The Game
After practice, I cross the street to the bank. Though it’s almost 2 p.m., a line of people remains, winding in and out between makeshift barriers, waiting their turn at the scattering of tellers’ windows still open. I stand near the door, away from the line, scanning the off-duty tellers at their desks. One looks up, catches my stare, and I walk past the line to a section marked “New Accounts.” There, a woman beside me fills out forms for a new account. As many in line watch absently, assuming I’m doing the same, I fill out a deposit slip, hand it to the teller with some checks, and get back a receipt. In five minutes, while those in line have only moved three or four places closer to the front, I am done and leave the bank.
Once I used to wait in line like everyone else. Then one day a teller motioned me out of line, and I haven’t been back since. Feeling a bit guilty each time, I continue none the less, unwilling to give up its convenience. For the tellers and me, it has become routine and normal.
They treat me the way they think people like me expect to be treated.
And I accept.
It is the kind of special treatment we have grown accustomed to, and enjoy. We have been special for most of our lives. It began with hockey, with names and faces in local papers as teenagers, with hockey jackets that only the best players on the best teams wore, with parents who competed not so quietly on the side. It will end with hockey. But in between, the longer and better we play, the more all-encompassing the treatment becomes, the more hockey seems irrelevant to it. For we are special, period. Others understand that—they know. We know. They give, easily and naturally: slippers, sweaters, plant holders, mitts, baby blankets, baby clothes knit and sent in the mail; paintings, carvings, etchings, sculptures in clay, metal or papier mâché; shirts, slacks, coats, suits, ties, underwear; cars, carpets, sofas, chairs, refrigerators, beds, washers, dryers, stoves, TVs, stereos, at cost or no cost at all. A hundred letters a week, more than 3,000 letters a year—“You’re the best,” all but a few of them say. On the street, in restaurants and theaters, you are pointed out, pointed at, talked about like the weather. Your picture is hung from a boy’s bedroom wall, appears in magazines and newspapers, on radio and TV; hockey cards, posters, T-shirts, and curios, everywhere, anywhere, name, face, thousands of times, flashed to an audience that waves into TV cameras, that writes to editors to have proud yellowed clippings in their wallets.
And we love it. We say we don’t, but we do. We hate its nuisance and inconvenience, the bother of untimely, unending autographs, handshakes, and smiles, living out an image of ourselves that isn’t quite real, abused if we don’t, feeling encircled and trapped, never able to get away. But we are special, head-turning, chin-dropping, nervous, giggly, forget-your-own-name special, what others buy Rolls-Royces and votes and hockey teams for, what others take off their clothes and kill for, we have. All we have to do is play.
We are celebrities. Like actors, musicians, politicians, writers, famous people, we are common threads between husbands and wives, parents and kids, friends. And once a celebrity, always an ex-celebrity; in thirty or forty retirement years here and there we are bound to be dredged up and recalled, if briefly. Until then, our images and names are reported on, gossiped about, carried over great distances by cable or wave—and we renew our celebrity each time we play.
But if exposure is the vehicle of celebrity, attention is what separates one celebrity from another. Guy Lafleur and Yvon Lambert are both celebrities, yet on the same ice, on the same screen, Lafleur is noticed, Lambert is not. Lambert, methodical and unspectacular, has nothing readily distinctive about him; his image is passed over, his name unheard. Lafleur is distinctive: the way he skates, the sound of the crowd he carries with him, the goals he scores. And so too are others for other reasons: Tremblay for his fiery, untamed spirit; Gainey for his relentless, almost palpable will; Tiger Williams, Eddie Shack, Ron Duguay, each colorful and exciting; and Dave Schultz.
More and more as sports coverage proliferates beyond games, as it becomes entertainment and moves to prime time, as we look for the story behind the story to put performance into a context, and drama into life, then off-ice, off-field performance becomes important.
