The Game

by Ken Dryden

  Once I didn’t. Once, as I was told I should, I kept a “book” on all the players I knew, with notes about wrist shots, slap shots, backhands, quick releases or slow, glove side or stick side, high or low; about forehand dekes or backhand dekes, and before a game, I would memorize and rehearse all that was there. But when my body prepared for Thompson’s backhand before I knew it was Thompson, I realized that what was in my book, and more, was stored away in my mind and muscles as nerve impulses, ready, able to move my body before I could.

  And once when I couldn’t see a shot, yet felt my body move, I resisted its move, unwilling to move foolishly for something I couldn’t see. Then, as I noticed pucks I couldn’t see go by me where I was about to move, but didn’t, I let myself go and stopped them. It’s what others call anticipation or instinct, and while both may be accurate, to me neither suggests the mysterious certitude I feel. It’s the feeling I get when I use a pocket calculator—pushing buttons, given no trail of figures, no hints to let me know how I got to where I did; no handwriting I can recognize as mine to let me know it was me who did it. I get only the right answer.

  It’s why I work all day to blank my mind. It’s why I want a game to get close enough to absorb me. I don’t want my eyes distracted by clocks and out-of-town scores. I don’t want my mind divided by fear, my body interrupted with instructions telling it what it should do. I want eyes, mind, body, and puck to make their quickest, surest connection.

  Lafleur comes onto the ice more than twenty-five times a game, and when he does, fans nudge and point and talk into a buzz, and sometimes they applaud. And when he gets the puck, there’s the sudden escalating roar of a scoring chance though he’s barely to center. And when he scores, which is often, he gets a sound reserved for no one else.

  Lemaire loses the faceoff, but Shutt gets the puck to Robinson, who sends it to Lafleur at the blueline. Helmetless, he starts with a suddenness that sends his hair flipping up in back, in three or four strides pulling away at his temples, streaming out behind him like a flag in a breeze. Stooped and coiled, an ascetic, blade-like figure, he moves without the elegant smoothness of Gilbert Perreault or Mike Bossy, instead cutting and chopping at the ice with exciting effort. He crosses center. Shutt and Lemaire scramble to catch up; Hamel, Harper, and Polonich, abandoning all else, turn tail in desperate chase.

  But since his early disappointing seasons, Lafleur has learned what Muhammad Ali learned before him—that if you’re quick enough, you can play a hitting game and rarely get hit. It was a crucial discovery.

  Confidence, he called it, simple comfort knowing that he could play with dazzling abandon, using all his special skills, undistracted, unde-terred by intimidation, protected by nothing but his legs.

  Crossing the Wings’ blueline, suddenly he swirls clockwise, sending Hamel and Polonich hurtling by. Surprised, the crowd laughs: our swashbuckling hero toying with two bumpkin cops, having fun. He cuts for the middle. The laughing stops. Harper and Polonich come at him again. As they reach out, slashing him with their sticks, he sees Shutt uncovered at the edge of the crease. A quick pass, Shutt tips it in.

  The game goes on. Fans, players, wait for whistles, talk, shake their heads, and laugh. When the puck drops, they keep talking. Some goals create the mood for other goals; this one belongs only to Lafleur.

  Late in the period, Lupien and Polonich nudge along the boards and decide to fight. It’s a comic sight, the spidery-tall Lupien, the griz-zled, gnome-like Polonich, taunting each other, swinging awkwardly, wrestling, the linesmen on top, all writhing on the ice in a pile. The crowd roars its excited approval, laughing at the same time. To the side, we watch, reacting to any sudden shift of fortune, otherwise waiting out its end. Other nights, when a fight flares from the escalating feeling of a game, when it shares its same ferocity, we stand passionately rooting, pretending the mood of the game, perhaps the game itself, is at stake.

