by Ken Dryden
There is a sense of destiny about Lafleur that is present only in a great player, and Lafleur has been a great player most of his life. A national figure at ten as star of the Quebec pee-wee tournament, moving up to Jr. A at fourteen, he amassed unprecedented scoring totals with the Remparts, and by seventeen was the kind of unmistakable star that a team will plan for and scheme for years ahead if it can. In May 1970, with two lower draft picks already acquired from other teams, the Canadiens traded Ernie Hicke and their first-round pick to the California Golden Seals for François Lacombe, cash and the Seals’(f)irst pick in the 1971 draft. In a draft that included such prospects as Marcel Dionne and Rick Martin, the Canadiens, with the first pick, selected Lafleur.
It was a propitious moment. Days before, with a triumphant tenth Stanley Cup, Béliveau, captain, aging hero and idol to Lafleur, had played his last game, announcing his retirement some weeks later. The torch was passed, the line of pre-eminent French-Canadian superstars beginning with “the Rocket,” Maurice Richard, more than thirty-five years before would continue unbroken. For a poor boy from a small pulp-and-paper town on the Ottawa River, the world was unfolding as it should—destiny calculated, manipulated, controlled by others; destiny none the less.
Now, eight years later, it is in a sense no less evident. He is a dazzling star, the best of his sport, his team more dominant than any since the last years of the Rocket. Wealthy, celebrated, emerging off-ice as a poised if not wholly polished public person, he has years of success ahead of him. Béliveau, the institutional embodiment of the team now elegantly blue-suited in upstairs offices, will eventually retire; Lafleur will retire and replace him, the torch will pass again.
It is an old story, now a rare one, confined mostly to the pages of adolescent fiction: a player, a team, and his sport. But now, with free-agentry to tempt him away, a player’s loyalty and self-interest divide, then collide, the rift wider, the collision more destructive, self-interest the winner at an ever younger age. Still, Lafleur seems untouched. No well-placed tattoos, no self-promoting blood of Canadiens’ bleu, blanc, et rouge coursing in his veins, you can hear it in simple, uncoaxed words—“hockey’s my life,” he says often; too young to know, he knows, and no one argues. It’s a life immutable; not my life, not one I would want, still a life someone should live, pure, simple, romantic—(a)fter all, what’s wrong with adolescent fiction?
I have known Lafleur for nearly eight years. In that time, I have been to his home only once, for a team party; he has never been in mine. We have never been roommates on the road; we have never talked for more than a few coincidental moments at a stretch; only twice have events stripped away teammates and left us alone and together. In the playoffs three years ago, an RCMP informer told of threats he had overheard to kidnap Canadiens players, somehow interpreted as Lafleur and me. Advised to tell no one else, we nodded and smiled to each other our common plight, alarmed, amused, with gumshoes looking unmistakably like gumshoes behind newspapers and potted palms, in driveways and rearview mirrors twenty-four hours a day for several days. Then, early this season, with Lafleur looking to renegotiate his contract, an erroneous report of my salary in a Montreal paper became his public ammunition, and, uneasy, we came together again. Still, watching him from three dressing room seats away, stuttering, stumbling through early career disappointments, suddenly in glorious triumph, I should have known better. But for nearly all that time, I have misread him.
For there is a life there, and in destiny and romance there is no room for life. Painted as they are with broad brush strokes, vivid and lush, they find shape and pattern only with distance. The person who lives them is too close. He feels sweat as well as triumph. He understands what others see, but feels none of it himself.
In the 1971 playoffs, as a twenty-three-year-old law student with only six NHL games behind me, I led an underdog team to a Stanley Cup. Romance? Destiny? Not to me, though at times I’ve tried to make it so. “It’ll hit me in the morning,” the celebrant gushes, apologizing at the same time. “It hasn’t sunk in yet.” Tomorrow it sinks in—satisfaction, immense pleasure, but no romance. For what is romantic about life between the highs, the plane rides and bus rides, the crushed hopes and fears, the morning-to-morning headaches every bit a part of the same experience? Even now, eight years later, I can’t forget enough to get outside my story and see it as others do. Instead, remembering just enough from along the way to know the boundaries of the rest, I stifle the imagination that makes romance possible.
Yet, anxious to find destiny and romance in others, Lafleur included, I find it, and assume that they find it too. So when Lafleur says,
“Hockey’s my life,” I hear his wide-eyed words and supply a tone which belongs to me, which isn’t his. For, like most of us, Lafleur is no romantic about his own life. Where is the romance in beginning life poor, except if you didn’t? Romantic dreams may send you beyond ghettoed walls, but with nothing else, they send you crashing back.
Wanting never to return to that childhood life, with desperate hopes and desperate fears, what is romantic about coming face to face with success, knowing you could blow it all? Sensitive and awkwardly shy, where is the romance in making it, only to find obligation, tradition, and responsibility, and a long, hockey-less future at its end? Béliveau, a towering figure, seemed always aware, always certain, of his legacy, as if once having perfected it, he had decided never to risk it again; a figure of destiny. No disembodied presence, Lafleur still struggles in the game like the rest of us.
Not long ago, I asked him to explain the unquestioning direction to his life he so often expresses in interviews—playing a little longer, retiring, staying on with the team, travelling the country as its ambassador as Béliveau has. He looked at me, surprised. “What else would I do?” he asked. “When you play as a kid, you have no time to learn or study anything. After fifteen or twenty years, what else do I know?” To the Canadiens, to Béliveau, his attachment is more than sentimental.
Lafleur knows what he wants and has known since he was young, quietly setting out to build it—a hockey life, a life he knows and enjoys, one he is secure in. As much as his on-ice performance, it was this quality about Béliveau that first attracted Lafleur to him. Béliveau had secured his future. And so would Lafleur.
Yet his life will be different from Béliveau’s. His game, built on speed, will not age so well. He is not a fatherly, elder-statesman type.
He will fight age, unsuccessfully, while Béliveau, with an elegant touch of gray in his game since he was young, eased comfortably into it. And when he retires, he will be a very different ambassador. The fiery Richard was a hockey player, primitive and unsophisticated by today’s standards, who understood the game only on the ice. Unwilling to accept an often cosmetic role, he left. Béliveau, understanding the role better, enjoying it, believing in it, performs it with customary elan.
The sometimes intemperate Lafleur will cope. They come from different generations.
In what he now, with a roll of his eyes, calls “my hockey first” (i)nterview, last year Lafleur told Robin Herman of The New York Times,
“I really love my family and kid, but first of all it’s my hockey, my career. Sometimes my fans go second, and my family is third. It’s turning all the time.” Then twenty-six years old, four years an NHL(s)uperstar, he was merely expressing the reality of most career-directed, cause-directed men. But in his characteristic candor, his tone, flat and unrepentant, was more revealing, the tone of a contented victim, resigned to the future he wants.
I hang up my coat and go to the trainers’ room. There is already a line-up to the door. Houle, naked, stands on the treatment table where he often stands, Meilleur wrapping his upper thigh and abdomen with a rubber groin-strap. In a corner chair, Lemaire reads a newspaper, a hot pack on his shoulder. Hughes, Lupien, and Mondou wait. Tremblay pushes in, gathers some tape and pre-wrap, Risebrough takes two hot packs from the hydrocollator, and both leave. Coughing, sniffling, gri-macing here and
there, Lapointe hovers at the back, trying to look as bad as he feels. Feeling as I do in an emergency ward, my bruised shoulder no longer so important, I leave.
It has been a fairly routine year. Brian Engblom broke his jaw in training camp, Lafleur his nose. Robinson and Napier broke their noses at other times, Shutt his wrist; Lemaire dislocated a shoulder, Risebrough and Hughes (twice each) and Lapointe separated theirs.
Add an assortment of back sprains, knee sprains, hip pointers, groin pulls, cuts, bruised ribs and knees; colds, flu, bronchitis, pneumonia, even dermatitis; nothing very serious, things that come and seem to go, except in knees, shoulders, and backs, except when you are older.
But while good health may be the equilibrium state for others our age, for us it is recovery and repair. Only at the opening of training camp, when we’re brimming with rested, tanned, robust summer-health, does everything feel right. Then, as things begin slowly to break down, it’s ice packs, heat packs, tape, pills, ointments, machines, the sports ethic, and us to keep us going.
And we do keep going. It’s what is expected of us, it’s what we expect of ourselves. “Out ten days,” the press release reads, although we’re certain to be out longer. “When’ll you be back?” teammates, coaches, fans, and press wonder in our ears, and we’re back in eight.
For injuries hurt the team, and only later, much later than we can ever imagine at the time, when their residue has settled in for a long, uninterrupted stay, do we realize that they hurt us too. But even if we had known, it might not matter, for we want to play, as another test to be met and won, as an important message to the team. Always in each other’s hands, we need to know who we can count on, who can suffer the random misfortune of injury and come through unaffected when needed. In time, we know. For the player too easily distracted by injury, it is a problem. Bill Nyrop, an important if mostly overlooked fourth defenseman to the “Big Three” of Robinson, Lapointe, and Savard, was good enough to have played a larger role on the team, but he was genuinely bothered by illness and injury—when we joked obliquely about it, he would pass it off, explaining he was a “thoroughbred.” We could never be sure which game he wouldn’t be able to play, so gradually we looked to someone else. Hockey, like all professional sports, demands plow-horse resiliency and resolve, a day’s work done no matter the circumstances, before thoroughbred flair can work.
There is nothing romantic in the way we view our bodies. Used and abused through a grinding season, aesthetic only to those who watch, like a plumber’s wrench or a carpenter’s hammer they are our instruments pure and simple; a collection of disembodied parts—legs, hands, head—(t)hat work well or not so well, that arc built up, fuelled, and conditioned, that get broken and cut. They are parts we know and understand; parts that wear out sometimes from injury, sometimes from cumulative injury and age, suffered in private for a while, later as an object of public sympathy / disdain / ridicule (“his legs are gone”).
Yvan Cournoyer was the first Canadiens player I ever met. At training camp in 1970, he took his physical examination ahead of me; stripped to his shorts, short and cherub-faced, he looked like a muscle-bound putti, his thighs rolled taut like two enormous roasts spilling over his knees. When I saw him, I thought everyone must look that way, and I wanted only to go home and keep my legs to myself. Cournoyer was a great natural goal-scorer with a hard, wickedly effective shot, but his game was based on speed. Cruising right wing without the puck, he would dart here and there, then suddenly explode into an opening for a pass, powering to the net, leaving everyone behind—he was called the
“Roadrunner.” But by the mid-1970s, though it was apparent to no one else, he could feel himself slowing down. Deciding he could no longer play his former way, he tried carrying the puck more often, playing the defensive zone with greater interest, doing things not instinctive to him, in the end becoming less effective. He had been suffering back problems for some time, and finally underwent tests where disc trouble was diag-nosed. His first back operation was in 1977, and instead of being depressed by it, he felt relieved and not a little excited, for now he knew the speed that had left him had gone for a reason, and with an operation seemed recoverable. But it was not, and this year, his back pains returning, he had a second operation, this time facing it with no relief or excitement. A few weeks ago, before he went to Florida to recuperate, I asked him about it. He paused, his bright face suddenly darkening, and as if reliving the moment in the operating room he said slowly, “When you see that big light for the second time…”; then the words stopped.
At that moment, he had known his career was over.
Tremblay sits at his seat rubbing ointment over much of his body, winding pre-wrap where he has just rubbed, and finally tape. Then, as if part of a routine familiar to him, he goes right into dressing for practice. Within two months of joining the team a few years ago, his skin began to turn red and blotchy, gradually scaling, itched into open sores, oozing, bleeding, sticking to longjohns, clothes, bedsheets, to whatever it touched, reopening again and again. It caused him frantic discomfort at first, and he has since seen numerous dermatologists and used a wide variety of creams and ointments, but to no avail. He is now no better than he ever was. Only one thing makes the rash go away—(t)he end of the season. Within weeks it has vanished, only to reappear in the same inverse pattern of days and weeks at the start of the next season. In a bar, on a plane, as he listens to Bowman’s pre-game talk, unpreoccupied with anything else, he scratches, but mostly now he seems not to notice that he’s doing it. Tremblay has learned to cope.
Rubbing the sores, wrapping them for each practice and game, he has simply come to accept it as another part of his season.
Almost next to him, his back against the wall, Risebrough sits vacant-eyed, a hot pack on his knee, another on his shoulder. When he was twenty, playing junior hockey, he tore the ligaments on both sides of his right knee. Since then, wearing a brace when he plays, he has managed a successful and mostly injury-free career. But now when he awakens in the morning, he feels stiffness in his knee that takes time to work out. And once or twice a year, he reinjures it, not seriously, just enough to remind him how close he remains to the edge he has never quite left. This year he has added a new problem, his right shoulder. He separated it in November, and coming back after Christmas, he separated it again a few days later, returning only a week ago, the shoulder still bothering him. Today, after two games in two nights, he is stiff and sore and I see worry in his face. For though only in his mid-twenties, he can see a clear, disquieting pattern emerging to his career, and he’s just beginning to know that from now until he retires, it won’t change much.
For each of us, it’s a race, a short, quick race we don’t know we’re in until we start to lose. We build up our bodies, break them down, and build them up again; it is the natural, unconcerned rhythm of our careers, until one day they break down faster than we can build them up and the end is not far away. Though we know that it’s coming and can feel its symptoms, the effects, we pretend, are much less clear, and the time always seems months and years off, except for others. I’m not there yet, at least I don’t think so, but what every other year was a slump can suddenly become the irreversible status quo. And, desperately preoccupied with redeeming myself and proving others wrong, like everyone else I would be the last to know.
“Eddy! Boomer! Where are those fuckin’ trainers?” a voice bellows. It is almost noon, and in the final panic of getting ready, laces get broken, tape and cotton are urgently needed, and it’s a question we’re all asking. In an eminently reasonable, hide-and-seek voice, Robinson calls out, “Oh Ed-dy, Boo-mer, you can come out now. We give up.”
A few moments later, punching his glasses back from the end of his nose, Palchak walks in looking harried as usual. There’s no sign of Meilleur.
“Ta-berr-nac,” Lapointe exclaims, “il vive! ”
Tremblay looks up as if he’s not so sure, and looks down again.
“Hey Eddy,” Houle
shouts, “where’s our checks?”
Every seventeen days, ten times a season, Palchak goes to the upstairs offices during practice and returns with our paychecks. Today is the day. In his heavy nasal voice, sounding as if someone is pinching his nostrils, Palchak tells us that we’ll get our checks after practice.
Pinching their nostrils, several players repeat what Palchak says, and everyone laughs.
Chartraw looks across at Houle. “Hey Reggie,” he shouts, “what d’ya want your check for? Ya got another hot tip?” and there’s more laughter.
“Lemme guess,” Shutt interrupts, “you and Bunker Hunt are gonna corner the silver market again.” There is loud laughter. Then, in a voice sounding vaguely like the TV commercial, Robinson says solemnly, “When E. F. Houle speaks…” and perfectly on cue a chorus shouts, “not one fuckin’ person listens,” and there’s more laughter.
Sitting almost next to me, quieter than usual, is Pierre Larouche.
He looks a little embarrassed and almost isolated from everything going on around him. Last night, on the plane back from Boston, not having played for the third straight game, he couldn’t hold back any longer. He found himself, not unintentionally, next to a reporter for Le Journal de Montréal, and started talking. As the reporter listened, nodding, writing, offering no argument in return, Larouche grew more and more sure of himself, and gradually more angry. This morning, above the headline that reads, “Canadiens battent Bruins, 3-2,” it says that Larouche demands to be traded.
It hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to for Larouche. Traded here from Pittsburgh less than two years ago for Pete Mahovlich, just twenty-two years old at the time, already with one fifty-three-goal season and more than a hundred career NHL goals, he had been too good, too young, for a mediocre team not to spoil, and the Penguins had spoiled him. But coming to the Canadiens, a team good enough to use what he could do, and strong enough to discipline, improve, and otherwise mask what he couldn’t, it would be different. In his first game, in the Forum against his former Pittsburgh team, he earned three assists and excited everyone with what we knew would happen next.
