by Ken Dryden
“Câlisse, Dryden,” he snarls, “one set of rules for the team, another for you,” then, as I begin to feel uncomfortable, he smiles and slaps me hard on the back. Napier and Hughes shout around for unused tickets for more family and friends than they had yesterday, but too late, they are mocked and find none. Reading a Toronto newspaper, Lapointe suddenly crumples it in disgust.
“Lookit this,” he roars, pointing to the paper. “‘The great Leafs-Canadiens rivalry.’ Who the hell they think they’re kidding? Shit, they must think we’re the goddamn Pittsburgh Penguins.”
Startled, we look up, waiting for a smile, waiting for a punch line, but none comes.
The conversation returns to Houle and his breakaway against the Sabres. Quickly it moves to Houle’s other breakaways, and as each is remembered, several others come to mind. I yell out my favorite—one last season in Chicago against Tony Esposito. Houle’s smile disappears. “Câlisse, you can’t stop me,” he growls. I stop laughing—he’s right, I can’t—but he presses on. “Some of the goals you let in. Câlisse, Reggie Leach, Schmautz,” brightening with each name he says.
He is beginning to sound like a catalogue, so I interrupt him.
“Hey, what’re ya starting in on me for?” I ask, trying to sound wound-ed; but it’s no use. The bandwagon has stopped, turned, and is coming my way. Ten voices, busy with their skates, come alive:
“…McDonald…” someone shouts.
“…Ramsay…” says another.
“René Robert…”
“Barber…”
The names stream out—Dionne, Gare, Tommy Williams stored away waiting for this moment, each name bringing a quick laugh, then a longer one as the memory of the goal returns. Finally, it is Shutt who remembers; it would be Shutt. “Hey, what about Plager’s goal?” he chirps, and there is a scream of laughter.
I had had a promising start, then everything came unravelled. In the next ten minutes, St. Louis scored three goals, at least two of which I should have stopped. I survived goalless the next few minutes, and began to feel better, wondering if I had finally settled down enough, if Bowman thought I had settled down enough, to play the rest of the game. With eight seconds left in the period, there was a faceoff in our zone. The puck went to the boards; Bob Plager, a big, ponderously slow defenseman for the Blues, came in from his left point position and flipped it towards the net. I reached out to catch it, and felt it hit off the heel of my glove, then watched mesmerized as it rolled up my wrist, through my legs, onto the ice, and over the goal-line, just as the siren sounded to end the period.
When the second period began, I was on the bench.
“Câlisse, Bob Plager,” Lapointe mutters to himself, still disbelieving, “it was so slow, there were three minutes left when he shot it…”
Hah hah hah.
“…the ref almost called it back—delay of game…”
Hah hah hah.
The next year, when we were back to play the Blues, a local announcer asked me for an interview. He apologized for not knowing much about hockey, but I reassured him, going into my “you don’t really need to know anything about hockey; it’s just like everything else” routine. Suddenly, his eyes brightened.
“Hey, you’re the guy Plager scored on from the parking lot last year. That was his last goal, ya know. Hell, it was almost his first. Hah hah hah, well I’ll be…”
The names continue on without a break. A little desperate, I try again.
“Hey wait a minute. Wait a minute!” I shout. “Getting back to your breakaway, Reggie…” But no one is listening.
“…hey, remember Larry Romanchych?” someone shouts, and there is more laughter.
“…and Simon Nolet?” “… and what about Tom Reid’s goal?”
“…Tom Reid’s goal! That was seven years ago! How did we get on to this?”
It is not easy to say what Réjean Houle does for a team. On the one hand he is a good skater and forechecker, capable of playing any of the forward positions, a better-than-average playmaker and penalty-killer; on the other, he is not big, not strong, not tough, often injured, a worse-than-average shooter, and has surprisingly little goal-scoring touch. On a winning team, where goodwill and kind words abound, it is often easy to pretend that someone is better than he is (on the Orr-Esposito Bruins, Derek Sanderson was a “great” player), but by his own admission Houle is “very, very average.” He says it without bravado, without the survivor’s ubiquitous pride, not intending to appear modest as others insist on doing (preferring to praise themselves by implication for having the character to overcome their defects), but because, as he says evenly, “It’s the plain truth.”
