Ex-ploring the Unknown: Ken Dryden’s The Game
Ruminations on Ken Dryden’s 1983 memoir, The Game.
When does history fail to be history, and when does it start to become someone else’s version of events, and does it even really matter? And what kind of legacy does it leave? This theme is explored in Ken Dryden’s 1983 memoir The Game, regarded as among the best sports books ever written. Dryden is perhaps best known as one of the best goalies hockey has ever seen, and played professionally with the Montreal Canadiens starting in 1970. Since his 1979 retirement, Dryden has become an acclaimed author and a public servant in his home country of Canada. He even occupied the commentator’s seat beside Al Michaels during the historic 1980 Winter Olympics “Miracle on Ice” game. But he’s probably most remembered for his hockey career, his six Stanley Cups, and his iconic, deceptively nonchalant “thinker’s pose” on ice. It’s funny how the passing of time distills one’s life into a series of decades-old snapshots.
While The Game is a reminiscence covering a week in Dryden’s last season with the Canadiens, it reveals itself as a diary of “leaving” and loss. Dryden ruminates upon how he knows — as good as he was and is — he won’t likely get any better. He’s in a line of work where he’s openly rated and compared to Polaroids of his younger self. While Dryden was arguably still in pretty good form around the time of his NHL retirement, he is fully aware he’s in a business where his failure to look as luminous as he did when he was 22 is considered anathema.
He writes, “In an athlete, it is not the legs that go first, it is the enthusiasm that drives the legs. I go to optional practices, I work as hard as I ever did, but my motivation is different: where once I felt joy, now I feel joy mixed with grim desperation. I will not get any better. I must fight to keep what I have.” Earlier in the chapter, he bluntly states, “We have won too often, for too long…Like a starlet at the morning mirror, we see everything as a haunting omen of breakdown.” How can a book about hockey — a sport associated with 1950s icons such as Gordie Howe cheesing it up in muscular publicity photos — get so dark, and why does the reader go so willingly into it?
While this does sound impossibly dark, remember that former Dryden colleague and Canadiens captain Jean Béliveau retired at age 39 in 1971; while 39 is by no means “ancient,” “Le Gros Bill” had been the fodder of sports scandal sheets for well over a decade because his game was starting to age. His crime: daring to get “old.” In Béliveau’s autobiography, My Life in Hockey, he describes a press that often discussed his health and injuries with morbid relish and fascination, even as he elegantly guided his team through multiple Stanley Cup wins. The press that worshipped him during the 1950s now tore him apart; he wrote, “Now, it seemed, [the media] couldn’t wait to show me the door.”
The fact is, in certain industries, you’re not allowed to “get old.” In a 1979 interview on the Merv Griffin show, former (remember that word, because it comes up again soon) British starlet Diana Dors discusses being labeled as “Britain’s answer” to American blonde bombshells such as Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, and Lana Turner. But she’s discussing this in the past tense, as her “heyday” took place 20 years in the past, during the 1950s. Yet Dors was only 48 in this clip, still physically stunning and vibrant, hardly “ancient.”
Everything regarding Diana Dors in this clip revolved around her being a “once was,” save for her promoting her current and future projects at its end. Apollo astronauts were regularly handed photos of themselves, decades younger, resplendent in their 1960s spacesuits, to sign. An older Béliveau eventually cut down on signing autographs when declining health made his signature less “perfect,” and he was all too aware that his fans and the public wanted to remember him as he was in his prime. As Dryden made it sadly clear in his verbiage, you’re always compared to your sparkling headshots of a younger self in certain industries. The Game also explores how the idealism of youth uncomfortably coexists with what you know now, when the thing you loved most brings you a sense of wistfulness and confusion, and when you know it’s never going feel as good as it did back then when you first discovered it. This is the most heartbreaking section of Dryden’s book.
In The Game, a 30-year-old Dryden — at the end of his professional hockey career — goes home and contemplates the family “rink” where he started skating as a child. He writes, “…[N]ow I am at the end of something, and for the first time I find myself looking back. I’m thinking about things I was too busy to think about before, finding confusion where once I felt none…Yesterday, I felt excited by the challenge a week away; today, I’m back in my past, bouncing from the past to the future, not liking it anywhere. Everything I see, everything I do at home, is a reminder. I’ve got to get out of here.” His attempt to reconcile his first view of hockey with his present one is painful, and he’s frightfully aware he’s about to grow a new appendage: the “ex-” or “former” prefix. And to gain that prefix launches you into the next phase of your life, whether you like it or not: the unknown future.
Like Elisabeth Sparkle in the movie The Substance — who quite literally becomes a monster when she attempts to coalesce and coexist with a younger self — Dryden knows he’s going to be viewed as a “former” or “once was,” and there is not much he can do about it. Dryden has had an incredible life and career outside of hockey; he pursued his studies throughout his time in the NHL and became a lawyer, a critically acclaimed author of many books, and a lauded public servant. But no matter what he did “outside,” the lingering view of him standing by the goalpost, plaintively leaning on his stick, lingered in everyone’s minds.
The difference between Dryden and Elisabeth Sparkle is that when finished, Dryden didn’t try to reclaim his former glories and chose to view hockey as a commentator and writer versus being a player. He didn’t try to become his “former” self, transforming into a monster during the process. The difference between The Game and The Substance is that sometimes, when you love something so much, you know when it’s time to move on and live your life so you can look at it with love again — this time, with distance and objectivity.
*****
Emily Carney is an ex-Nuke. Thanks to my friend John Egiziano for recommending The Game.
