by Ken Dryden
Unable to sustain our funk, gradually we compete against ourselves, and the practice picks up. A short hour later, Bowman blows his whistle, “Okay, that’s it,” and we let out a satisfied roar, then stay on the ice. With his irrepressible “Who’s got a good shot?” Ruel coaxes most of the players to his end of the ice for shots on Larocque.
I go to the other end with Lapointe, Lambert, and Risebrough.
Larocque and I are competing again. Though we’ve won our last three games, with games against the Flyers and Islanders coming soon—(g)ames I will almost certainly play—a good, enthusiastic, hard-working practice might get him the Detroit game, and he knows it. So today he is among the first on the ice, and will certainly be the last one off. It is bound to be noticed. I don’t really want to play against the Wings, an inept, uninteresting team, especially in the Forum—but I don’t want not to play either. So I compete back, staying out for shots I don’t want and today maybe don’t need, staying out just long enough that not staying long enough cannot be a factor.
Lapointe lines up fifteen or twenty pucks near the blueline and slaps them at me one by one; then Lambert and Risebrough do the same, but from closer. Unsure what to do next, with boasts and bets and great enthusiasm we decide on a penalty-shot contest, which Risebrough inexplicably wins. Running out of ideas, Lambert and Lapointe leave the ice, and Risebrough joins Ruel. Larocque is still in goal. I skate around, turning backwards and forwards, dropping to my knees for stretches, skating from board to board several times. Still Larocque hasn’t moved. I skate down the ice and stand next to him, waiting a turn. When I get it, he stands next to me, waiting his turn. Crack-crack, crack-crack, like a snare drum in a roll, the pucks jump from Ruel’s stick to a line of sticks across the blueline. “C’mon my Ricky,” Ruel shouts to Chartraw, “Shoot the puck! Shoot the puck!” (a)nd Chartraw, then Tremblay (“my Mario”), and Napier (“my Mark”) take two or three strides from the blueline, wind up for a slapshot, and crack-crack, the next puck shoots from the corner to the next stick in line, again and again until gradually the numbers dwindle. Finally, with only Ruel and Lupien left, there seems no great need for two goalies, yet neither of us will leave. Ruel puts us through a short skating drill, then we go back for more shots. The net is empty. Larocque and I skate towards it, easily at first, then like two kids reaching for the last piece of cake, with disinterested single-mindedness. When I realize that only an embarrassing sprint will get me there first, I angle away and skate to the dressing room. Larocque has won. But by leaving the ice first, I have reminded him that I am still the number one goalie.
Palchak distributes the checks. Houle looks at his and shakes his head. “How come my contract says I’m so rich and this check says I’m not?” he wonders, knowing the answer.
“Câlisse de tabernac, taxes!” Tremblay growls and storms to the shower. Shutt watches him go.
“That goddamn Lévesque,” someone snarls, not for the first time.
“Why the hell doesn’t he do something about that instead of the fuckin’ referendum?”
There are loud murmurs of agreement.
Suddenly Shutt goes to the skate room, picks up a plastic cup, fills it with ice, and returns to the room. Then, as we watch with squeam-ish, open-mouthed glee, he urinates in the cup until it’s almost full, tops it with Coke for color, puts it down beside him, and walks to the shower. Undressed and ready for our showers, we decide to stay put.
Moments later, water dripping from his body, Tremblay reappears and sits down. We watch him from the corners of our eyes. He dries himself slowly, then turns his head to one side and sees Shutt’s Coke. He looks around for Shutt, then, sharing smiles with those around him, grabs the Coke and sips from it—no laugh, no wink, no devil-may-care leap this time.
The laughter dies down, and one by one we become aware of some short, quick screams, like those of a passing racing car—it’s Palchak sharpening skates. Robinson stands up, puffs out his cheeks, sticks out his belly, wrinkles up his nose like an accordion, punches imaginary glasses back into place with his middle finger, and, stooped over like an old-world shoemaker, his hands in front of him as if holding a skate, he waits for the sound to begin again. Then, pursing his lips, he moves his hands back and forth as if across a sharpening stone, while others make the quick guttural scream of a passing racing car. When the sound stops, wrinkling up their noses like accordions, punching imaginary glasses back into place with their middle fingers, in heavy nasal voices several chorus, “Hey Eddy, leave some for us,” and there’s more laughter.
Lafleur has left, Risebrough and Lemaire disappear back into the trainers’ room, and Larouche heads out the door in the direction of Bowman’s office. The room gets quiet. Suddenly Lambert disappears around a corner and returns with the hard, heavy beat of rock music blaring from our stereo. “Aw-right Lambert,” we scream, “play that funn-ky music!” and the mood that seemed tired finds life again. His hair pushed up and back in a pompadour like a dry-look Little Richard, Lambert dances, his body jerking to the rhythm, his mouth sneering with feeling. “Ooh Lambert,” we shout, “make me feeeel it,” (a)nd, eyes closed, he hovers across the floor, loose and fluid. A few moments later, the stereo turned lower, then off, no one protests.
The room quickly empties. We are on the road from Sunday until the middle of next week, and with banking to do, and tax decisions by the end of the month, mid-afternoon downtown meetings with lawyers and accountants await. Going out the door, Houle yells back that he’ll be across the street at the pub. Dressing quickly in more three-piece suits, more suits and sport coats than usual, few seem to hear him.
Last year, many years after being traded by the Canadiens to Los Angeles, Bob Murdoch took me for a long, undistracting drive along freeways and beaches, and as we drove, we talked of our future plans and of contracts we had both just signed. Several years before in Winnipeg, we had been roommates together while playing for Canada’s National Team, both of us just out of college and playing one step higher than we ever thought we could play, both of us planning non-hockey careers, yet wondering if there was one step higher we could go. But in the middle of that year, Canada withdrew from the World Championships it was scheduled to host, and the team was dis-banded. Adrift, our plans of playing until the 1972 Olympics gone, we talked of quitting; and we talked of continuing on. A few months later, we both began negotiating with the Canadiens, the team holding our NHL rights. With matter-of-fact excitement, we would dream out loud of contract and bonus figures we had heard for others, wondering if Sam Pollock would go as high as “10 and 10” ($10,000 signing bonus, $10,000 a year in salary), “10 and 12,” or maybe “10 and 15.”
In May 1970, we both signed contracts and the following September began together with the Voyageurs.
Eight years later, as we drove around Los Angeles that day, the tone of our conversation had changed. No longer wide-eyed, we talked of our contracts and big jaded numbers spilled easily from us—”a hundred thou,” “two hundred thou,” individual bonuses, team bonuses, signing bonuses. Then, after continuing this way for several minutes, we suddenly stopped, looked at each other, and started laughing.
Remarkable though it might seem, as recently as ten years ago, it was possible to watch a hockey game and never once think how much its players were paid. For while salaries had moved up till they were nearly compatible with those in other sports, they were not so high as to seem relevant to what was happening on the ice. So good players were “all-stars” or “trophy winners,” and good players in bad seasons were “overrated,” not “overpaid.” It began to change late in the 1960s.
As sports and entertainment moved closer together, as sports turned from pastime to business, partnered and propelled by TV, leagues expanded, new money appeared with new expectations and styles, lawyers and agents emerging in its wake. Salaries went up; hold-outs increased. Comfortable with their historic upper hand, many general managers fought back, refusing even to negotiate with agents, turning negot
iations and their resulting settlements into newsworthy events, turning money from an occasional issue to an incessant one.
But though that was a dramatic development at the time, the real change came a few years later when the courts struck down the“(r)eserve clause,” opening up free-agentry, giving a new competitor—(t)he World Hockey Association—its chance. Between May and September 1972, as WHA teams signed players for their initial season, the “going rate” on a new contract more than doubled. Bobby Hull received a million-dollar bonus for signing with the Winnipeg Jets; Brad Park, Rod Gilbert, Vic Hadfield, Walter Tkaczuk, and many of their teammates signed WHA-size contracts with the Rangers.
