by Ken Dryden
Ten minutes. I strap on my right pad. Preoccupied with time and equipment and not yet the game, the room is quieter, if no more serious. Too quiet. Uneasy, thinking of Cournoyer, the team’s captain, at home, his distinguished career probably over, Lapointe says, “Hey, let’s win this one for Yvan,” and instantly the room picks up. “Poor little guy,” he continues, “his back all busted up, probably just lyin’ at home…” and as he pauses as if to let his words sink in, Shutt and Houle jump in before anyone else can. “(h)avin’ a little wine…”
“…a little Caesar salad…”
“…poor little bastard,” Lapointe muses sadly, and we all laugh.
I’m not sure what I thought the Canadiens’ dressing room would be like before a game, though in me there was certainly a lingering image and a Marty Glickman-like voice that went with it:
“Here we are inside the dressing room of pro sports’ greatest franchise, the Montreal Canadiens. See and hear the majestic Béliveau, the lion-hearted Richard, the enigmatic Mahovlich. Watch as a team of proud, aging veterans readies itself for one more crack at hockey’s top prize, the coveted Stanley Cup.”
The first time was almost eight years ago, in Pittsburgh before my first NHL game. I remember being surprised, even disappointed, that it seemed so much like every other dressing room I had been in: players undressing, dressing, no special words spoken, no mood of a different quality, no solemn rituals that set it apart. Then about ten minutes before the warm-up, it changed. The powder sock appeared.
An ordinary sweat sock filled with talcum powder and taped shut at its open end, though uncommon today, it was used by many at the time to turn tacky black stick-tape a more pleasing shade of gray. This time, it appeared for a different reason.
“Hey, nobody get Fergie’s new suit,” a voice shouted, and before the fractious Ferguson could move, the powder sock splattered against his dark blue jacket, leaving it a not-so-pleasing powder blue. Amid laughter, a sympathetic voice cried, “Oh Fergie, that’s terrible. Here, lemme help.” The helper rubbed at the powder with a large ball of cotton, plastering it over with a thick cotton mat. Furious, laughing, Ferguson grabbed the sock; others, their skate laces dragging, ran from the room with their clothes, the sock pinballing here and there after them. When it disappeared about five minutes later, five minutes before the warm-up to my first game, a heavy talcum cloud filled the room.
I can never sense the mood in the room before a game. Noisy, or quiet, each can be read a different way; both can mean the same. Some players use noise like exciting mood Muzak, riding it, building with it until game time; others need noise to blurt out the oppressive tension they feel, others to comfort themselves that all is well. I used to worry at the one-liners and frequent laughter before a game. Not my way, not a goalie’s way, it seemed an incompatible distraction from what we were doing. But now I worry less. For a one-liner, a burst of encouraging chatter (“C’mon this’’ or “C’mon that”), an earnest gem of information, even a powder sock, can come from the same state of mind, depending on the way a player deals with pressure. Only for important regular season and playoff games does the room sound different: a little more quiet, a little less laughter, as if noise is unneeded, laughter too easily misunderstood.
With only a few minutes left, Shutt suddenly remembers and looks across at Lupien. “Hey Loopie,” he says with an unconcealed grin, “(y)ou and Mousse [Mondou] gonna get Woods?”
We begin to laugh, then laugh even harder thinking of what’s coming next.
A chorus of mocking, adolescent-high voices fills the room.
“Hiya Woodsie. How are ya Woodsie?”
“…How’re the wife and kids, Woodsie?”
“…Hey Woodsie, I got a new boat. It’s a real beauty.”
Laughing at first, Tremblay looks at Lupien. “Hey, Lupien,” he snarls, “why don’t ya give him a kiss?” Lupien sets his chin, then smiles. The routine is done.
“Tabernac,” growls Robinson, breaking a skate lace. “Eddy, Eddy, I need a lace!” he shouts.
“Left or right?” a voice asks.
“Ri—,” he starts, then stops angrily. “Eddy!” he tries again,
“Boomer! Gaetan! Peter!” No one appears and he’s run out of names.
“Oh Ed-dy, Boo-mer, you can come out now.” Nothing. A moment later, Lafleur appears. He’s been at the Forum since 4:30 p.m., was fully dressed at 7 when I first noticed and probably long before that. He’s been in the room at times, other places other times, and now he’s back—his hair greased flat to the sides of his head, combed straight up in front, his teeth out, a toothbrush in his hand, brushing furiously at his gums. Lemaire sees him first.
