The Game

by Ken Dryden

  The owners have done all this by building new arenas with corporate boxes closer to the ice; with club seats, specialty restaurants, and bars; with concession stands that serve more than hotdogs and stale beer; with cushioned seats with longer legroom; with a video board and sound system that entertain. All of this comes with a new understanding that a hockey game doesn’t have to be just for the hockey fanatic.

  Hockey can provide an evening’s enjoyment for a casual fan as well, someone who might otherwise have gone to the opera, the theater, a movie, or to a restaurant. But to attract that fan, you need to provide what he or she is used to and expects from any entertainment: a comfortable, friendly atmosphere; attentive people; a sense of pride and caring; and an engaging experience that can be talked about later.

  Sports needs that fan. There are now lots of interesting things for everybody to do, and they are available to more people, especially to those who can afford season tickets. Season ticket holders don’t want to go to all forty-one games in a season. If they don’t find others to take up their tickets for some, indeed most, of those games, except perhaps in Toronto, they will give up their tickets entirely. Thirty years ago and before, most season ticket holders went to most games themselves.

  Now, they spread their tickets around and most fans attend games as a special occasion. Going to a game is like going to The Lion King or Phantom of the Opera, something they budget for, that they only do once or twice a year. Without the casual fan, the number of season ticket holders would fall, and the price of tickets would go down. The more people the tickets can be spread among, people who will accept special occasion prices for a special occasion experience, the more teams can raise the price of tickets. Season ticket holders don’t want to pay more—that’s their bottom line. If that means going to fewer games, if that means purposely fooling themselves, that’s OK.

  The crowd has changed. The fans complain that higher costs mean that they can’t go to games any more, let alone take their kids.

  And in some arenas there are fewer kids. As hard as it is to pay $100 a ticket, it is harder for a company or a parent to justify paying that kind of money for a kid. $12 or $25 is easily ignored; $100 is conscience raising. Yet, the fact is, in Montreal and Toronto, those fans never could go to games. What price had once allowed, lack of access did not allow. If the great-grandparents of today’s fans were not rich in the 1930s or 1940s, the tickets were already snapped up, passed along to new generations and gone forever and those fans were out of luck. Yet, undeniably, things do feel different now. Once, people accepted that there were certain others who were able to go certain places and have certain things that they didn’t, and that was simply the way it was. We don’t accept that today. Privilege is for everyone. Not going to games in earlier times because of lack of access, when access wasn’t assumed and cost wasn’t a barrier, was only to be regretted. Now, not going to games even with better access, when access is assumed and cost is a barrier, is deeply resented.

  With fewer kids at games, the mood is now less joyful and unrestrained. Good games feel the same; mediocre or bad games feel different. When a price is low enough to seem irrelevant to the experience, the fan expresses only what a fan truly feels—hope. When it isn’t, the fan expresses entitlement. Hope unmet brings disappointment. Entitlement unmet feels sour.

  A game is now much more a full entertainment experience, with music, video replays, and features to support the action below. Those fans old enough to remember when the only music was the clickety-clack of stick against stick and puck find it all too much. Those under thirty, who have been raised on the pound and blare of sound as energy, wonder what the fuss is about. To them, and there are more of them all the time, this is their life.

  The owners have met the test of higher salaries with higher ticket prices and with “up-selling.” “You want a beer? Can I get you a hotdog and fries with that?” “You want a ticket? Can I get you a private box, or a club seat, or a restaurant reservation as well?” And also by selling anything and everything. Every bit of space and time is a potential message opportunity. Signs are everywhere—in the ice and on the boards, especially signs that are “camera-visible.” As background to the photo of the winning goal in the newspaper, but far more important during shots of practice on the daily reports of the all-sports TV channels, and during random moments over two and a half hours of a game, all of which games are now broadcast. “Camera-visible” means extending the commercial message far beyond the 19,000(p)eople of an arena. It means more money for a team. As well, there are now more and longer commercial breaks for TV to sell; these increase the value of broadcast rights and are also used in-arena to do the same for sponsorship packages. Inside the arena has changed just as outside the arena has changed. On billboards, on bus shelters, in movie theatres and elevators, commercial messages are everywhere. Bright, often attractive, they have become part of our entertainment.

  The owners have also met the players’ test by expanding the League to thirty teams, generating a windfall of more than $500 million in expansion fees, and then taking their share and spending it on players, setting new salary levels, generating new standards and expectations, thus creating a new economic structure based on one-time windfalls that couldn’t continue. And the owners have met the players’ test because, to everyone’s surprise, in constructive and destructive ways, they could. The fans would pay enormously more; broadcasters would pay enormously more; commercial sponsors would pay enormously more. Hockey and sports meant more to more people than anyone had imagined. To the extent that fans, broadcasters, and sponsors were willing to pay more but not enough, owners were willing to pay more themselves for reasons that surprised even them. Owners are businessmen. They like to make money. They think they are special, and they want others to think of them the same way. Some also want attention, not just status. They don’t want to be just another “dime a dozen” multi-millionaire invisible to all but their colleagues and cronies. Ownership of a sports team can do that. It will get them attention. It will make them important. What the owners didn’t realize was that attention and importance can be good or bad. Only winning makes it good.