Gradually, as old contracts became due, other teams fell into line.
From a private, almost inconsequential matter, money moved front and center, where mostly it has remained. New teams in new hockey cities, hard pressed to sell goals and assists to fans used to ERAs and yards per carry, sold price tags as performance, and sold both as celebrity, overnight turning twenty-five-goal scorers like the Bruins’ Derek Sanderson into “million dollar” superstars. Agents, happy to use old clients to publicly solicit new ones, came up with creatively inflated figures and sold them to the media as news. The story became money, lots of it, all the time: ticket prices, TV contracts, free agents; day after day rumors, denials, speculations about who is going where, when, and mostly for how much.
“Sports” had become “Sports Inc.” With big money now to be made in sports, big money would be made, and the attitude changed.
“Cities” became “markets,” “games” became “products,” “sports” part of the “entertainment business,” fighting for “entertainment dollars.”
Owners sold civic pride, appealed to civic vanity, got civic concessions, moved into civic monuments; blamed civic pride, left. Players adopt-ed pin-stripe suits and permanented hair. Money, once only a practical imperative, a vehicle to let them as adults play what as little boys they could play for nothing, was now a reason itself to play. Sports became a means to something else, a player’s commitment distracted and suspect; money a motivation, so the motivation.
It is something far different from what I expected nearly nine years ago. Coming to Montreal as a part-time goalie with the Voyageurs while completing law school, I thought the Canadiens would simply take over from my parents for a time, paying my tuition and books, my room and board and little else until I graduated. Then, after giving them one more year as I was obliged to do, I would merely stop playing and they would stop paying. But I was better than we both thought, and with the team winning most of the time, and the WHA to compete implicitly or explicitly for my services, my salary has increased many times. In most ways, nothing has really changed. The cars I rode in as a child are the cars I drive now, the house I live in is the same, the food I eat, the clothes I wear the same; my bank account is larger, but quantitatively life seems little different.
Still, there have been changes. An agent, an accountant, a tax lawyer, and an investment counselor now ease and complicate my life.
When I talk to old friends who earn a thirty-year-old’s average wage, they seem uncomfortable, or I do. For me, money, which seemed always a by-product, distant, even unrelated to the game, has taken on new importance. A cause of great bitterness and division, it brought me to retire for a year; a cold-eyed standard against which I judge my relationship with the team, and against which I am now in turn judged.
It is the other side of the Faustian bargain. For when a high-priced player, especially a free agent, comes to a team, he comes with a price tag—the “million dollar” ballplayer. It was the market that created the price tag, but now it’s the price tag that he must live up to. So, with nothing more than a bigger bank account to make him a better player, he must play better, like a “million dollar” ballplayer, or be bitterly resented. For many, it’s too much of a burden. Surrounded by goodwill at one moment, feeling immense satisfaction at exceeding others’(e)xpectations; then signing a new contract so large that performance is no longer relevant, for expectations cannot be reached, a shutout, a home run being simply what you’re paid to do. And while once you were allowed such motivations as personal or team pride, such postgame feelings as satisfaction or sadness, that no longer applies. With all that money, all other feelings, all other motivations, are relin-quished. Nothing else can feel good or bad, nothing else can matter; nothing else is relevant. What was always a business transaction, but never seemed so, can seem like nothing else again. It sounds like a small price to pay, except to the athlete it doesn’t feel that way.
I have never been able to justify the amount of money I earn. I can explain it, but that’s not the same thing. I know it has to do with the nature of the entertainment business, that, as with actors, dancers, musicians, and others, thousands will attend an arena and pay to watch me work, and millions more will stay at home to do the same on TV.
I know that large revenues are produced, which in turn get shared among those who produce them, that indeed using strict economic argument, my teammates and I, more important to producing those revenues, more irreplaceable in their production than most owners or executives, should probably be paid more. I also know that I’m as skilled at my job as most senior executives are at theirs, that I’ve trained as long and hard as they have, that my career is short, with risks and life-lingering side effects not present in other jobs, that soon I will retire and earn less than others my age with my training and experience earn.
