The Game

  I know that I am doing now what he did then, but still I cannot make the connection. I have this strange sense of unreality that never diminishes, no matter how long I play, a feeling that I’m not really playing for the Montreal Canadiens, that this isn’t really the NHL; that I am the victim of a wonderful, cruel hoax, and that some day, today, now, it will end. Pierre Bouchard and I used to have a routine that we would go through several times a year. Prompted by nothing in particular, one of us would say, “We’ve fooled them this long,” and the other, shaking his head, would reply, “Yeah, but how much longer can we do it?” Then we would laugh. But then I started to wonder—(w)ho is fooling whom?

  I remember my first training camp, and wondering what I was doing there. Me. Then stopping Béliveau and Cournoyer and knowing what I was doing there, but wondering where I was. Feeling excited/(d)isappointed/confused—was this the real Béliveau I had stopped? The real Cournoyer? Was this really the training camp of the Montreal Canadiens? Was this the NHL, the league I had never dreamed of playing in—even when I was young and knew no better; even when I was older and had been scouted and drafted and offered a contract—(b)ecause I knew I wouldn’t be good enough? Instinctively I knew what the answer must be—that if this was the real Béliveau, if this was the real Cournoyer, I couldn’t stop them.

  It was the same wonder I felt in 1973. 1 had played two seasons with the Canadiens, two successful seasons, and had returned to Toronto to work with a law firm. I began watching NHL games on TV just as I had always done until two years before. As I watched, wondering at saves that a year earlier I would have thought routine, I found that no matter how I tried I couldn’t put myself in the game I was watching. I couldn’t see myself on the ice, in one of those uniforms; I couldn’t feel what the game felt like.

  Instead, I had an overwhelming disorienting sense of jamais vu, as if those two years had never really happened.

  Bower-NHL; NHL-me; Bower-me—it is a connection I know to be real, but it’s a connection I cannot feel. There is only one moment when I can almost make it. It happens when I see a kid in a driveway or on a street, playing hockey as I once did, wearing a Canadiens sweater, and on his back a number 29.

  Hall, Sawchuk, Jacques Plante, and Bower—they were the heroes of my childhood. Performing before my adolescent eyes, they did unimaginable things in magical places. Everything they did was braver and better than I had ever seen before. Then later, when I got old enough to get close to them, they had gone. And so it was that as a boy, my impression of them was fixed and forever frozen. They were the best. It meant that later, when I would get better, they would get better too.

  For any goalie who came before—Georges Vézina, George Hainsworth, Frank Brimsek, Bill Durnan, Turk Broda—I have only record books and someone else’s opinion, invariably exaggerated by time. For those who have come later—Bernie Parent, Tony Esposito, Gump Worsley, Vachon, Ed Giacomin—I have seen each of them up close, too close. I have seen their flaws and remember more than their highlights, and I have fixed on them a thirty-year-old’s cold, jealous judgement. I know that pucks are now shot faster by more fast shooters. I know that players train harder and longer, and receive better coaching. I know that in any way an athlete can be measured—in strength, in speed, in height or distance jumped—he is immensely superior to one who performed twenty years ago. But measured against a memory, he has no chance. I know what I feel.

  Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was. The “golden age of sports,” the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood. For me and for the writers and commentators of my time, it was the 1950s. For those who lived in the 1950s as adults, it was the 1920s or the 1930s. Only major disruptions like wars or, expansions can later persuade a child of those times that what he feels cannot be right. For me, the greatest goalies must always be Hall, Sawchuk, Plante, and Bower.

  As I skate off at the end of practice, I wonder what Johnny Bower is thinking.

  I walk back to the hotel with Risebrough and Houle, and go directly to the banquet room reserved for our team meal. The meal has been arranged for 1 p.m. and it is now only 12:30, but more than half the team is already there. Across the room, I see Shutt with an empty seat beside him.