  But this is a ritual fight. Each is a goon/player, each has a role he understands, doing what he thinks is expected of him. So if it seems a little like slapstick to others, to them it is not. It is more a duel than a showdown, more eastern than western. Though they both will fight again, it means satisfaction or a dangerous loss of face; in front of fans, in front of teammates suddenly less comfortable and less secure. It is a short, hard life. Like Hollywood starlets, their bodies open the door, giving them a chance they would never have, giving them the cushion of time to learn their craft; but few make it. A few years later, when they are slightly worn out, someone stronger and tougher, a few years younger and more eager, arrives, and they’re gone.

  The NHL theory of violence goes something like this: Hockey is by its nature a violent game. Played in an area confined by boards and unbreakable glass, by players carrying sticks travelling at speeds approaching thirty miles per hour, collisions occur, and because they occur, the rules specifically permit them, with only some exceptions.

  But whether legal or illegal, accidental or not, such collisions can cause violent feelings, and violent feelings with a stick in your hands are dangerous, potentially lethal feelings. It is crucial, therefore, that these feelings be vented quickly before anger and frustration explode into savage overreaction, channelled towards, if not desirable, at least more tolerable, directions. In essence, this is Freud’s “drive-discharge” (t)heory of human aggression.

  The NHL offers two possible channels for this discharge: fighting, which on ice is little more than a harmless burlesque of threats, sweater-pulling, and off-balance punches, leaving the loser often unmarked, the winner’s hands cut and swollen; and stick-swinging.

  Neither is desirable, one is necessary, so it is a matter of choice. With its worst abuses—mass brawling, goonery—now largely eliminated, fighting becomes the tolerated channel; stick-swinging, infinitely more dangerous, is more severely dealt with, by expulsions, fines, and suspensions. And for those who cite European hockey as evidence dis-proving the inevitability of hockey fighting, in fact European hockey only reinforces the point. For, playing in the same (albeit slightly larger) confined area, also carrying sticks and travelling nearly thirty miles per hour, colliding (though less often), and not permitted to fight, its players resort instead to dangerous stick-swinging. The result, as related to NHL President John Ziegler by his scouts and by Ziegler to us, is that at game’s end their bodies are covered in welts.

  The NHL is wrong. The reports of Ziegler’s scouts notwithstand-ing, there is much visual evidence to the contrary. But more to the point, the NHL is wrong because if Freud was right, anthropologist Desmond Morris is also right. As Morris believes, anger released, though sometimes therapeutic, is sometimes inflammatory; that is, by fighting, two players may get violent feelings out of their systems, or, by fighting they may create new violent feelings to make further release (more fighting) necessary. If Freud was right, the NHL is also wrong believing as it does that fighting and stick-swinging represent the only channels by which violent feelings can be released. Anger and frustration can be released within the rules, by skating faster, by shooting harder, by doing relentless, dogged violence on an opponent’s mind, as Bjorn Borg, Pete Rose, and Bob Gainey do. If Freud was right and anger released is anger spent, then a right hook given is a body-check missed, and by permitting fighting, the NHL discourages determined, inspired play as retaliation.

  But Freud might be wrong. Anthropologist Richard Sipes thinks so. He has written that violence, instead of being a human potential requiring release, once released is learned and repeated, not cathartical-ly purged away—in other words, violence feeds violence, fighting encourages more fighting. If Freud was wrong and Sipes right, the NHL is still wrong.

  The NHL theory of violence is nothing more than original violence tolerated and accepted, in time turned into custom, into spectacle, into tactic, and finally into theory. For years the league has argued the wrong-headedness of its critics, and for years it has missed the point. Surely it matters little any more whether hockey fighting is vi
olence or vaudeville, release or just good practice. What matters is that fighting degrades, turning sport to dubious spectacle, bringing into question hockey’s very legitimacy, confining it forever to the fringes of sports respectability.

  In a TV interview, Dick Cavett once asked John Cleese of England’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus the connection between his training as a lawyer and the group’s outrageous, nonsensical humor. It was intended only as a set-up for a quick, witty reply; but Cleese answered that there was a connection, indeed a close one.