Still, that is not enough. And if someone asks me why I should earn more than a teacher, a nurse, a carpenter, a mechanic, I have no answer. I can simply say that, offered money for something I always did for nothing, and would have continued to do for whatever the“(g)oing rate” was, with no obvious strings attached I take it, which, if eminently human, doesn’t come without its own psychic downside.
In his fine book, Life on the Run, former basketball star Bill Bradley relates overhearing another player explain, “Money alone makes you more of what you were before you had money.” I would like to think it does, but I’m not so sure. Because money buys you a return ticket from anything you do, it may only make you less sure of what you really are. But I suppose that’s the kind of nice intellectual distinction I can afford to make.
For a player, money is also important another way. To many, it means respect, and ultimately self-respect, offering a new life-style, new surroundings, new friends—doctors, lawyers, professional people many years older—a new self-image. The kid who never seemed too smart is suddenly a businessman, un homme d’affaires, for the first time in his life feeling like more than a jock. He is dressed up in expensive suits, briefcase and agent in hand, riding elevators to skyscraper offices, listening to smart people use words that never made sense, but that coming from their mouths almost do (though trying to explain them later to his wife he will become angry at her when he can’t quite do it).
But nothing comes free and clear. With more money than you can handle yourself, you hire others to do it for you, and so you never learn. Budgets, tax returns, the disagreeable facts of other people’s lives, are passed on and out of yours because of money. Only later, gradually disoriented by all you have, feeling helpless before the costly infrastructure needed to support it, do you realize there was a price; that in its freedom, money can be a trap. For what happens later?
What happens to the life-style, the expectations, the lawyer, accountant, and investment counselor, the respect and self-respect when the money stops? And it will stop. What then? Like an oil-rich third-world country, an athlete, beginning with little, finding himself with great unplanned-for riches, is suddenly aware that in him is a finite resource fast running out. Without the broader sophistication to deal with it or to build something lasting from it, surrounded by others too anxious to try, he lives with one desperate, nagging fear—this is my chance, don’t blow it.
So, torn between extravagance and tomorrow, it means a Corvette with the signin
g bonus of your first contract, then agents, lawyers, accountants as partners to the rest, instead of the taxman, hoping the ledger works out right. In the first few years, it seems like more money than can be spent in a lifetime. In the last few, married, with a family, a house and two cars, you wonder where it went. It was money you once had spread in your mind over thirty years or more, but you forgot the price of beer would rise. And now, while the pile looks much the same, it is filled with 80¢, 70¢ inflation-weakened dollars, and you can see the years ahead shrink agonizingly back. It is like living through an Arctic summer for the first time. Arriving in May or June, and feeling the wonderful, endless sunlight, knowing, but forgetting, that sometime it will end. Then one day in July, long after it began to happen, five, six, eight minutes a day, you feel the sun slowly hemor-rhaging away. And unable to stop it, suddenly you know what’s ahead.
Before it can happen, you retire, your problems disappearing with you, later to be uncovered by some inquiring journalist. It is in no way a remarkable story, though the celebrity of the names involved makes us think it is. Rather it is simply the universal story of having something before you can appreciate it, then having it go away when you can. And as Roger Kahn discovered in his accomplished book The Boys of Summer, and as others have discovered since, it’s an easy story. Like nursing-home abuses for an investigation reporter, it is one that’s always there, you only have to decide to find it.
But there’s one more thing. What does money do to the game on the ice? How does it affect a player? In playoff games, does Guy Lapointe put aside his shot-blocking phobia because of money? And what about Lafleur and his relentless brilliance? What about Robinson and Gainey and Lemaire? What about the so-called money players? Do they play the way they do because of money? No amateur would believe it, nor would many fans, nor indeed many players, but on the ice, in a game, more money, less money, playing for team or country, a blocked shot, a body-check, a diving save comes only from instinctive, reflexive, teeth-baring competition. Money, like other motivations, comes from the mind and has nothing to do with it. More money can’t change that.