  I have played with Shutt for more than five years, sharing the same corner of the dressing room, hearing and (mostly) enjoying thousands of his good and bad one-liners, and I’ve decided I want to know more about him. A few weeks ago, a friend, a professor at McGill, asked me about the players on the team. He wanted to know where they had grown up, where their families had come from, what work their fathers had done, what vivid childhood memories each carried with him.

  I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t know. I had never asked, and no one had ever said. Yet it never occurred to me that there was something more that I didn’t know. I had seen each of them almost every day, often for many years, through wins and losses, slumps and scoring rolls, in unguarded and indiscreet moments. I knew them, everything about them, far more than they could ever tell me. Still, except for the slow news/no news mid-week bios that newspapers run, offering each of us an athlete’s formula childhood (backyard rinks, supportive parents, glorious minor hockey triumphs—athletes and politicians have none of the torment in their childhoods that writers insist on in theirs), I knew none of the details. Last week, over breakfast, I had a chance to talk to Houle. Now I want to know more about Shutt.

  I walk over and sit down beside him. He is looking the other way. I pour myself a glass of Coke and ask him for the salad dressing. Then, as if the question had suddenly occurred to me, I start with an easy one.

  “Hey Shutty, you were born in Toronto, weren’t ya?” I ask casually, reaching for some ice.

  “Hmm, I’m not sure,” he chirps, “I was so young at the time.”

  About 12:45, the rest of the meal arrives.

  After lunch, I meet a writer friend in the lobby and we go for a walk just to talk. Two years ago I helped him with a play he was doing on the Canadiens, and now, recently back from Mozambique, he is finishing another play he began work on several months ago. It has been giving him trouble. I listen as he explains, offering back what I can, but quickly I realize that I am not helping. Too abruptly, I ask about his trip; he begins to answer, but soon I am lapsing in and out of what he is saying. I am not thinking about the Leafs; I am not thinking about hockey at all. I am spinning four or five things around in my head, each unrelated and unimportant, there, spinning, only because I can’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds at a time. It is what happens to me on the day of a game. I do not think about the game, but I am preoccupied with it. As it gets closer, my mind and body discover its rhythm and build with it towards game-time. Yet I am never aware that it’s happening. Suddenly, I lapse back and hear him say something about the land reform policy of the Frelimo government. I find a disjointed parallel with the Leafs. We both laugh.

  On the way back to the hotel, we pass a construction site.

  Stretching half a city block in all directions, it is surrounded by a high white plywood fence, with nothing yet far enough out of the ground to be visible above it. On the fence, every seventy-five or a hundred feet, “post no bills” has been painted in black stencilled letters. About midway along the fence, painted above a section framed with molding to make it look like a large bulletin board, it reads “post bills here.”

  Scores of notices in tidy rows have been pasted up, each tight against the one next to it until the space is completely filled. Along the half city-block of high white fence where several times it says “post no bills,” no bills have been posted.

  Only in Toronto.

  I go to my room. Risebrough is in bed reading a book called Wind Chill Factor. Though he insists he really hasn’t been reading it all season, it seems he has. Indeed, with a cowlick of a hundred pages or so that stands straight up when the book is at rest, he seems even to be at the same page. But every road trip he brings it out and reads it as a
necessary part of his routine. Getting on the plane, he finds his seat, folds his overcoat carefully into the overhead rack, puts his bag on the floor in front of him, takes his book from his bag, sits down, buckles up, and starts to read. Moments later, the plane in the air, his seat angled back, he’s asleep. An hour later, the plane on the ground, he wakes up, takes his book from his lap, stuffs it back in his bag, and walks off the plane, ready for the next trip. Recently, apparently anxious to finish, he has taken to reading it in the room. When I look over at him, I see him reach up his hand and stifle a yawn.

  A few years ago, a sports columnist for the Montreal Star left Montreal for Boston, and for his final column he wrote about the ten most memorable athletes he had met in Montreal. It turned out to be a rather predictable list of the city’s celebrated and notorious (if the reasons he gave were not always so predictable), except that one of the names he included was Doug Risebrough. Why Risebrough? A small, versatile, and useful twenty-goal scorer, he is handsome, but much too discreet, and certainly no swinging bachelor (after seeing him in another of his gray, blue-gray, brown-gray suits, someone once remarked, “Dougie, I didn’t know drab came in so many colors”).