  And winning isn’t easy. It has come to cost money, especially since the early 1990s when greater, though limited, free agency (limited to players, for the most part, thirty-one years of age and older, and beyond their peak years) has made money a competitive tool. There is no exact correlation between team payroll and success. The New York Rangers routinely lead the League by far in payroll, and they routinely don’t make the playoffs. Every year, there is an Ottawa or a Carolina or a Minnesota or an Anaheim that does better than their payroll would suggest. But year-in, year-out, the top teams, the teams that win or contend for Stanley Cups—Detroit, Dallas, Colorado, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Toronto—are the top spending teams. New Jersey, with a mid-to-high player payroll, is the only exception.

  So what is it like for the proud owner of an NHL team that loses?

  “Your team sucks.” It is one thing to hear that from people you don’t know. It is another to hear it from your next-door neighbor and from your cronies at the club. It’s not fun. By implication, you are stupid and everybody knows it. That’s not fun either. That’s not what you thought you were buying when you bought this team. You had images of Stanley Cups dancing in your head, a grateful city singing your praises. So now you’re in and you can’t get out in any way that isn’t embarrassing—without winning. So now, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, you escalate. You spend more money. And you spend it until you run out, or until someone with the same images dancing in his head buys the team from you, or until you lose enough money that, offended at yourself by violating your own most fundamental image of yourself as a smart businessman, you just get out because you decide you can live less easily with being a private fool than a public loser.

  Owners and players both like to win. They are both used to winning.

  Both got to where they are because they are
great competitors. When both have a choice—when a player is a free agent or when an owner might lose a free agent or acquire one from another team—money is a consideration for both of them, but both also want to win. There is one difference: a player can get his money and still win in a few different places. The owner can only win where he is. The player can leave; the owner can’t. So owners chase the players, salaries go up, fans pay, and sometimes owners pay. It is why we are where we are today.

  When you look around sports, it is easy to see money everywhere, in everything. Indeed, sometimes it is hard to see anything but money. The fans pay more; the players get more. Some owners get more; some get less. A bigger, broader industry has grown up around sports. All-sports radio, all-sports TV, magazines, newspapers, journals, all with a stake in sports getting bigger, all serve to make sports bigger. There are new arenas, many of them more fun to be in; some not. Players, with lifetime security now at issue, invest in themselves year-round—working out, employing personal trainers, improving themselves. Owners, with more money invested, often with financial institutions as partners and needing to protect their investment, have become more rigorously corporate.

  The successful balance between corporate discipline and personal passion has become harder to maintain. Minor hockey parents, seeing gold at the end of a rainbow seemingly only a breath away, have injected ambi-tion into play and changed the spirit of kids’ hockey. Eighteen-year-old boys who once bought an exuberant Corvette when they signed their first big pro contract, now trained in money, buy a BMW.

  Money has affected who wins the Stanley Cup and who doesn’t. It has especially affected the fortunes of Canadian teams. In the fifty years from 1943 to 1993, Canadian teams won thirty-five times. In the last ten years, since money has become a competitive tool, they’ve not won once. Canadian teams take in almost all their money in Canadian dollars and spend most of their money in U.S. dollars. With the Canadian dollar having dropped in value, it’s a big problem for them.

  City size has become more significant as TV ratings, sale of merchan-dise, and season ticket splitting to support higher ticket prices have come to matter more. Many Canadian cities have suddenly become“(s)mall markets.” The “Canadian advantage” of history, climate, and passion for the game, where players live in an environment that offers them every reward of victory and every penalty of defeat, has been neutralized. For Montreal, more accustomed than any other team to winning, it has made winning even harder to achieve.

  Money became an issue in sports the day someone came upon a game in an open field and noticed people watching it, enjoying it, having a good time. “If these people stop and watch,” that person realized, “(m)aybe if I put up walls around that game they would pay to get in.”

  From sandlots and outdoor rinks to modern sports palaces, the rest has followed naturally: owners charging as much as they can; players demanding as much as they can, the only question being who gets what piece of what size of pie. Money is part of sports life. You can debate it, get angry about it, fear it, yet in many ways it just is. In another way, however, it represents the biggest threat to the future of professional sport. Money is a threat, not in the stresses it puts on sports’ structures (though that is significant) but in what it can do to those who have it. We see that outside sports with corporate executives in the immense sums they receive and the perks they negotiate for themselves that cut them off from the very world they had to understand so well to get to where they are. A fan is distracted by the money players make, but will accept that, I believe, so long as that player, who might have grown up next door to him, but didn’t, and who seems as if he might live next door to him now, but doesn’t, doesn’t act like he inhabits another world. In other words, the fan is saying to the player, “Act like a good guy and score fifty goals, and I’ll cheer you on. Act like you’re better than I am, and you’re toast.”