If he was a slightly better player, but mostly if he allowed it to be so, his story would have an almost monumental quality to it. Instead, typically underplayed, it is a quiet story, a nice story, a story sure to have a happy ending, though it is far from over.
Up close, he has a little boy’s face, lumped and scarred by a decade of pucks and high-sticks. But stand back, a few feet more each year, let the lumps and scars go out of focus and disappear, and you will see the real Réjean Houle, still untouched: the eyes and smile that tighten and twinkle; the shock of thick brown hair, his too-long sideburns, his persistent wisps of cowlick, the fan of hair that falls on his forehead. And listen to his voice—its highpitched, exuberant bursts, never far from a laugh, his guileless candor and simple eloquence that sound naive. It is the look and sound of a fourteen-year-old boy, and it is both real and deceptive.
He was born in Rouyn, a small mining town in northwestern Quebec, neighbor to Noranda and to the small mining towns of northeastern Ontario a few miles away. In the heart of the Canadian Shield, a vast sweep of lakes and forest and mostly rock, it was an area largely unsettled until early this century when rich ore bodies were discovered—nickel and silver mainly to the south and west, gold to the west, iron, lead, zinc, and copper in and around Rouyn—and towns went up as if overnight. Houle remembers Rouyn as a town of travailleurs, workers—Québécois, Italians, Poles—miners like his father, who worked for the giant multinational Noranda Mines. Noranda, on the other side of the tracks, north and west, was where “the big boss-es” of the mines lived. They were English (“as usual,” Houle laughs) from Montreal and Toronto, and lived in big white houses, with big gardens and beautiful lawns. Houle was rarely in Noranda, except for hockey games, and remembers being uncomfortable there, as if he didn’t belong. Yet asked if he ever felt any bitterness or resentment, he said without apology, “No, I respect people for what they are.”
His father was a driller, working in stopes, big hollowed-out caves deep underground, drilling holes for dynamite charges in the face of the ore body. The base wages at the mine were low, and he worked hard for bonuses, sometimes working faster than he should. One time a heavy wrecking-bar bounced back, hitting his face and knocking out several teeth; another time, he badly injured a hand. It was dangerous work, Houle recalls; then, suddenly remembering a jaw he had broken twice, a leg, finger, toe, and collarbone once each, a shoulder separated, the other dislocated, and the more than two hundred stitches that line his face, “like a hockey player,” he says, and laughs with great delight.
But his father’s injuries were mostly inside him, and, like his fellow miners, he tried to keep them there, avoiding doctors as best he could.
Finally, at forty-two, his health deteriorating, and spitting up black saliva, he was retired from the mine, later to work in a halfway house for delinquents in Rouyn. I asked him if his father had ever made his experience in the mine a lesson to him. Houle said that his father often talked about his work, and like every other father wanted something better for his children, but that no, it was never a lesson. His father liked being a miner, he said.
Houle remembers his childhood mostly in a series of hockey images: the games under a solitary street light, the only one that his street had; a friend’s backyard rink, with lights for the early northern nights; Saturday morning, every second week,
his father working from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., sleeping for two hours, then taking him to play; Saturday afternoons and Sundays at a local collège (high school), where on a single rink there were four pucks, scores of kids, and four games played simultaneously—three across its width, one down its length; and Saturday nights, on a couch in the living room with his family, listening to announcers René Lecavalier and Jean-Maurice Bailly, and watching the Canadiens on TV. They were his team, and “Boom-Boom” Geoffrion was his favorite player—“I thought he was spectacular,” he would say later. “A kind of showman, and when he scored goals, he showed lots of expression, smiling, jumping up and down. I liked that.” Yet while those around him dreamed of playing in the NHL, Houle did not. Not until later when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. I asked him why. He paused a moment, choosing his words carefully as if unsure I would understand. “You see, working-class people have no confidence,” he said in his quiet, straightforward way. “It just takes a while to get some.” Later, he explained it to me another way, and in doing so told much about himself. “I never dream of something I cannot be,” he said.
