It’s not just a game — it’s The Game
The dumb jock TV interview has become a stereotype.
You know the drill. Sports commentators have to fill in TV time between the action so they interview the athlete whose responses range from dumb to cliches like how God was on his side or how “unbelievable” it felt to win. We just sit back, sip our beer, munch our Lays chips and laugh, thinking it’s a good thing intelligence and eloquence aren’t prerequisites to playing sports.
But there are the exceptions. Basketball hall of famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one, as revealed in his recent Yom Kippur message. And in my country’s beloved sport, hockey, there are few who rise to the level of Ken Dryden.
The legendary Montreal Canadiens goalie is also a lawyer, successful author, former politician and businessman. Among his many accomplishments on and off the ice, his 1983 work The Game is perhaps the best account of hockey ever written and one of the finest sports books of all time. It deserves to be read, and re-read.
As a diehard fan of the Canadiens, or Habs as they’re affectionately known, I grew up and cheered on Dryden and his stellar teammates as they won Stanley Cup after Stanley Cup in the 1970s. They were indeed a team for the ages, the New York Yankees of hockey.
Those were heady days. Today, the 32-team National Hockey League has achieved parity and the championships have thinned and spread out but there have been spurts of the Habs’ former glory. The 1986 and 1993 Stanley Cups were two of them. Last summer was the team’s closest brush with those jours glorieux when they advanced, improbably, to the Stanley Cup finals before losing to the Tampa Bay Lightning in five games.
It was during last year’s pandemic-shortened season that extended well into the summer that I picked up Dryden’s book (the 20th anniversary edition in 2003) and read it a second time while cheering on my Habs in the playoffs. The Canadiens’ run was magical and so were the many memories of their former great teams: It was as if the past, present and future were all coalescing into one great big happy bouncing ball, or puck as it were.
Non-hockey fans have to appreciate the special place the game holds in the hearts of Canadians — and especially Canadiens’ fans. The images of street hockey games and kids playing on backyard rinks is etched into our collective consciousness, like the scratching of blades on ice. It’s part of our Canadian DNA.
When it comes to the Montreal Canadiens and their fans, the feeling approaches the kind of glorious high you achieve in a frenzied religious fervour. It’s no accident that the team’s former arena, the fabled Montreal Forum, has been referred to on so many occasions as a shrine, one that I was excited to stumble upon it when I visited Montreal to see the Habs take on the Toronto Maple Leafs in their 2013–14 season opener, a 50th birthday present I’ll cherish forever.
Habs’ fans are a fervid bunch. You may even call us rabid. In fact, that’s just what one Canadiens’ fan site calls itself: Rabid Habs. To tap into the depth of those passions, you only need to read Jay Baruchel’s very funny and blunt Born Into It. As I wrote in my review of the 2018 work by the actor, director and comedian, it’s a “wild, rollicking book.”
Or you can go back to the classics and read Dryden.
The Game is a superb analysis and memoir of the game, coolly observed from the perspective of the tall fortress-like goalie whose signature pose was leaning on his goal stick when the action was on the other end of the ice. Dryden writes about winning and the burden it placed on the heads of the Canadiens who, like King Henry IV, bore the uneasy weight of their crown. There are insightful and funny anecdotes about the players and their shared joys and burdens.
The Game is also a fascinating account of the game itself — its history, what it looked like in ’83 and ’03 and where it seemed to be going. Dryden writes about violence, analyzing the rise of the ‘Broad Street Bullies’ in Philadelphia and their like, from the perspective of Desmond Morris’s writing on anger and Sigmund Freud’s “drive-discharge theory.” (Did I mention that Dryden was a lawyer?) He writes about how finesse in the game has given way to rough stuff, how Canada’s dominance has been challenged by other countries, the business of the sport, the French-Canadian fact and so much more.
He quotes former coach Al MacNeil who said the Canadiens “feel it’s their ‘God-given duty to be the best every year.’” Says Dryden: “It’s a message we all sense. The team is a business, yet its bottom line seems only to win.”
But it’s the quality of the team — its essence, its je ne sais quoi or maybe its raison d’être — that can only be conveyed by someone like Dryden.