“Ta-berr-nac…” he exclaims.
We look up; amid laughter, as if reading from a newspaper, a voice intones, “…he waits as if in a trance, his only thought the game still four hours away….”
“Câlisse, you got them fooled, Flower,” Savard laughs.
“Hey Shutty,” Lapointe taunts, “there’s your meal ticket.”
Shutt, who has made a career feasting off his linemate’s rebounds, is typically nonplussed. “Ah, that’s the way I like to see him,” he says, “(r)eady, but not too ready. There’ll be rebounds tonight.”
Five minutes.
“Good warm-up, guys. Good warm-up.”
Laces get tied, straps tightened, last-minute shoulder pads slapped into place. The clock eases forward with each anxious glance: two minutes, a minute, thirty seconds.
“Here we go, guys. Here we go.”
Messages get shorter, louder, more urgent, and are unheard.
Risebrough and Tremblay pace the room, then Mondou, Napier, Hughes, and one by one several more. Palchak hands me the game puck. Everyone’s standing; we’re ready.
Bowman enters.
“Okay, let’s go,” he says quietly, and with a shout we spring for the door.
The Forum is almost empty. A few hundred fans cheer as they see us in the corridor to the ice, but with no support from 16,000(v)acant seats around them, suddenly self-conscious, they go quiet.
Grim-faced, my eyes on a spot always a few feet in front of me, when I hear their fragile sound I look up, and, remembering this is the warm-up, I look down again. The Wings are on the ice. I skate around, glancing back to look for Vachon, but, out of sync, when I’m at center he’s a hundred feet away circling his net. Skating faster, cutting each corner as I come to it, a few laps later I pass him at center, and we smile and nod as goalies do. Gilles Gilbert winks, Tony Esposito and Chico Resch skate by as if preoccupied with other things, Bernie Parent hovers near the centerline, reluctant to be anywhere else until the ritual is done. A few times, eyeing each other up opposite sides of the ice and certain to pass at center, I looked suddenly away just to make him wait. But each time it bothered me more than it did him, and a few laps later, smiling and nodding I would play out my part.
I used to look for Joyce. A Forum usherette behind the visiting team’s bench, Joyce met me on the street one day, and we stopped to talk like old friends. A few days later at the Forum, when I skated by in warm-up, we smiled and nodded to each other. We won; and I played well. From then on in each warm-up, skating counterclockwise so I had the width of the ice to get ready, I would smile and nod to Joyce. Then last year, losing more often and playing poorly in the Forum, I stopped, and haven’t said hello to Joyce since.
I still have the puck that Palchak gave me. Free of the dressing room, the team dances and cuts happily by me, but without a puck for nearly a minute, they’re getting impatient. When I was seven or eight years old, the Toronto Marlboros, then a junior farm team of the Leafs, had a goalie I liked named Johnny Albani. Small, with a short black crew-cut, when Albani led his team onto the Gardens ice he would drop the puck he held in his catching glove and shoot it off the protective glass to the right of his net. Clink. It was a sound we heard only at the Gardens, for at the time only the Gardens had protective glass, and a sound more special becaus
e a goalie, using his awkward paddle-like stick, had made it. So when I got home, grabbing my goalie stick and puck I would go out to the backyard and try to emulate Albani. There, time after time, I would draw the puck back, pivot, and power forward, at the critical moment of release feeling my wrists roll over, my arms and stick slam into slow motion, the puck slither-ing away in an arc, never leaving the ground.
Years later, wrists firmed up, hours of practice behind me, Albani-like I would lead my team onto the ice with a shot off the glass, but too often it was an unsatisfying shot off the boards, sometimes one that never left the ice. So, in time I tried something else. Turning joy and achievement to humorless superstition, before each game, I must take the first shot; it must strike the boards to the right of my net between the protective glass and the ice. If it doesn’t, I will play poorly. So, as the team waits anxiously, I look for an opening, fifteen to twenty feet of uncrowded space to take my important shot.
It’s one of many superstitions I’ve come to burden myself with. I don’t tell anyone about them, I’m not proud I have them, I know I should be strong enough to decide one morning, any morning, no longer to be prisoner to them. Yet I seem helpless to do anything about it.