Personas are born, and sometimes made, cameras and microphones there as they happen. The crazies, the clowns, the “sports intellectuals,” the anti-jock rebels, Jim Bouton, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the playboys, Joe Namath, Derek Sanderson, Duguay, all are distinctive personalities, some real, some not so real, but getting our attention, each bigger celebrities because of what they do away from the game.
But while few can be virtuoso performers, TV has given us a new minimum off-ice, off-field standard. Articulateness. The modern player must be articulate (or engagingly inarticulate, especially southern style). It is not enough to score a goal and have it picked apart by the all-seeing eyes of replay cameras. A player must be able to put it in his own eloquent words, live, on-camera words that cannot be edited for the morning paper. How did you do it? How did you feel? If the answers contain grammatical errors or profanity, the magic is broken for the fan at home. For celebrity is a full, integrated life, earned on-ice, performed, sustained and strengthened, re-earned off-ice. As writer Roger Angell once put it, we want our athletes to be “good at life,” (r)ole models for children, people we like and commit to, people we want to believe earned what they have, every bit as good at things off the ice as they are on. But if players are inarticulate, suddenly harsh and pejorative, they’re jocks—less likeable, less good at life, less celebrated; finally, seeming even less good on the ice.
At its extreme, it creates the category of professional celebrity, those “famous for being famous,” so accomplished at being celebrities that their original source of celebrity is forgotten (does anyone remember what Zsa Zsa Gabor was?). At the least, it encourages learning the skills of the public person: how to look good, how to sound modest and intelligent, funny and self-deprecatory. It’s a celebrity’s shortcut to the real thing, but it works. Walter Cronkite looks trust-worthy, Ronald Reagan seems like a nice guy, Steve Garvey and Denis Potvin sound intelligent. Or are they only articulate? Good enough at something to be a public person, or simply a good public person?
From where I sit, in front of a TV or a newspaper, I can’t tell the difference, and I’ll never get close enough, long enough, to know.
And if that isn’t enough, all around are battalions of people anxious to help us look better. Not just flacks and PR types, but a whole symbiotic industry of journalists, commentators, biographers, award-givers. There are ghost-writers who put well-paid words under our names, then disappear; charity organizers, volunteers giving time and effort so that “honorary chairmen,” “honorary presidents,” “honorary directors” may look even better. Kids in hospitals, old folks in old folks’ homes are merely props as we autograph their casts and shake their hands to demonstrate our everlasting generosity and compassion. And never far away, photographers and cameramen to record the event. It is the bandwagon momentum and industry of celebrityhood.
In the end, for us, is one image.
Years ago, I saw writer David Halberstam on the Dick Cavett show after the release of his landmark book, The Best and the Brightest. With time running out, he allowed Cavett to play name association with him. Robert McNamara? “…brilliant, incisive…” and then a trail of three or four more adjectives, and a short, clipped phrase. McGeorge Bundy? “…brilliant, complex…” and again a similar trail, skipping from name to name. His subjects were fifty-year-old men who had lived long and complicated lives, full of twists and contradictions, things irreconcilable, all exhaustively chronicled in his book, but here they were reduced on TV to ten or fifteen words, sometimes fewer.
That was all. An image.
For me it is concrete and yet disembodied, what agents call “Ken Dryden”— What is “Ken Dryden” like? Recently, I asked an acquaintance, a senior executive at an advertising agency, to pretend he was trying to persuade a client to use me as commercial spok
esman for his company. Having met only two or three times several years before, my acquaintance knew me mostly as others do. He wrote the following memo to his client: “…Historically I know you have had some concerns about using athletes … either because of potential problems developing out of their careers and public life, or due to simply their lack of availability. I think Ken is quite different from the rest. He is known as a thoughtful, articulate and concerned individual. I think it would go without saying he would not participate in any endorsement unless he was fully committed to and satisfied with the product. (His Ralph Nader exposure would assure that.) He is serious, respected and appears to be very much his own man. I don’t think we could ever consider using him in humorous or light approaches (like Eddie Shack) unless it would be by juxtaposition with another accompanying actor or player. He has good media presence…. His physical presence is also commanding. He is quite tall and impressive…. Other encouraging things would be his intelligence and educational background. He would be more in tune with our target audience with his credentials as a college graduate (Cornell) and a fledgling professional person (law).