In hockey at the time he was writing, he refers to the Italian phrase inventa la partita to explain what has happened to the game. Translated, it means “invent the game’ and it’s used in soccer, often as a lament for players with “polished but plastic skills” and the passing of soccer genius. Those earlier players possessed “minds and bodies in not so rare moments” who
“create something unfound in coaching manuals, a new and continuously changing game for others to aspire to.”
The Canadiens were from that genius mould, Dryden writes:
“There is a different quality about this team, a quality we might deny, one that oftentimes we wish we didn’t have, one that in the inflated rhetoric of sports sounds inflated but is not. It is excellence. We are not a ‘money team’ like the Leafs of the 1960s, aided and abetted by a generous playoff system. We must win and play well all the time; we cannot wait for May.”
Canadiens’ fans, at least the ones from my generation, instinctively know that. As Dryden writes, “In Colorado or Detroit or New Jersey, win one Stanley Cup and you are a success. In Montreal, win one and you’re a failure.”
That special bond with their fans is something that isn’t lost on the players themselves. As intense as the heat of the spotlight and expectation to perform at peak levels is in Montreal, the devotion of their fans and demands of playing in that market is a challenge that the best of the Habs, like Paul Byron, take on willingly.
Dryden recognized the unique bond between Habs fans and their team. He said it went beyond brand loyalty and could not be compared to other corporate entities or products.
“This is no public enterprise. Why should we think of hockey as a national possession? Why should we think of the Montreal Canadiens as ours? If we buy a car, we don’t think of General Motors as ours. So why is hockey any different? But it does seem different. The Canadiens do seem ours. We cheer them as if they are ours, and boo them the same way.”
“It is our fundamental dilemma. A game we treat as ours isn’t ours. It is part of our national heritage, and pride, part of us; but we can’t control it.”
For the Habs horde, it was never enough to make the playoffs or win a round or two. Success meant winning the Stanley Cup and nothing less. Which is why last season, as exciting as it was, ended in disappointment. Who knows how long it will take the Habs to go that far again after a new pre-season begins against the Leafs again on Sept. 23?
Dryden already knew that the era of dynasties was behind him even before he wrote the new “Overtime” chapter in 2003. Referring to the “state of mind” of winning championships, he writes,
“When you win as often as we do, you earn a right to lose. It’s losing to remember what winning feels like. But it’s a game of chicken. If you let it go too far, you may never get it back. You may find its high-paid, pressures comfort to your liking. I can feel it happening this year. If we win, next year will be worse. But who’s going to stop it?”
Dryden’s title expands on a quote, one he revisits a couple of times in the book, by former Canadiens superstar Dickie Moore. At the time he wrote the book, the author was preparing to leave the Canadiens and reminisces about what Moore said: “the game is a life, so long as you live it.” In 1983, slouching back and feeling mellow as others talk of ‘the game,’ Dryden notes, “It is hockey that I’m leaving behind. It’s ‘the game’ I’ll miss.”
In his “Overtime,” Dryden reflects on the era of expansion teams, dump-and-chase hockey, violence and a 1972 Series against the Soviet Union that was “so rancorous and disappointing at the time“ but ” is now a glorious national memory.” He asks us to project into the future and wonder what hockey will look like to the next generation:
“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.”
With the startup of another season, with all its flaws and its fates and fortunes, the hockey fan — and especially Habs followers — would do well to look back and reflect on what glory looked like. Dryden is the perfect guide for the journey, and his concluding words in the book — a kind of mantra for himself as a player and a person — are a measure of the man who is a hero to millions:
“I am a player
I love to play
I want to win
It matters to me if I win or lose
It matters to me how I play the game
I want to win without injustice or bad luck or regret
I want to own every pleasure and disappointment
I want to get lost in play
I want time not to matter
I want to do something more important than me
I cannot win alone
I need my teammates and my opponents to make me better
I trust, because I have to trust
I forgive, because I need to be forgiven
I play a game, not only a gameI try because that matters to me
I try because it’s more fun that way
I don’t quit because it doesn’t feel good when I do
I play with others, but I play against me
I learn when I play
I play when I learn
I practice because I like to be good
I try what I’ve never tried before
I fail, to fail smarter
I want to be better than I was yesterdayI dream
I imagine
I feel hard and deep
I hope, because there’s always a way.”
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for more than 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
© Claudio D'Andrea 2021