Sports is fertile ground for superstition; crossed hockey sticks, lucky suits, magic stones, and things more bizarre, it comes from the mystery of athletic performance—the unskilled bat that goes 4-for-4, a goalpost, a bad hop, a move, brilliant and unconceived, that happens, and never happens again. Luck, we call it, and coming as it does without explanation, leaving the same way, when it comes we desperately try to hold onto it, isolating it, examining its parts and patterns, if never quite to understand them, at least to repeat them by rote. What did I do yesterday different from other days? What did I eat? What did I wear?
Where did I go? Who did I talk to? and each answer becomes our clue, not a serious clue, of course (of course!), but still the best we have. So we use them—don’t change the luck.
But I use superstition in another way. I don’t want Joyce or the first shot to be the reason I play well. It may be “better to be lucky than good,” as we’re often reminded (for a loser can be good, but only a winner is lucky), but I want to feel connected to what I do, I want the feelings a game gives unshared, undiminished by something separate from me. So, instead, I use it as a focus for the fear I feel. Afraid of a bad game each game I play, I use Joyce and the first shot to distract me from the fear of a bad game, which I can’t control, to the superstition, which I can. I have turned it into a straw game, one with no other opponent, with standards and requirements I set, which I know I can meet. So when I do meet them, when I successfully smile and nod to Joyce, when my first shot hits the boards to the right of the net, I give myself reason not to fear a bad game. If things change, if Joyce quits or turns away when I look at her, if my shooting deteriorates, I simply change the game and set new, achievable standards. For me it’s a way of controlling the fear I can’t eliminate, a way to blank my mind and keep it blank when other ways fail. Off the ice, there are no lucky horse-shoes, no four-leaf clovers, I need no superstitions; on the ice, older and more insecure, I need more each fearful year.
I see an opening, not as large as I would like, but cutting sharply for it, I drop the puck. Eager skaters dart after it—I shoot. The puck wobbles badly, but strikes where it must. Feeling a tiny surge of pleasure, I skate around mindlessly.
Round and round, and each lap the clock is eighteen seconds closer to zero. Over the glass, fans shout, reaching pens and programs toward me, but looking down at the ice, readying myself to play, I pretend not to hear. I glimpse usherettes, ushers, photographers; Eddie, behind the penalty box, a small, shy, older man who once a year gives me a wrinkled brown bag containing pajamas for Sarah and Michael that he made at work; Lennie, in the same corner where Pete Mahovlich, reaching his stick over the glass, would regularly sprinkle him with snow, laughing, grateful, with hundreds of fans as his witness, a friend of the team.
Tonight Lennie stands in the exit talking, waiting.
Round and round we go. Gainey stops, the team stops and turns the other way. Larocque goes in net. I keep skating, glancing at the clock, aware of nothing else. At 15:00, 1 stop in front of the penalty box for stretches; at 10:10, my mask is in place; at 10:00, I skate to the net.
Like skippers in a fast-turning rope, Larocque jumps out, I jump in, the rhythm uninterrupted. But I am cold and unready, the pace is too fast, and shot after shot goes in. Before I can worry, Robinson skates to the middle of the ice, motioning everyone to the blueline.
Facing only a single shooter, gradually I gain control. At Cornell, I tried to stop every shot in the warm-up; each one I didn’t stop represented a goal I would allow in the game. With faster, better shooters, I have no chance, so I changed the game. Now I must stop only enough shots that the ones I don’t stop disturb neither me nor the team. Like every other part of my game day, unworried, untired, uninjured, I want only that the warm-up come and go without trace.
With about three minutes left, I begin to think about it. Since I was young, a practice couldn’t end until I had stopped the last shot. It was someone else’s ritual first, probably my brother Dave’s, but for every practice and warm-up since, as the proper end to something and the base on which to build something else, it has been mine. But sometime during twenty-five years, the ritual got complicated. It remains unchanged for practice, but for a warm-up I must catch cleanly (no juggling or trapping) a shot from a player unaware his shot must be caught (no gratuitous flips). And then I must leave the net. If I don’t, I will play poorly.
It is not so easy as it seems. Undefended shooters come in close and try to score, and I must stay in net long enough to get warmed up. Yet I have help, at least I think I do—Robinson. We have been teammates for more than four hundred games, and Robinson seems to understand.
