back. I’m thinking about things I was too busy to think about before, finding confusion where once I felt none. I had always sprinted through the present, the future an exciting day away, the backyard, my parents and family just glib anecdotes from the past. Then the present slowed down and the future changed direction.
I now have a past that will get longer and more pervasive. It is the life of an athlete, the life of any prodigy who makes it young and has to move along. Just a quick climax in the first act, and a long denoue-ment to the end. Always ex—, always former, pushed and talked into the past, the future a place where others get their chance; where we find “something to fall back on,” if we’re lucky. But forty years is a long time to pay out the string.
Yesterday, I felt excited by the challenge a week away; today, I’m back in my past, bouncing from the past to the future, not liking it anywhere. Everything I see, everything I do at home is a reminder.
I’ve got to get out of here.
My father drives me to the subway.
The summer before I left for Cornell, I worked for a demolition company tearing down houses to create a narrow above-ground strip for the latest extension to the Toronto subway. It is now more than ten years since this station was completed, yet only the gloss of newness has gone from it. Even closer to downtown, as I pass in and out of stations older and busier, the only hint of age comes from color juxtapositions more popular in another time. The subway cars show the effects of hard winter use, but, like the stations, nothing looks so dirty that it cannot, or will not, be cleaned. More remarkable in a modern city is the almost total absence of gratuitous abuse. There are no graffiti; no seats have been slashed, no initials carved. F
or the visitor from New York or Boston, the Toronto subway is a jarring, disorienting experience, an object of wonder, and, as if somehow authoritarian and unmodern, one of lingering suspicion. It has none of the monumental quality of the Moscow subway, or the aestheticism of the newer Métro in Montreal, but, clean, civilized, efficient, not quite exciting, the Toronto subway is an apt metaphor for the city.
I sit back in my seat, reading a newspaper. Two teenage boys, sitting in front of me, are talking.
“You think Laflooor’s any good?” one asks.
“Naw, he’s overrated. Sittler’s better than he is,” the other says, and they both nod. I look up to see who is talking, then look back at my paper.
“Yeah, him and Salming are the best,” the first one says again.
“Yeah, Palmateer too. That guy’s great. Shit, if he ever played for the Canadiens, nobody’d ever score on him.”
I change at Yonge Street and get off at College, and follow the sign that reads “Maple Leaf Gardens,” emerging onto the street less than a block away from it. A giant theater-like marquee hangs over the sidewalk:(w)ed 8 p.m.—montreal
When I was growing up, in an insular world before Guinness and The Book of Lists, there were certain things we were told so often that we knew, them to be true: “Toronto is the fastest-growing city in North America”; “Toronto has the world’s largest annual fair, the Canadian National Exhibition”; and “Maple Leaf Gardens is the finest indoor arena in North America.” The Gardens was built in 1931 by a Toronto entrepreneur named Conn Smythe, and by the time I first saw it more than twenty years later, it was still a wondrous place. It is now more than twenty years later again, and thinking back on it, it seems quite incredible to me that the Gardens could ever have existed. There was a large portrait of the Queen, framed in royal maroon drapes, above the mezzanine in the south end, and beneath it, a bandshell, extending out in a balcony where thirty-one-man regimental bands played during intermissions, and before and after games. Hidden away above was Horace Lapp’s giant Wurlitzer organ, its pipes cut into the south wall and covered over with gold-colored slats that opened and closed like vertical venetian blinds. Suspended by a torrent of cables, the huge
“Sportimer,” a four-sided scoreboard-clock with the faces and venera-bility of Big Ben, hung over the center of the ice; across from it, exactly fifty-four feet above the ice, was Foster Hewitt’s famous “gondola,” so named because it reminded a Gardens director of the cabin of an airship; and below were 14,850 unobstructed red, blue, green, and gray seats, and the aisles between them which always looked clean.
It was a period piece—elegant, colonial Toronto—perfectly, shame-lessly preserved from a time before glitter and spectacle came to the city; and came to sports.
I used to go to junior games Sunday afternoons at the Gardens, and between periods I would look at the pictures that hung from its walls. There were team pictures in the front lobby “World Champions and Stanley Cup Winners” some of them said, and at the time, it was an indisputable claim. There were action pictures and ceremonial pictures; pictures of players from the thirties—Charlie Conacher, Joe Primeau, King Clancy, Lorne Chabot, Busher Jackson—players whose names were already legendary to us, but with whom, because of their curious haircuts and equipment, we felt no connection; players from the late forties, their equipment distinctly modern, their faces, like pictures we had seen of our fathers, broadly smiling, with the postwar look of robust good health. I liked to follow the faces from year to year, guessing at where they went and why. Taking what little I knew of them, finding clues in the pictures, imagining their stories. Looking to see if the faces had stayed the same from picture to picture (maturing together? getting old as a team?); if they had won or lost the year before; if faces had disappeared, then reappeared in consecutive years (sent to the minors), or after a lapse of several years (gone to war); if they had disappeared entirely (traded or retired). And each time I was in the Gardens, as if to reconfirm what I thought I had seen each time before, I would run through the names under the pictures until I found “Happy” Day, the Leafs’ long-time coach; then quickly again the faces, looking for Garth Boesch’s mustache, the only mustache I had ever seen on a hockey player.