Also, during production, I think this intelligence and coolness would help in case of commercial production as well as helping to keep costs under control due to mental errors….”
My image. Right? Wrong? It doesn’t matter. It is what people think, it presupposes how they’ll react to me, and how they will act, and for the ad man and his client that is what matters. Being told what others think means if I don’t like it I can do something about it. I can do things that are “good for my image.” They aren’t hard to find, or to do. I can stop doing things “bad for my image.” Or, as actors and actresses remind us casually and often, I can do things to “change my image.” Too serious?
If I run around the dressing room throwing water at the right moment, someone is bound to notice—a journalist with a deadline to meet and space to fill, a new angle, news: “Dryden misunderstood.”
And though some things take longer, others less central do not.
Want to be known as an antique collector? Collect an antique. A theater-goer? Go. Once is enough. Tell a journalist, sound enthusiastic, and above all, before you go, play well. Then stand back and watch what happens. Clipped and filed around the league, it spreads like a chain letter, to other journalists themselves without time to check it out, and presto, it is part of your standard (authorized) bio. And your image. It is really nothing more than selling yourself like everyone else does, at home, at the office, just trying to make yourself look better. But it is easier. As in a singles bar, everything is taken at face value, everyone is willing, if you play well.
If you change the word “image” to “reputation,” as you might have done a few years ago, you would have something quite different. For a reputation is nothing so trifling or cynical. Rather, it is like an old barge. It takes time to get going, then, slow and relentless, is difficult to maneuver and manipulate, even harder to stop and turn around. An image is nothing so solemn. For us, it is merely a commercial asset, a package of all the rights and goodwill associated with a name—“Ken Dryden”—something I can sell to whomever I want. But it is a sticky question. For the image I’m selling is your image of me, and the goodwill, though it relates to me, is your goodwill. Whatever commercial value there is in my name, my image, it is you who put it there, for you like me or trust me or whatever it is you feel about me, and any prospective buyer, anxious to put my name alongside his product, knows that, and is counting on that to make you buy. And you might buy, even though it may not be in your best interests to buy what I endorse, even to buy at all. So, by selling my name, I have taken your trust and turned it against you. You like Robert Young as an actor, you trust him, you buy his coffee. Thanks, and thanks again.
I did a commercial once, six years ago. I had decided that I never would, but this one was different enough to start me into a web of rationalizations until I forgot the point, and accepted.
A fast-food chain was looking for a winter promotion; Hockey Canada, the federal government hockey advisory board, wanted a fund-raiser and a way to deliver a message to kids and their parents that minor hockey can be approached and played differently. The idea was a mini-book done by Hockey Canada, then sold through the restaurant chain to its vast market. I was to be a collaborator on the book, and its public spokesman. But after doing the TV and radio ads (for the book, but with a corporate jingle at the end), and seeing the point-of-purchase cardboard likenesses of me in the restaurants, I understood what I had done. It is a mistake I haven’t repeated. Since then, among others, I have turned down endorsements for a candy bar (“…the way I see it, a full body shot of you in the net, mask up, talking, then we draw in tight on your catching glove, you open it, the bar’s inside…”), for a credit card company (“… You may not know me without my mask, but…”), and, with several unnamed others, their names all beginning with the sound “dry” ( Dry sdale? Dry er? Dri nan? Dre iser?), for a roll-on deodorant whose slogan was “It keeps you dry.”
It is a game—an ad game, an image game, a celebrity game.
Everyone needs someone to talk about, right, so why not about us?
Everyone needs heroes and villains. We earn a little money, get some exposure, the commercials are going to be done anyway. Besides, it doesn’t last long. A few years and images change, celebrity cools, and it’s over. It all evens out. But it doesn’t, and we all lose, at least a little.
