by Ken Dryden
The players’ skates offered little support, and their blades were clunky; in fact, these first hockey players skated like rugby players. But they moved faster on skates than anyone could move in shoes, so the game seemed fast. They collided with each other and fell to the ice often, so the game seemed dangerous. They wore no other equipment. After all, sport was a test of courage. To a remarkable extent, because of circumstance—the skates; the ice surface that was 204 feet by 80 feet, almost exactly the dimensions of today’s NHL rinks—and because of happenstance—the speed and the collisions between the players—and because of the sporting understandings of the time—no forward passing or free substitutions being allowed—the future game of hockey was on display that night in the Victoria Rink.
Two years later, in 1877, the “McGill Rules” were codified, and published in the Gazette. The future risks of the game were anticipated: “No player shall raise his stick above his shoulder. Charging from behind, tripping, collaring [holding], kicking or shinning [slashing] shall not be allowed.” Years of informal, evolving play had shown that a stick might be a weapon, that a stick or a body might send an opponent dangerously out of control, that the head needed to be protected.
In 1893, Lord Stanley of Preston, Canada’s Governor General, gave as a gift a trophy to be awarded annually to the amateur hockey champion of Canada. The Dominion Hockey Challenge Trophy came to be known as the Stanley Cup, and would have an effect far beyond what was originally imagined and even intended. Players suddenly had something to focus on and aspire to. More people began to play, and the game spread into more and different parts of the country. New indoor arenas were built, which meant more games could be played as fewer were weathered out. By 1910, games were divided into three periods, rather than halves, allowing the rink to be resurfaced twice during each match. The ice got better. Skates got better. The players and their skating improved. If the puck could be pushed up the ice, why could it not be stickhandled? If collisions happened, why could hip checks not be practised and orchestrated? Hockey became more challenging. In 1911, it changed from a seven-against-seven game to six-against-six; free substitutions were allowed. The players, now on the ice for shorter stretches, could skate harder. The game got faster. With better players and a more exciting game, spectators were willing to pay to watch, and so professional teams were created. Players could afford to play more hours in a week, more years in a career—and they got better still.
In 1917, the NHL was formed. All of its founding four teams were in Canada, but hockey was popular in prep schools in the U.S. northeast, too. After all, if the future could be won on the “playing fields of Eton,” as the British elites liked to believe, why not in harsh winter conditions on the ice rinks of Exeter and Groton? So the NHL expanded into these hockey regions, with teams in Boston, New York, and Pittsburgh.
As the game grew off the ice and speeded up on it, its pace of play also began to slow down. If an advancing player was allowed to pass only backwards, opponents could retreat and congest the defensive zone. Space and time began to disappear; goals became harder to score. During the 1928–29 season, goalie George Hainsworth of the Montreal Canadiens recorded twenty-two shutouts in forty-four games. On average that year, opposing teams together scored fewer than three goals a game. Professional teams needed fans; fans wanted goals. During the 1929–30 season, the forward pass was allowed. Within a few years, scoring had almost doubled. The game got even faster.
Yet it wasn’t as fast as it might have been. Players accustomed to playing without substitutions found it hard to come off the ice after only ten minutes or so. Players used to stickhandling up the ice still passed only when no other option was available. And a pass, of course, couldn’t be allowed everywhere. One from a player’s own defensive zone to a teammate near an opponent’s net was contrary to the spirit of sport. The puck, after all, couldn’t be allowed to do all the work. So blue lines had been introduced, repositioned closer or further from each goal-line (the red line wasn’t added until the 1940s), which limited where passes could be made and forced players to skate more slowly than they could. The speed of the game couldn’t be entirely uncontrolled. After all, sport required discipline.
In the 1930s, the players were still mostly of average size for a North American adult male. The greatest star of the decade, Howie Morenz of the Montreal Canadiens, was five-foot-nine. Charlie Conacher and Red Horner of the Toronto Maple Leafs were giants, at just over six foot; neither of them weighed 200 pounds. Almost no players wore helmets—those who did had usually suffered head injuries but wanted to continue to play. Injuries were primarily facial cuts and lost teeth; cuts healed, and missing teeth were hardly unusual for adults at the time. But the consequences of more severe injuries were much greater than today. Medical care was more basic; medications were less advanced. Several players lost eyes. Ace Bailey of the Leafs had his career ended by a head injury. Morenz died from complications of a broken leg suffered in a game. Countless others had their careers shortened or diminished by ligaments that were never repaired, or never healed. But, in general, this was an age of risk. People worked on farms, in factories, and in mines where life-threatening accidents were a regular occurrence. Hockey injuries were just part of the game, and part of the era.
The game’s rules did offer some protection. A hit from a hip or a shoulder was considered fair. Both were blunt instruments, and a hip could strike an opponent’s head only if the opponent’s head were down. In such cases—the thinking went—the player deserved it. Stickhandling, a player’s principal offensive weapon, could be done better if he looked down at the puck. If he sought this as his advantage, he should have to live with its consequences. Besides, in this much slower game, forceful collisions were infrequent.
Elbowing and kneeing penalties were introduced, as elbows and knees are pointed instruments and, when thrust out, allow a player to extend his body and strike an opponent at his two greatest vulnerabilities—his head and his knees. Charging (from the front; the McGill rules had covered charging from behind) and boarding were also penalties. Taking a few running steps to make an offensive or a defensive play was fine, but doing so to hit an opponent, or hitting an opponent a short distance from the boards and throwing him uncontrollably into them, was considered too dangerous. A player’s purpose in both cases could be only to hurt—if not to injure—his opponent.
Helmets didn’t become mandatory for new players entering the NHL until 1979, the year Steve was born. For the most part, players protected themselves by the way in which they played. They skated with their heads up, partly in order to see everything, but also so that their heads were further from the ice and less in range of sticks, shoulders, and elbows.
In 1959, Jacques Plante became the first goalie regularly to wear a mask. Goalies had always employed what was called the “stand-up” style. Initially they had been penalized for lying on the ice—it being considered unsporting to stop a puck merely because shooters, with their heavy, inflexible sticks, couldn’t raise it high enough to get it over them. Goalies who sprawled on the ice were later disparaged as “floppers.” The stand-up style was understood as the proper, most effective, and only way to play. But it was also the safest way. In stand-up position, a goalie’s head was above the top bar of the net, and so less in the line of dangerous fire.
Players found little protection in the equipment that was allowed by the NHL, or anywhere. In time, skaters could put small, formfitted cups over their shoulders, elbows, knees, and groins, and goalies could wear leg pads like those a cricket wicketkeeper used, but neither could wear padding that took away much more than the sting of pain. A body check hurt the hitter almost as much as the player being hit. Collisions with opponents or with the boards affected a player more the faster he went, and moving faster left him less time to see what was coming—less opportunity to avoid the blows—resulting in even more dangerous collisions. Speed had consequences.
Speed was hockey’s greatest risk. Yet hockey’
s greatest appeal was speed, and the excitement it generated. The question was how to keep the two of them—the excitement and the risk—in balance. Players were allowed to slow down the game on their own. They could “rag the puck,” or “freeze” it against the boards; neither the officials nor their opponents would put much pressure on them to keep it moving. The goalies could hold onto the puck when they chose, too. Mostly, however, it was the practicalities and customs of the game that slowed the player down—the quality of his skates and of the ice, the long shifts, the blue lines, and the game that generally moved at the speed of the puck-carrier rather than the puck. Hockey may have seemed an all-out, “damn the consequences” game, but it was always a compromise between performance and safety.
This was also true even in its fighting, which had always been an element of the game. In football, baseball, and basketball, a fight brought its combatants an ejection from the game; in hockey, the punishment was only a major penalty. The theory was that in hockey, with players moving at high speeds in an enclosed area, collisions were inevitable—and some of them, whether by accident or on purpose, would be judged unfair by the offended player, generating anger and the desire to get even. A player’s alternatives were to use his stick against his helmetless opponent, or his fists. As stick-swinging was considered much more dangerous, fists were allowed. But as fighting was permitted only because of the “righteous” anger it provoked, the offended player had to fight his own battle. And few players fought very often—fighting on skates being difficult for anyone. As a result, most fighters were not very adept—little damage was inflicted by either party—and penalties for fighting were for five minutes, not more.
But because hockey was faster and more dangerous than other games, hockey players developed a reputation for their toughness, one that they wore with pride. They were expected to play through everything, and were known for putting “everything” into a game. But what is considered everything is different depending on the era. In the mid-1930s, it was a forty-eight-game regular-season schedule, and three rounds of significantly shorter (best-of-three, best-of-five) playoff series. It was seasons that began in November and ended, after the playoffs, in early April. It was less intense practices and no off-ice training, and five-month off-seasons with little or no training at all. Players who had grown up on farms or in working-class homes—Morenz, Maurice Richard, Gordie Howe—had the advantage. Their off-ice, off-season training consisted of doing chores that involved much more than just taking out the garbage. Because players earned a normal worker’s wage, everything meant working another job in the summer. It was also retiring from hockey and having another career for the rest of their life.
Until the early 1960s, everything didn’t change much. The seasons had become longer—seventy games—but in a six-team league, the playoffs were only two rounds. There was still no office, off-season training for the players. Players now earned more than an average worker’s wage and many no longer had summer jobs, but all of them would need second careers, usually outside hockey, to carry them through the last thirty-plus years of their working life. The medical care they received was better, but not much better; injuries were still mostly cuts and lost teeth. The game’s penalties continued to focus on the head and the knees. Fighting remained between the aggrieved and the “aggriever”—two combatants little capable of inflicting damage. Equipment offered more (and better) padding, but still took away little of the pain. On average the players remained of normal North American adult-male size—Elmer “Moose” Vasko, who retired in 1970, was six-foot-two and 200 pounds. (Too tall to be in the range of an opponent’s high stick, Vasko played his entire career without ever losing any teeth.) Farm and working-class kids with their off-ice, off-season hard labour of chores retained a natural advantage.