He was a star in Rouyn; later in Thetford Mines, he had scouts at many of his games, but it wasn’t until he reached Montreal and starred for the Junior Canadiens that he thought he might be good enough to be an NHL player. Asked how it finally happened, he answered quickly,
“I was lucky,” then stopped himself, and quietly started again. “No, not lucky,” he said. “Lucky’s a funny word, eh?” and pausing while I nodded, he continued again, “I was given the chance to prove I was good enough.”
When we were rookies together in the 1971 Stanley Cup playoffs, as teammates talked of money and pride, Houle, wide eyed at the magic, kept repeating, “I wanna kiss the Stanley Cup.” (It became a dressing-room rallying cry of sorts—“C’mon guys, Reggie wants to kiss Stanley’s cup.”) Two years later, he signed a lucrative contract with the Quebec Nordiques of the WHA. He had been torn between his enthusiasm for the Canadiens and his even more instinctive quest for financial security. Three years later, he was back with the Canadiens, this time with the contract he wanted.
He has always been careful with his money, investing much of it in annuities to guarantee his future, but in recent years he has seen inflation rise and his annuities—secured future shrink agonizingly away.
For the first time, he has seen the end of his hockey career—three years, four, perhaps five years away, but sometime; and soon. It was his one gift, his one chance, the source of security he never had, the source of confidence he always needed, the rallying point for the people he has learned to crave, the underpinning of his way of life—he could feel it slipping away, with nothing to put in its place.
He was clearly bothered by it all, though his friendly, open, self-mocking manner never changed. He read “doom and gloom” (f)inancial newsletters, and magazines; he announced out loud each jump in interest rates, each fall in the dollar, until teammates, noticing his torment, gleefully announced them to him first. There had seemed such an urgency about him; he seemed always to be running after“(d)eals,” promotions, endorsements, openings anxious to conspire on the latest and hottest tips, wheeling for nickels and dimes like a French-Canadian Sammy Glick. He began even to look the part, wearing three-piece pinstripe suits (closer to Frank Nitti than to Brooks Brothers), smoking big cigars. Yet always there was that laugh.
At our hotel in Newport Beach a few weeks ago, he looked out over the pool, his hands in his vest pockets, puffing on a big cigar, and said,
“You know, I oughta be a millionaire. I got all the moves,” then, laughing at himself, “I just don’t have the money.”
But this season, I have begun to notice in him an ease that wasn’t there before. He still talks constantly of inflation and interest rates, but the edge in his voice has gone, as if he does so now only because the team expects it of him, as part of his team persona. I see him reading biographies of Moshe Dayan, Martin Luther King, and Trudeau, talking politics with Savard or with one of the reporters, sitting quietly in a lobby with piles of newspapers he has brought from home. He seems involved in more and different things with new people who like being around him, and, doing well, he seems happy with himself. All his life he has searched for confidence and security, and now it seems he has found them. Their original source may have been hockey, but when hockey leaves, they will remain. The nicest part of his story is that he is now beginning to realize it himself.
What does Houle do for a hockey team? Any team, even a great team, has many more Réjean Houles than it has Lafleurs and Robinsons. Grinders, muckers, travailleurs, they form the base of any team; they do the kinds of diligent, disciplined, unspectacular things that every team must do before it can do the rest. But more than that, players like Houle make it fun to be on a team; it is a rare skill.
A few days ago, over breakfast, I asked him how he felt. With characteristic eloquence, he said simply, “I feel just the way I want to feel.
I feel great in my skin.”
The door swings open and Pierre Meilleur strides in, looking like someone whose brother is the toughest kid on the block.
“The Leafs are off [the ice],” he sneers. “‘Piton’ [Claude Ruel] says if ya aren’t on right away, don’t bother goin’ on.”
Only Lapointe looks up. “Hey Boomer, see this,” he says, holding his stick upright, pointing to its butt-end, “sit on it.”