  For though appearing random and nonsensical, he said, the group’s humor in fact derived from an outrageous initial premise, but a premise then logically followed, step by step as a lawyer might, to its outrageous but logical end. So if, as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a knight, both arms cut off in a duel, continues to duel, it follows he must do so by either kicking or biting his opponent. The result, if nonsensical, is only because the original premise made it so.

  Often criticized for lenience in dealing with league violence, Ziegler and NHL executive vice-president Brian O’Neill in fact have acted entirely consistently with the league’s own understanding of violence. Unfortunately, trapped in their own myth and intending no humor, they too begin with an outrageous premise.

  “That’s it guys. Got the lead. That’s all we wanted,” a voice shouts coming in the door.

  The door opens again. “Jesus Christ, we’re fuckin’ dead out there.

  C’mon!”

  I sit down to see if Bowman has anything to say, but when he continues through the room to his office, I get up and leave. I don’t like it in the dressing room between periods: nineteen wound-up bodies, together with nothing to do; for fifteen minutes, no equipment to put on, no sticks to tape, with nothing we want to say, quiet, then selfconsciously quiet, then anxiously loud, then quiet again, exploding, imploding, uneasy, uncomfortable. We want only to relax. Bowman leaves so we can relax. But if I relax and do nothing, I think of other things, quickly unrelaxing; and if we relax, if something seems funny, if someone laughs, we panic.

  “C’mon, c’mon, we’re too loose in here!”

  So I go to the video room.

  Though I come here every intermission, Fred, the videotape oper-ator, seems surprised to see me. “I don’t have much this period,” he apologizes, though not quite sure why. During the game, he notes goals, near-goals, and difficult saves he thinks I might want to see, the first retrieved and ready by the time I arrive. He pushes a button and a picture flickers onto the screen—it looks like random action from any game, then here and there is a pattern I recognize, then nothing.

  Finally, a tiny figure shoots from a bad angle and my stick swings across, deflecting the puck to the corner. I keep watching, waiting for the moment he has set aside. He stops the machine and asks if I’d like to see it again.

  I go back to the room.

  For a team or a player, each game, each period, is arguably different from the last. In two days, in fifteen minutes, things can change—a rest, a change of mood or strategy, a deep breath, a second chance, and everything seems different, and will again until it seems the same. So at the start of a period or a game, those who need another chance get it; and those who don’t must prove themselves again.

  The game starts up, and this time builds. Savard gets the puck at our blueline, waits for Libett to come on him, then, spinning counterclockwise, with a powerful but graceful leap, sheds him and starts up ice. Spotting an opening quickly, Gainey breaks, then Jarvis, but no pass comes and, slowing down, they angle back and wait. Savard moves to center. Thompson and McCourt come at him. Like a big stallion, feinting with fluid crossing strides, he prances languorously right, then left, swinging his body to shield the puck, casing by them.

  Recovering, Libett tries again, running at him, with Larson and Miller crowding him at the blueline. The puck rolls off his stick and trickles to the corner. The game stops.

  Every game is not different. If not exactly the same, most are predictable, many at least uniform in mood and rhythm, in the types of problems they pose. When asked, I’ve always said what others have, that each game offers its own exciting and unique challenge. But if I ever really believed it, I don’t any more. Maybe it’s that I never wanted to shake others’ expectations, or my own, or go to the trouble of explaining, risking that it might be misinterpreted; or maybe I’ve simply reached the age where I see sameness in things I always saw as different.

  I see patterns now where I once saw mostly details: in games and seasons, in several seasons, in goals, in saves, in words I hear, in others, in me, everything like something from before, each new something slotted, added to the old, itself disappearing. More than fifty games a season, more than a hundred goals and a thousand saves, many vivid and important, many painful or satisfying, in days, weeks, they are gone.

  Like yesterday’s newspaper, they are discardables, bundled together, forgotten, leaving only a sweep of intense, moderated feelings, and a handful of moments as reminders. Recently, a journalist asked me what were the most memorable saves in my career. Quickly I mentioned three or four to him, paused, waiting for others to come to mind; a few minutes later there was another, but that was all. A little embarrassed and determined to find more, that evening I sat in my office thinking back on nearly twenty-five years of playing goal, writing down each save as I remembered it. When I could think of no others, I counted them—(f)ifteen—the most recent nearly two years ago.