  Why would he be included? I don’t remember the writer’s precise reasons, but I think they were the same as my own. Risebrough is a nice guy. Not wimpy, ingratiating nice, not “try like hell” nice. Nice.

  Athletes, entertainers, politicians, all public persons live at the center of their own world. Things revolve around us; things we do, and do with others, reflect back on us alone; others exist as they relate to us, they are there to ask us what we think, how we feel, how we are, as if it is somehow important to them. After a while, preoccupied with ourselves, we forget to ask—how are you? Risebrough asks. Not as a pattern of speech—“How’re the wife and kids?”—not as practiced courtesy, not out of curiosity, but out of interest—he wants to know. In Toronto, he asks about my parents, though he has met them only a few times—is your father back from his trip? How was his Christmas-tree season? He asks about Lynda, Sarah, and Michael, and if I tell him only they are “fine,” he will ask about Sarah’s school or Michael’s black eye. No big thing, nothing intended to reflect back on him—he cares; he just wants to know.

  On a plane, in a bar or hotel lobby, when people talk to him, he talks to them, easily, comfortably, about anything, about them, and he listens and reacts to what they say. Like most hockey players his formal education ended when he turned professional after high school, but he has such a natural intelligence and passion for people and things that he can talk to anyone about anything. Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour later, when the conversation ends, you will both go away feeling better, and knowing you have learned something.

  Periodically, prompted by nothing we are aware of, Bowman changes around the roommates. I have roomed at various times with almost everyone on the team, but most recently with Bill Nyrop, for two years with Lapointe, and now for more than a year with Risebrough. I am not someone easy to room with, but we get along well, mostly because of him. I go to bed later than he does and like to read in bed or watch TV. I am usually awake for many hours after a game, alternating between bathtub and bed; I get up early by our standards (about 8 a.m.); I get frequent phone calls; I like to make phone calls the afternoon of a game when others wish to sleep. For him, it means noise and disturbing lights, interrupting the fragile sleep we seem always in a hurry for. But through it all, Risebrough appears unbothered. Instinctively I like to be alone, and have often thought I would prefer a room by myself, but if I am alone too much, I cut myself off from the team and from the shared feeling I, and we, need. As well as being a friend, Risebrough, like Lapointe before him, is my point of contact with the team, and a steady reminder of the feeling I am missing if I stay away.

  I settle back uncomfortably on the bed, leafing through a newspaper, unable to decide what I want to do. I ask Risebrough if he wants to go for a walk. He says nothing. Still glancing at the paper, I ask him again. Finally, I look up. His book open across his lap, he’s asleep.

  I call a friend, a lawyer north of Toronto, who grew up with me in Islington. His secretary answers the phone in a perfunctory way, but when she asks my name and I tell her, I can hear a trace of pandemo-nium in her voice as she relays the message to him.

  Not surprised by the call, he comes on the phone as if in the middle of the conversation, laughing, pleased to remind me of something unkind that a New York writer wrote about me recently. We speak by phone only the twice a year we play in Toronto, and see each other only two or three days each summer at his home, but our friendly dressing-room banter, our occasional lapses into something more serious, easily come back to us. Yet as we talk, there are moments when everything sounds different. It is not because time has passed and we see each other less often, fumbling at the details of each other’s current lives. It is a tone, a little too respectful, as if he is talking to someone that he doesn’t know so well. More and more he knows me now only as others know me, and even though what he reads and hears is not what he remembers, he can no longer be sure.

  A few summers ago, in Toronto, he took me to a health club he had recently joined. He talked at length about its facilities on our way over; then, not wanting to sound too positive, he interrupted himself, complaining in his raspy, passionate way about the high cost of its membership. When we arrived, he showed his membership card to the man at the desk and took some money from his wallet to pay the guest fee. The man never looked at the card, or at the money. He looked at me, quickly recognizing who I was, and after talking hockey for several moments, reached into his desk and gave me a free membership to his club.