On the ice, the game had gotten faster, more exciting, and more dangerous—but not by much. Coaches and players still hadn’t realized most of the possibilities of free substitutions and the forward pass. The puck carrier was still king; the (blue, and now red) lines still held back play; shifts grew shorter but remained two minutes long even through the 1950s. In highlight clips and in memories, Richard, Howe, and others skated a hundred miles an hour. In full-game films, the players—Richard and Howe included—coasted a lot, burst forward or back when opportunity arose or when need be, and mostly paced themselves. The action was very slow. Other than in the scoring areas near the net, the players had lots of time and space to create plays and protect themselves. The game was still a compromise between performance and safety.
Three events in the 1970s changed the game: the Summit Series in 1972; Stanley Cup wins by the Philadelphia Flyers in 1974 and 1975; and the creation of the WHA in 1972 (and its subsequent demise and the absorption of its four remaining teams into the NHL in 1979).
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The Summit Series of 1972 pitted for the first time the best of the so-called amateurs—the perennial world and Olympic champions from the Soviet Union—against the best of the professional world, the top Canadian players in the NHL (and the top players in the NHL were all Canadian). The series began on September 2 in Montreal, with a stunning 7–3 loss by Team Canada in Game 1. It ended twenty-six days later in Moscow with Team Canada’s almost-as-stunning 6–5 victory in Game 8 to take the series. Yet a bigger surprise was ahead.
The Soviets had begun playing organized hockey only twenty-six years earlier, in 1946. In order to someday challenge the superiority of Canada, Soviet players knew they had to work harder and longer. They needed to accept their own sporting traditions and the conditions of Soviet life—just as Canadian players had done in Canada—and make the most of both of them. The Soviets had little indoor ice, and so they had to develop their skills mostly through off-ice training. This they could do just as well in summer as in winter; they could train eleven months a year.
The traditional winter stick-and-ball sport in the Soviet Union is called bandy, which is similar to field hockey on ice. It was played on a soccer-sized pitch too big for players to skate a bandy ball from end to end themselves, so passing has to be the focus. The Soviet Union’s first hockey players came from bandy, so in Soviet hockey the pass receiver, not the puck carrier, was king. In the Summit Series, the Soviets did not win, but they showed that hockey could be played at the highest level in more than one way.
This was their crucial achievement. Out of the necessity of their own circumstances—and the traditions of their own winter sport—they demonstrated the possibilities of the forward pass, and of off-ice, off-season training. And so the Summit Series produced an almost unique result: its winner was changed more than its loser. While the influence on Canadian hockey wasn’t visible for almost a decade, it shaped the hockey lives of all the players that came after—including Steve Montador’s.
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The Philadelphia Flyers had entered the NHL as one of six new expansion teams when the league doubled in size in 1967, but the Flyers were disadvantaged in a way even the other expansion teams were not. The existing “Original Six” teams made very little available to the new franchises in the expansion draft in terms of skill or promise, but while the other new markets (Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, California/Oakland, and St. Louis) had some history of hockey success—at least at the box office—Philadelphia had none. The Flyers would need to compete on the ice with a team that wasn’t competitive, and compete off the ice for new fans. It was very possible that some of the new teams, especially Philadelphia, would fail.
In 1971, the Flyers hired a smart, cynical, and pragmatic coach, Fred Shero. To win and to give the Flyers a chance to survive, Shero had a choice. He could try to make the team a lot better fast, which he couldn’t do, or he could try to make his opponents worse.
Intimidation had been a strategy used throughout hockey’s history—by individual players, and by some teams against certain opponents. But for the Flyers, intimidation became the basic team approach. A superior player who is not focused completely on wha
t makes him superior, but is instead distracted by concerns for his safety, is no longer superior. The Flyers brought their opponents down to their level, then beat them with their own sprinkling of stars: inspirational captain Bobby Clarke, goalie Bernie Parent, and scorers Bill Barber, Reggie Leach, and Rick MacLeish. The “Broad Street Bullies” were born.
Other teams had been tough; the Flyers were punishing. Some players, as healthy as butcher’s dogs until they noticed the Flyers were next on their schedule, suddenly came down with the “Philadelphia flu,” as it came to be known, and were unable to play. For the Flyers, violence became the product, not a by-product, of their game. Fighting wasn’t about one player righting a wrong, but a team event. The Flyers won the Cup in two straight years, 1974 and 1975, and because losers imitate champions, the league got tougher, fighting increased dramatically, and players got bigger.
The game also got faster. Expansion-team players were less skilled but could skate as fast as Original Six players—in straight lines, especially if they didn’t have the puck. So the strategy for expansion-era players was to skate to centre ice with the puck, dump it ahead into their opponent’s corners, and chase after it. It was called “forechecking.” The result was less coasting, more bursting; more frequent collisions of greater force; more tired players, and, as a consequence, shifts that weren’t much more than a minute long.
While the Flyers’ bully-effect diminished in the years ahead, it never entirely went away. The definition of putting everything into a game was changing.