  Mostly they were odd saves, more different than special or important. Against Harvard, there was a short, quick shot that hit my skate and disappeared, the puck lodging behind my pad, undiscovered for many seconds. Once I split to my left in “butterfly” position for a Darryl Sittler shot, never having moved that way before, or since; another time in Minnesota as I lay on the ice in the midst of a scramble, my glove reached blindly around in back of my head, and a tap-in to an open net from the North Stars’ J. P. Parise disappeared into my glove.

  Whole seasons are now gone for a litter of random, quirky moments. Quarter-final and semi-final series are removed from whole playoffs. Yet I remember each season and each playoffs vividly. Games with the Wings, the Islanders, and the Hawks, with the Kings and the North Stars, I remember what each was like first periods, third periods, home games, away; players, styles, us, me, and them. All of it is organized, classified, stored away in a trail of feelings, in a pigeonhole mind, in patterns, and those that don’t fit, I remember. Few don’t fit.

  For me, a game, a season, has become a series of moods and rhythms which, as a goalie, I must both support and counterbalance, rising as they rise, falling less far when they fall. Games or seasons, even great ones, don’t skip from highlight to highlight, triumph to triumph, but come in widely varying moments of good play and bad.

  They are distinguished only by an inescapable sense of commitment, what some call “intensity,” that its players and fans can feel at every moment, assuring them at bad moments that good ones are never far away. Tonight, for more than twenty-five minutes, the game has staggered without rhythm or commitment; it’s a game I’ve played before.

  I look at the clock; the next time, it’s six minutes later. Like driving hour after hour of highway, suddenly realizing I remember nothing from along the way, I wonder if I was asleep, and scare myself.

  “C’mon, c’mon, guys, pick it up. Gotta get goin’. C’mon, c’mon…”

  I’m shaking my legs, bouncing around the crease in an exaggerated way, talking to myself, yelling. But penetrating the words and movement as it often does, there is a sudden thought— we can only lose if I lose it for us —and I feel another twinge.

  Shutt curls lazily one way, then another, the puck fifty feet away, changing hands at each touch. Finally, it is surrounded by skates; bodies sag awaiting a whistle. It jumps loose. Before Lafleur gets it, Shutt bursts through center. From his defense position, Miller watches him.

  Small enough as a defenseman to appear small, though he�
�s not, stocky, modestly skilled, in his better games Perry Miller goes unnoticed but for one thing: he is one of the league’s few remaining body-checkers.

  As Shutt takes the pass, he looks up and sees Miller, dead ahead, throw out his hip. Panicked, Shutt dances to his right, glancing off him, skipping by, catching up to the puck on the other side. Stranded at the blueline, Miller turns to watch. Shutt snaps a quick low shot. Vachon kicks out his pad and stops him.

  Delivered mid-ice with shoulder or hip, a body-check is the universal symbol of Canadian hockey. Hard, clean, elemental, a punishing man-to-man contest, as it fades from our game it is more and more symbolic of glories themselves past. A lost art it is called, its practitioners—Ching Johnson, Red Horner, Bingo Kampman, Bill Ezinicki, Bill Gadsby, Leo Boivin, Bobby Baun, Doug Jarrett, Gilles Marotte—(q)uickly dying out, their quality dying before them. But while coaches, general managers, journalists, fans, and ex-players all lament its passing, in fact, each generation since the 1930s has done the same, blaming each subsequent generation for its loss. For the body-check, like its obverse skill, stickhandling, began its (remarkably) slow decline as a victim of the forward pass. It is now a lost art whose time is past.

  When Vachon stopped Shutt, I silently cheered. It was a cheer for a brilliant save, a fellow goalie, a beleaguered underdog, also for a friend. Then, moments later, remembering it’s a 1-0 game we might lose, I admonish myself for cheering.