We lose because you think I am better than I am—brighter than I am, kinder, more compassionate, capable of more things, as good at life as I am at the game—and I’m not. Off the ice, I struggle as you do, but off the ice you never see me, even when sometimes you’re sure you do.
I am good at other things because I’m good at being a goalie, because I’m a celebrity and there’s always someone around to say I am, because in the cozy glow of success, of good news, the public—or the media—(w)ant me to be good. It is my angle, and so long as I play well the angle won’t change. I am bright and articulate because I’m an athlete, and many athletes are not. “Like a dog’s walking on his hind legs,” as Dr.
Johnson once put it, “it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” But the public doesn’t believe that, just as I don’t believe that about celebrities I don’t know. Taller, brighter, more talented, more compassionate, glittering into cameras and microphones, award-ing each other awards for talent and compassion, “great human beings” (e)very one of them—wet-eyed I applaud, and believe. And all of us lose.
The public loses because it feels less worthy than it is; I, because once, twenty-three years old and trying to learn about myself, I wanted to believe I was everything others said I was, or soon would be; instead, older and having learned much, I feel co-conspirator to a fraud.
We are not heroes. We are hockey players. We do exciting, sometimes courageous, sometimes ennobling things like heroes do, but no more than anyone else does. Blown up on a TV screen or a page of print, hyped by distance and imagination, we seem more heroic, the scope of our achievement seems grander, but it isn’t, and we’re not.
Our cause, our commitment is no different from anyone else’s, the human qualities engendered are the same. Instead, we are no more than examples, metaphors because we enter every home, models for the young because their world is small and we do what they do. But by creating celebrity and mistaking it for substance, too often we turn celebrity into hero, and lose again.
Joe McGinniss, author of the acclaimed The Selling of the President, 1968, later wrote a book called Heroes. Unsatisfying in many ways, it sketched McGinniss’s own tormented trail from being the youngest, to the highly acclaimed, to the former all before he was thirty, at the same time ostensibly searching for the vanished American hero. He finds no hints in traditional sources, in mythologists or philosophers, in critics or poets; he gives us none in the theories he offers. But along the way, he makes some discoveries, and so do we. H
e travels to talk to George McGovern and Teddy Kennedy, to anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan, to General William Westmoreland, to John Glenn and Eugene McCarthy, to author William Styron, playwright Arthur Miller, and others, some of them heroes of his, all of them heroes to many. But, like chasing a rainbow, he finds that as he gets closer, his heroes disappear. In homes and bars, on campaign trails, jarringly out of heroic context, they are all distinctly, disappointingly normal. They are not wonderfully, triumphantly, down-to-earth normal, as normal appears from a distance. Up close, breathing, drinking too much, sweating, stinking, they are unheroically normal. Normal. And for heroes, to McGinniss, normal isn’t enough.
We are allowed one image, one angle; everything must fit. So normal in one thing begins to look like normal in the rest. Unlike the Greeks, who gave their gods human imperfections, for us every flaw is a fatal flaw. It has only to be found, and it will be found. For in moving from celebrity to hero, there is a change. It’s the difference between a city and a small town. In a city, the camera’s eye is always proximate, yet distant; in a small town, it peers, leers, offers no place to hide. John Glenn, astronaut, first American to orbit the earth—at home with his wife he is friendly, likeable, to an interviewer’s prying eyes only “the next junior senator from Ohio,” seeming as if he could never have been anything else. A hero? Or not? It doesn’t really matter.
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first oversell,” as Wilfrid Sheed wrote in Transatlantic Blues. Superficially created, superficially destroyed, for the hero, for the celebrity, it all evens out. Except along the way a price is paid. So still we lose. The public because, saddened and hurt by heroes who turn out not to be heroes at all, it turns cynical and stops believing. I, because I’m in a box. For what is my responsibility? Is it, as I’m often told, to be the hero that children think I am? Or is it to live what is real, and be something else?