Until recently, teams had only a “morning skate,” often in civvies or sweatsuits, simply for players to test that their skates were properly sharpened. But for a player, putting on skates means picking up sticks, and sticks mean pucks, and sticks and pucks mean easy shooting and informal games. That means the risk of an injury and the need for full equipment. And with full equipment, coaches began to ask themselves, why not have a practice? So for fifteen or twenty optional but demanding minutes, we practice.
I don’t like practicing the day of a game. I am afraid of getting hurt, not seriously, but perhaps a bruise on my catching hand, or on my arm or my shoulder, just enough to nag at me through the day and make me wonder how well I can play. What a morning practice does, and does well, is kill time, something not unimportant on the day of a game. On a day when nothing matters until the day is nearly complete, it is something to get out of bed for, to get dressed for, to get to, to get undressed and dressed for, to do, to get undressed and dressed again, to get back from—to get us through more than two hours of a purposely uneventful day.
We file out singly to the ice, along a narrow rubber path that comes out behind the net at the north end. The ice is still being resurfaced after the Leafs’ practice, and, cursing Ruel and Meilleur, we pool up near the boards and wait. Hurry up and wait. The bright TV lights have been left off and the Gardens lies in a kind of amber twilight.
Half the ice surface away, two or three Leafs players stand behind their bench, being interviewed for the 6 p.m. sports. We sit in the seats, bored, impatient, our legs propped over the seat backs in front of us, or pace on the spot beside others who do the same. Tremblay yells something not quite in the direction of the Zamboni driver, then quickly looks away, but the driver doesn’t hear him. It is the day of a game, repeated eighty times and more a season. With too much energy, too much time, and not enough to do—hurry up and wait.
I look around, then again more slowly, gradually aware of what I see. The enormous Sportimer is gone; an even larger, more versatile scoreboard-clock, the kind you might find in any large arena, is in its place. Foster Hewitt’s gondola was taken down last year; the portrait of the Queen, the bandshell, and Horace Lapp’s giant Wurlitzer were removed nearly twelve years ago when more than 1,500 unobstructed seats were added. The “reds” are now “golds,” though they appear more a mustard-color; the “blues” are “reds,” except in the mezzanines; the “greens” and the “grays” and the aisles that always looked clean remain.
I don’t much like the Gardens now. Competing against a child’s memory, t
hat is perhaps inevitable, but it is more than that. The building’s elegant touches are gone, but anachronistic perhaps even in that other time, most deserved to go. It has been expanded and modern-ized for contemporary needs—more seats, more private boxes, a bigger press box—but I dislike the haphazard, graceless way it was done.
There is a veneer of newness about it now that doesn’t quite fit. It has been stranded in awkward transition; no longer what it was, it cannot be what it wants to be. Now, after nearly fifty years, there is nothing special about it. It is just another rink; just another place to play.
The Zamboni drives off the ice and we burst on. For twenty minutes we skate easily, then harder, whistled into drills by Bowman—one-on-ones with the goalies, three-on-two line rushes, two-on-ones—like every other practice except each drill is shorter and quicker. When it is almost over, as we are changing from one drill to another, I look up in the seats and see Johnny Bower.
Now a scout and goaltender coach for the Leafs, Bower, in 1958, at the age of at least thirty-three (because he had enlisted in the Canadian army in 1941, it was often thought he was even older), joined the Leafs for only his second NHL season. It was a time when the Leafs were assembling and maturing into a team that would win four Stanley Cups during the next decade, and Bower, a relentless worker and competitor, with an awkward, almost comic, style, became an important member of those teams. A few miles away, I was nearly a teenager and playing in my last few backyard seasons. I felt too old to pretend in quite the way I had done before, but when I did, I was Johnny Bower.
Last year, I met Bower for the first time. It was at an NHL awards luncheon in Montreal, and, leaving the hotel together, we shared a taxi to the airport. We were both uneasy at first, but gradually we just began to talk. As we were nearing the airport, he was telling me about his goaltending partners Sawchuk and Don Simmons when suddenly it struck me—he was speaking to me as a fellow goalie, as a colleague.
It was not NHL star to star-struck kid; it was as if we were equals. For the length of the cab ride, it was just Johnny and Ken.