  The conversation winds down after several minutes, I remind him that I’m paying for the call, and he talks on—about the Leafs, about Ballard, expressing his angry disbelief at the season-ticket holders who return year after year. Though he means what he says, it is also his way of letting me know that he doesn’t want to go to the game tonight. He is like friends in other cities, most of them former classmates at Cornell, who a few years ago were anxious for tickets they couldn’t get otherwise, and would go to a game each time we came to town. But they are now married, with children, and often live far from the center of a city. The excitement of the game and the novelty of having a friend who plays it have worn off; there are now the complications of family, baby-sitters, and cost, and though they would never say so, they do not want to go any more. So when I talk to my friend on the phone, I no longer ask him if he wants tickets. I know that if he wants them, he will tell me.

  I make one more call. It is to the secretary of an Ontario government advisory committee of which I am a member. I have not attended any of its meetings for several months and I want to find out what the minutes and other materials I am sent don’t tell me. Excited at the coincidence, the secretary tells me the committee is meeting this afternoon about an hour from now, and asks if I would like to come. I fumble for a moment, uncertain what I will say. Finally, not too con-vincingly, I say no, I won’t be able to make it.

  In the first three years I played with the Canadiens, when I was given a form to complete for my American immigration visa, under“(o)ccupation” I put “law student.” Later, after I had graduated from law school and returned to the Canadiens from a year of articling in Toronto, handed the same form I started to put “law student,” then“(a)rticling student,” then “lawyer”; then I realized I was none of them, and wrote “professional hockey player.”

  Because my hockey identity is secure and well known, as often as not I am referred to as “Ken Dryden” comma “lawyer,” or “Ken Dryden” (c)omma “former Nader’s Raider.” As much as stopping pucks, like Joe Namath and his life-style, like Bill Lee and his off-the-wall “spaceman” (r)outine, it is what makes me publicly distinctive, it is what makes me celebrated as a hockey player. And while hockey has been my number one consuming priority when I’m playing it, something else is when I’m not.

  It
takes much of my time and more of my energy, but hockey never took away other interests. It never forced on me a choice.

  That had always been so. Until I graduated from law school five years ago, I had been a full-time student and a full-time hockey player at the same time. When I returned from Toronto in the fall of 1974, law school finished, my articling over, I felt immensely free. I was back as a full-time player, and now had all my law student time to pursue new things. Quickly I became disoriented, picking up things, dropping them, moving on to something else, but gradually new interests developed, and therein lies the problem. I could be a full-time law student and play hockey because I could do law-school work on my own time.

  Missing most of my lectures (scheduled on someone else’s time), I could still find time after games, on planes or buses, for the more important course reading. But with other things, things that involve other people, where it isn’t just my time, it doesn’t work. Slowly, so slowly I didn’t notice it happen, I have become a full-time hockey player and a part-time everything else.

  It is a life that can fool you. Eight months a year in good years, fewer in others, three games a week, an hour a day at practice, there should be time for other things, plenty of time; but there isn’t. There are no weekends for families and friends, no night time; then there is a summer of weekends and night time, catching up to fall behind the rest of the year. Hurry up and wait. Hockey had always been a game, something I had done with something else alongside it that would go on after it had ended. Even with more games, more practices, more travel, being paid like a full-time job, with all those other hours in a day that seem vacant, those other months in a year, it can’t be a full-time job. But it is.

  And now I am beginning to learn the choice I have made. When I was twenty-four or twenty-five, I did more interesting and challenging things, more exciting and remunerative things, than every other twenty-four- or twenty-five-year-old I knew. Three or four years out of college, my friends started in the middle, working slowly up the corporate ladder. Playing hockey, I was happy doing what I wanted to do, and happy not doing what I didn’t want to do. Now, things have changed. I am thirty-one years old. Other thirty-one-year-olds are doing ‘interesting, challenging, exciting, and remunerative things, and they will continue to do so. I am beginning to feel I am missing out.