I have never told him, nor has he ever asked, nor have I told anyone.
But as the clock flashes down, as I dance about my crease anxiously, he seems always to get the puck, and with it to take a shot I can catch.
With less than a minute remaining, as Robinson moves slowly into position, I catch Lapointe’s shot and leave the net.
Tremblay rips off a skate, “Eddy! Eddy!” he yells. “Câlisse, I’m slidin’(a)ll over the place.”
“Good warm-up, guys,” says a voice coming through the door.
“Good warm-up.”
A few steps behind, another, “Câlisse, we gotta be sharper than that. We’re dead out there!”
It’s quieter than before. Ready or not, we have fifteen minutes.
Nothing can be put off any longer. Skates, some sweaters, shoulder pads, and elbow pads come off, sticks are re-examined and taped, helmets adjusted, bodies slouch back against cool concrete block walls.
An ice pack behind my head, now and then I sip at a Coke, looking at the program, putting Wings’ names to numbers and faces I didn’t recognize in the warm-up. Three seats away, Shutt does the same.
Everything is slow, almost peaceful, each of us unconnected one from another, preparing in our own separate ways; as the game approaches, we reconnect. Against the Islanders or the Bruins, the room can be quiet or loud, it makes no difference. We know we are ready. Tonight, we aren’t so sure, about each other, about ourselves. So sometimes we’re quiet, and sometimes we make ourselves loud.
“C’mon, big gang,” Houle exhorts, breaking the silence, “an early goal and they’ll pack it in.”
“Yessir, guys, they don’t want any part of it.” But again nothing.
“Câlisse, where’s the life?” Robinson yells. “We’re dead in here.
C’mon, c’mon….”
Houle looks at Lapointe taping his wrists, turns and shouts in the direction of the toilets, “Hey Pointu, you in the shitter?” Then louder, “Can’t hear ya, Pointu. Can’t hear ya.”
Lapointe looks up, then down again, saying nothing.
Lemaire, who, with Cournoyer in
jured, is the senior player on the team, tapes a stick, minding his own business. “C’mon, Co,” Savard interrupts pleasantly, “this might be your last game. Never know, Co, at your age you might die out there.”
Another routine begins. Lemaire giggles convulsively. Tremblay shrugs, “Who’d notice?” and there’s loud laughter. But set to jump in, Shutt stops himself, then Robinson, and suddenly it ends.
“C’mon, c’mon, we’re not ready!” a voice shouts. There is a pause, a change of tone, then another shout, more pleading this time.
“Hey, c’mon, let’s be good homers, guys.” Nothing. With a deep breath, Robinson tries something different.
“Hey, c’mon guys,” he says casually, “gotta play it, might as well win it.”
We know why we want to win. We know how a win can make us feel; we know how we feel when we lose. We know that we are better than the Wings, that we’re expected to win, that we expect ourselves to win; that we should win. Still, before every game we worry that this isn’t enough, that reasons unchanging from game to game have become wearied and cliched, so we try others: seasonal reasons—
“Let’s start [finish] the season [the second half] off right, guys”; “Two points now is the same as two in April”; pride—“Need it for the division [Conference, overall], gang”; money—“Forecheck, backcheck, paycheck, guys”; “C’mon, might mean fifteen Gs [two Gs]”; home reasons—“Let’s be homers, guys”; road reasons—“Let’s not be homers, guys”; “Let’s start [finish] the trip off right”; practical reasons—“It’s a four-pointer, guys”; “C’mon, they’ve been hot [cold](l)ately”; “Two points against these guys [Wings, Canucks, Capitals] is the same as two against the Islanders [Bruins, Flyers]”; “Let’s not give 'em [Bowman/Ruel, the fans, the press] anything to give us shit about”; others—“Hey, let’s win this one for — [an injured player].”
The reasons interchangeable, the logic and emotion invariable, it is usually to no effect. Still, every so often, something is said that reminds us of something we believe in, that is important to us. At the start or end of a season, when I hear, “Let’s start [finish] the season off right,” it means something to me. Before a game on the way to the West Coast, already dreaming of the peace and freedom a win and the weather can give, when I hear, “Let’s start the trip off right,” it pumps me up a little.