But while I looked at each picture, there were two I always lingered at a little longer. One was of Rocket Richard, his body bent, his right leg frozen in the air moments after his skate had shattered the Gardens’ herculite glass. The other showed Canadiens’ goalie Gerry McNeil, on the ice and fallen in his net, a puck hanging against the mesh above him, and in the foreground, his back to the camera, a Leaf player almost horizontal to the ice. The caption read: “Bill Barilko scores Stanley Cup winning goal 1950-51 season.” We knew that a few months later, before the next season began, Barilko had been killed in a plane crash.
With the kids at the back waiting for the team bus, the sidewalk in front of the Gardens is clear. I open a door to the lobby and drop my eyes to the floor, moving quickly for an entrance gate so as not to be recognized. I needn’t have bothered. The lobby has the near-empty look of a bus station at midday. There are a few untidy lines at ticket windows marked for future Gardens events; several unhurried clusters of mostly middle-aged men, tourists perhaps, talk idly, glancing here and there at the pictures on the walls. On the day of a game, a Canadiens game, I expected more. I wanted clamor and excitement, but except for a few general admission tickets that disappeared like phantoms many weeks ago (always to someone else), the rest of the tickets have been gone since season-ticket subscriptions were renewed last summer.
I am a few minutes early, happy/unhappy to go unnoticed, and decide to look around. Many of the same pictures are still here—the team pictures in the lobby, the pictures of Boesch and Day, of Barilko’s goal—but as I look at them, at the haircuts and the equipment, at the maskless goalies and bareheaded skaters, it is those pictures that now look old and dated to me. I look for the Richard picture, but it is gone; several action pictures from the Stanley Cup-winning teams of the sixties—of Frank Mahovlich, Tim Horton, Johnny Bower, Red Kelly, Bob Pulford—have gone up, but as I get to the end, I notice that I have seen few from the present. One or two action shots, a few ceremonial ones, of Leafs captain Darryl Sittler and owner Harold Ballard, of Sittler and Ballard and Sabres captain Danny Gare, of Ballard and Bobby Orr—
“Two Hockey Hall of Famers
Bobby Orr 1979 Harold E. Ballard 1977” (t)he caption reads—but little else, as if the legacy of the Leafs died with those teams more than ten years ago.
Now in his late seventies, Harold Ballard is the new star of the Leafs. He has become a Toronto, even a national, celebrity. Known locally as jovial and outrageous, nationally above all as outrageous, as owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs he is ipso facto a celebrity, and there is nothing he can say or do, nothing anyone can say or do, to change that. He can be unfair and erratic; he can be unequivocally wrong. It doesn’t matter. He is Ballard, owner of the Leafs. What he says, what he does, we pretend is news. In turn, used to the attention, he pretends that it isn’t his money that has bought him his celebrity. It is the dis-ease of the sports entrepreneur.
Ballard, George Steinbrenner, Ted Turner, Nelson Skalbania, Peter Pocklington, Jerry Buss—money buys celebrity, and celebrity means being able to say anything about anything and someone will report it as if it were true; money and celebrity together mean thinking that no one, nothing, can stop you. The cost is small—just a few millions among the scores you have—except sometimes to the fan. 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.
Not long ago, I was speaking with a friend. I knew he was not a Leafs fan, and I was laughing at the team’s snowballing demise. My friend was laughing too, until suddenly, looking pained, he stopped.
He explained that when he had lived in Montreal, he was happy to see the Leafs lose. But now, living in Toronto, he felt differently. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m still not a Leafs fan, but I want to see good hockey and who else have I got to watch?”
Yet as his team sinks lower, Ballard continues to parade himself before us, apparently invulnerable—his Maple Leaf Gardens filled by more and more events, his television revenues increasing, his team selling out as they have since 1946; his celebrity status intact. The press and the public vie with each other in attacking him, then pause to praise his charitable generosity or his devotion to his late wife (maybe we’ve got him all wrong?); then, like the wrestling villain who touches his audience to make his next villainy seem worse, he does something or says something to start up the cycle again. But, check and checkmate—the currency of the celebrity is attention, and each angry attack only means more attention for him.
As a member of the Gardens board, as vice-president, he was perfect. Likeable, convivial, able to be disregarded at the proper time, without the title that brings the platform that brings the rest; but as president, as principal owner, he is very imperfect. And the Leafs fans suffer. Yet I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Though he confronts the public, almost challenging fans to stay home if they dare, laughing at them when they don’t, taking their money, telling them that he cares for nothing else, in part it must be a pose.
For as someone who has spent most of his life in hockey and with the Leafs, it is impossible to imagine that he doesn’t feel some of the immense sadness and anger a Leafs fan feels at seeing a once great team, a once great institution, now shabby.
The team arrived from Montreal by charter this morning. Lafleur and Robinson, in their longjohns, stand outside the dressing-room door, talking to Toronto reporters; Risebrough, a few feet away, planes and files some sticks for the game. When I walk into the room, Tremblay looks at me sharply.