  I left hockey in 1979 because it felt like time to go. I didn’t take any other job in hockey because, as I told people, I’d already had the best job—goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. Eighteen years later, I came back as President of the Toronto Maple Leafs. I returned to a very different NHL, to a vastly different sports world. Earlier, I related the story of a phone conversation with Dickie Moore, a Canadiens star of the 1950s and 1960s. I told of how, in a vulnerable moment, he had talked about “the game,” in a tone and in a way that made me realize for the first time that “the game” was not the same thing as hockey or baseball or any sport. It was something bigger, something that had to do with an intense shared experience of parents and backyards, teammates and friends, winning and losing, dressing rooms, road trips, fans, dreams, money, and celebrity. “The game,” Moore knew, was a life so long as you live it.

  The experience in hockey that I came back to 1997 was different, often dramatically. When we are older, we see similar things through different eyes and don’t realize that it is we who have changed. The“(g)olden age of sports,” the golden age of anything, is still the age of everyone’s childhood. My time in the NHL in the 1970s, with its over-expansion, rival WHA, dump-and-chase and Flyers-level violence seemed a mess to commentators at the time. To today’s adult, frustrated by obstruction and money, it seems wondrous. “Hockey’s just not the same,” those people say to me. I wait for them to laugh, and they don’t. The 1972 Series, so rancorous and disappointing at the time, is now a glorious national memory. The longer we don’t play, it seems, the better we get. Twenty-five seasons from now, what will this time in hockey feel like to today’s ten-year-olds? What will they remember?

  How will they remember it? And what about today’s players, ten or fifteen years after they have retired? How will they look back on their hockey life? Will they feel about it the way Dickie Moore does about his? And when you ask them that question, listen to their liquid voices as they answer, see the glistening pride in their eyes, and you will know. Hockey has changed, but the game has not.

  A year ago, I was asked by LeafsTV to give the commentary on a past Leafs-Canadiens game. Tapes, sometimes films, of old games are shown in their entirety on a weekly show, and cut in to them are contemporary comments by a player who played in that game. The game chosen for me was from the 1978 Stanley Cup semi-finals. We had won the Cup the previous two years and had dominated the 1977-78(r)egular season as well. The Leafs had their best team of the decade, with Borje Salming, Darryl Sittler, Lanny McDonald, Tiger Williams, Ian Turnbull, and Mike Palmateer—they had just upset the Islanders in seven agonizing games. This was the second game of the series, in Montreal; we had won the first game.

  Before doing the commentary, I brought the game tapes home to watch. I had no memory of the game at all, and if I had realized what I had agreed to, I wouldn’t have agreed to it. The game had been a long time ago and that time was over and done. All the votes were in and tallied. The results were on the scoreboard and could not be changed. All my feelings were in too; they had been tallied, and they had added up to something great. It had been a wonderful time. To live in Montreal in the 1970s, to live in Quebec, to play for the Montreal Canadiens at the Montreal Forum; to be surrounded by people who were the best; from the Molsons and Bronfmans to Sam Pollock and Scotty Bowman; from the players to the fans; to win six Stanley Cups in eight years—what could be better?

  I don’t go back to things I have done. They are done, and there is nothing I can do about them. And there’s nothing I would want to do about this part of my life. But in going back with these tapes, I realized there’s something that might be done to that period of my life. I might see things now that I don’t want to see, that I didn’t see then, that can make me feel different now, that can muddy and confuse something that has been perfectly clear. And what is real is what was then, when it happened, and how I reacted to it, how I felt about it, and how others did the same—not what I see and feel now.

  When I turned on that tape machine, I realized what was at stake.

  I also realized that while I had seen highl
ight clips, I had never seen us play a full game before. And there we were. Roger Doucet singing the anthem; the players without their helmets; Claude Mouton with the PA announcements; the ice that looked slightly blue. The voice of Danny Gallivan, smart, clear, still able to tingle my spine. Larry Robinson, much taller than I remember, and such a good skater.

  Jacques Lemaire, so smart, efficient, effective, always knowing where he should be. And Bob Gainey, his stride no longer or quicker than the players who were chasing him, surging past them with embarrassing ease. Bill Nyrop, too. Mostly unremembered from those teams, he moved so well. If he hadn’t left hockey the following year, I thought again to myself, he might have made “the Big Three” defencemen of Robinson, Lapointe, and Savard “the Big Four.” And Guy Lafleur, quick, decisive, confident, ever threatening, his jersey rippling, his hair streaming back the way no one else’s hair did. Shutt, Jarvis, even me.

  I could have played the two goals differently, but I was OK. I was fine.

  We went ahead 2-0. We had the game entirely under control; the Leafs scored two quick goals in the second period. We might have been shaken. The Leafs might have won a game they shouldn’t have won. Instead, unshaken, we scored late in the second period and shut the game down completely in the third. The Leafs didn’t come close. The Leafs had some good players, but we were just better.

  However much they would pick up their game, we would pick up ours more. It was there, perfectly clear, on that TV screen.

  When I sat down to watch, I wasn’t sure what I would see. I was less sure how I would react to what I saw. As I watched, I started to enjoy. We were good. We were really good.

  When I was done writing this chapter for the last time, I came across something I had written to myself a few months before, that I had left unfinished, and I finished it: