The Game

  Behind, but close, after forty minutes it’s the only way the Wings can beat us.

  When a game takes off, you can hear it. Sounds rush at you, cramming your head, squeezing it louder and louder, driving your mind away, and driving your legs mindlessly on. Urgent, staccato sounds: skates that bite and crunch and get back in the play; pucks clickety-clacking from stick to stick; voices screaming sounds when words arrive as echoes. And over the boards, roaring, rising, swelling sounds that empty your stomach and run up and down your spine—the mar-tial Muzak of the crowd as it rollercoasts the game.

  The game has changed. For most of forty minutes, the Wings were afraid: of losing as badly as they might lose; of being embarrassed in front of 17,000 fans and two million television spectators; of what a crushing loss might do to proud parents and friends who have talked of this game for days. Afraid of getting ahead and hoping foolish hopes, of getting close enough to think they might have a chance. For what would you do if you were the Detroit Red Wings and you led the Montreal Canadiens at the Forum with forty minutes to play? or thirty-five? or thirty? First you would celebrate, then you would just feel good, better than you’ve felt in a long time, thinking, hoping, no dammit, thinking—tonight’s the night, confident, excited, feeling like you feel when a game is over and won. Then the puck is dropped.

  Scrambles, penalties—twenty-seven minutes to go. Goalposts, missed open nets—twenty-five minutes. More goalposts—please let it be over. Please!—twenty-four minutes, eighteen seconds. Feeling it slip away. Afraid of the joy you feel. Afraid of what joy feels like when it’s played with and mocked, and finally crushed. Afraid of driving on lemming-like, punch line to your own Big Joke. Hey, you guys didn’t really think you were going to beat the Canadiens, did ya? Hab hah hah. That’s the best I’ve beard yet.

  But now, down 2-1 and only twenty minutes to play, the Wings have no time to be embarrassed. There’s nothing left to be afraid of.

  We’ve made a terrible mistake. When you let an underdog think he can play with you, he forgets how bad he is and how good you are and is swept along on the moment. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff, when he forgets where he is, he can do remarkable things. We’ve made it into a game we can’t be sure of winning.

  It warmed up in the dressing room and started in the middle. Seven minutes later, it’s in a sprint. We are twelve rats in a box, changing on the go, in a forty-five-second relay race. The whistle blows. The game goes on, too fast to stop, too fast for anything but a penetrating burn of feeling that later, with time, will explain itself. Its smile has disappeared.

  It has lost its professional cool; it is fun. Desperate, twisting, thrilling fun that hurts so much you want it to stop, and need it to go on.

  “On him! On him! Two on ya, Bird. ‘Round the boards! Get it out.

  Get it out! That’s it. That’s it…. Shoot it in, Sharty. Shoot it—look out! Back! Back! Two-on-two! Stand up! Stand up! Offside. C’mon, offside! They’re changin’. They’re changin’. Go with it, Pointu, go!

  Move it up. Move it up! Stay back, Pointu. Back!… Stand up! Stand up! Right on ya! Freeze it! It’s loose! It’s loose! In front! It’s loose! Ice it! Ice it!…”

  The puck moves from stick to stick and team to team. More than six times a minute, more than one hundred and twenty times a period, it changes possession. Physically contested all over the ice, the game is in constant transition. Patterns disrupt and break apart, moods skip, unsettled in one, on to the next, spiralling higher. Three quick strides, coast and turn, and turn again, and stop; three more quick strides, a pass, checked, and three quick strides the other way. Fragments, hundreds of them, each looking the same, some going somewhere, most not, and as player or fan you can never be sure which it will be.

  Gradually as the period builds, as time gets shorter, there is a moment, one we can all sense, when a game will be won or lost. It is now. For fifteen minutes, the Wings have done what they were sure they couldn’t do, and with nothing more to give, can slowly feel us getting stronger. With the puck at center, they shoot it into our zone and pile after it. Four, five, six bodies, the puck bouncing between them. The moment drags on.

  Then it stops. Lapointe’s shot deflects off Tremblay’s right knee through Vachon’s legs and it’s 3-1.

  Every minute or two, the Wings test us. Pushing their game a little higher to see if we push back, and when we do, they know it’s over.

  It’s like a cycling race, two and a half hours around and around; slowly, we looked over our shoulders, and close behind, they looked back at us. Here and there they speeded up, and we speeded up with them, always ahead. Then, nearing the end, they sprinted and we sprinted back. They pulled up alongside, nearly even, and we both went faster and faster until, finding a little more, or they a little less, we pulled ahead. Now we are looking back and, further behind, they look at us.

  They slow down; we slow down. They slow some more; we slow some more. Ever slower, in control.

  Montreal Part III

  “C’est ça, gang. That’s it.”

  “Another two [points], guys. Another two.”

  One by one we burst into the room.

  “That’s it, guys. That’s it.”

  Equipment is thrown to the floor. Drinks are grabbed up and swallowed thirstily. The room goes quiet. Houle looks up, uneasy.

  “Hey, good third [period], gang. Good third,” he blurts. But no one seems to hear him. Again, “Big four-pointer, gang.” Nothing.

  There is a muffled cheer from the arena. Tremblay charges through the door, the first star of the game. We look up.

  “C’est ça, Mario,” we yell. A few seconds later, it is Lambert.

  “C’est ça, Yvon.” The noise picks up, then fades. Silence. This time we can all hear it.

  “Hey, get ’em any way we can, guys.”

  “That’s right. That’s right,” Robinson begins earnestly. “Takes a good team to win when uh, uh…” He doesn’t finish. There is a longer silence. Lambert, last in the room, explodes.

  “Câlisse, gang. Mad when we win, mad when we lose. Let’s be happy. We won, tabernac. We won!”

  The mood changes.

  “Hey yeah, c’mon we won, guys. We won.”

  “That’s right, guys. That’s right.”

  “We got our two. That’s all we wanted.”

  Lapointe warms up, “Yeah, let’s have some noise in here.” Instantly there is noise.

  “That’s it. That’s it. Now we’re goin’.”

  The noise begins to die. Robinson jumps in.

  “Hey Lambert, play that funn-ky music!” he shouts.

  There are more shouts, loud and enthusiastic this time. Lambert disappears around a corner; Lapointe behind a divider across the room. From the stereo, there is a hard, heavy, pulsating beat. Lights strobe on and off in time. The room comes alive. Tremblay starts dancing, then Lambert.

  “Aww-right! Aww-right!” we shout happily.

  “Hey, that’s it, gang. Now we’re goin’. That’s the old gang.” A few minutes later, the music stops.

  * * *

  SUNDAY

  “More often than I like, I am saddened by a historical myth….

  I can’t help thinking of the Venetian Republic in their last half-century. Like us, they had once been fabulously lucky.

  They had become rich, as we did, by accident…. They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flaw against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystalised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.”

  —(C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution) Philadelphia

  Slow, relentless rain drizzles down. I clutch the curtains around me like a cloak and peer at the soggy outback of the airport across the road. It is Sunday morning in Philadelphia. No planes are in sight, no cars streaming off and on the b
usy interchange below, nothing but cold, tired, day-long rain. Behind me Risebrough snores, warm and contented in last night’s darkness. I close the curtains and go back to bed.

  I don’t like the feeling I get in Philadelphia. It is a hollowness, deep and disturbed, as if something is about to happen that I don’t want to happen but can’t stop. Before the day ends, I will feel threatened and physically afraid. I will hate fiercely (and admire). I will scream and curse, and get angrier than I ever get. In victory, I will gloat. Then slowly the hollowness will return, and I will be left to wonder about feelings I didn’t know I had, about the nature of what I do, about things I never wonder about at other times. Only the Flyers do that to me.

  It used to be it was the way the Flyers played. Now it is them. I have no room left for tortured ambivalence. I once saw the admirable and contemptible side by side, the simple, courageous game they played, their discipline and dedication, Bobby Clarke, Bernie Parent, their no-name defense, Fred Shero. It was the way they turned a hockey wasteland into something vibrant and exciting. It wasn’t the brawling and intimidation that finally turned me. It was their sense of impunity. They were bullies. They showed contempt for everyone and everything. They took on the league, its referees and teams; they took on fans, cops, the courts, and politicians. They searched out weakness, found it, trampled it, then preened with their cock-of-the-walk swagger— “C’mon, ya chicken. I dare ya!” For two years, they were kings of the mountain. Not many years from now, those two years will be symbols of the NHL’s lost decade. For Clarke, Parent, and a few more, I feel sorry.

  It has been a decade of turmoil: expansion, the WHA, the Soviets, the Flyers, the haves and have-nots, money in new and disturbing quantities, violence, the courts, the legislatures. “The sport of the seventies,” hockey was called; its decade almost over, it was a promise that was not kept. It was just thirteen years ago that the NHL was a cozy six-team enclave in the northeast, an overnight train ride east and west, north and south. Prosperous, inbred, deeply conservative, like a collection of old-world barons, the Montreal Molsons, the Boston Adamses, the Chicago and Detroit Norrises, the Toronto Smythes, the New York Kilpatricks, held in their contented hands the tight little world of hockey. Four of its teams were highly competitive, the Bruins and the Rangers provided competition for each other, and occasionally for the rest, while the league operated at more than ninety percent of its seating capacity.

  But changes were coming, big changes in sports, that were beyond their control. The continent was booming west and south; commercial jets were turning miles and days into comfortable hours, turning regional leagues into anomalies. Everywhere there were new “big league” cities, looking for “big league” status; everywhere local politicians and first-generation money were looking for the same. So franchises moved. The baseball Dodgers and Giants moved west, the Braves south to Atlanta, other teams, other sports, following. But it was too little, too late, too slow for bullish times, and soon rival leagues sprang up—the AFL in football and the ABA in basketball, while baseball expanded by four teams to head off Branch Rickey’s proposed Continental League.

  In this same environment, the NHL faced the same dilemma—to expand or not? It had expanded forty years before, from four teams to ten, as it moved into the United States for the first time, but the results had not all been good. The league acquired a broader, more substantial base, and new expectations; the Rangers, Bruins, Hawks, and Red Wings (née Cougars, later Falcons) survived; the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Quakers, St. Louis Eagles, Montreal Maroons, and New York (later Brooklyn) Americans did not. It had seemed a lesson—major-league hockey was not for everywhere; without a large indigenous player base in the United States, there was a similar absence of broad-based fan support. A city would need to be in Canada, or proximate to Canada, in a traditional American hockey stronghold, or need to be so large that even a cult-like percentage of followers could attract 15,000 people for a game.

  For twenty-five years, through war and emerging prosperity, the league stayed put. When the subject of expansion came up, as it rarely did, it was argued away— this city, that city, this owner, that owner always unsuitable, by standards that seemed fortuitously to rise according to the quality of the applicant. In fact, the league didn’t expand because it didn’t believe it to be in its interests to expand. For why would owners like Conn Smythe or James Norris want expansion? Their arenas were full. It was a gate—receipt league; radio and TV brought them little in revenue. How could teams in Los Angeles or Atlanta possibly help them? Indeed, an expanded league would only mean fewer games with old rivals, teams that had kept those arenas full. Would Los Angeles and Atlanta teams be as good and exciting, would they fill their arenas just as full? These men may have been“(h)ockey enthusiasts,” as then-league president Clarence Campbell described them, owners with “one foot on the bench,” but first and foremost they were businessmen. They needed fans in Toronto and Chicago, not somewhere else, not later.

  But in the 1960s, it changed. With extant rival leagues, the status quo would no longer guarantee them prosperous peace. Moreover, TV had become a factor. Once considered a dangerous leisure-time competitor, TV had emerged as both partner and promoter of sport’s new growth. In 1966, CBS and NBC paid $26 million for the rights to NFL and AFL games, NBC $10 million for major-league baseball.

  For the NHL, playing to near-capacity crowds in barely expandable arenas, its tickets priced to what the market could bear, TV was a new, potentially immense source of revenue where few others existed. This was no pie-in-the-sky dream. Pro football, for decades in the shadows of its college cousin, had boomed in the late 1950s, a phenomenon of TV. Offering a similar recipe of speed, violence, and excitement, hockey could do the same. It has “all the potential of pro football,” TV(s)ports-guru Roone Arledge announced to a Newsweek reporter in 1966. And so it seemed.

  But there were problems. TV in the 1960s meant network TV, and network TV meant shows that could play in Birmingham and Bakersfield as well as in Boston. Hockey would need a national audience. With tens of millions of viewers with no hockey pedigree, where would it come from? The answer, of course, lay in the innate attractiveness of the sport, and in expansion. To get Mahomet to the mountain, it would be necessary to bring the mountain to him. So, in 1967, the league expanded. Midwest to St. Louis and Minnesota, west to Los Angeles and Oakland, again into Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, doubling its size. Three years later, Vancouver and Buffalo were added; in 1972, New York and Atlanta. In only five years, the league had spread to much of the continent. It had done so to thwart the emergence of a rival league, and position itself for the fruits of network TV. In neither case did it succeed.

  Yesterday, a brief item appeared in the paper. Coming at the end of a story previewing our game with the Wings, it said that NHL owners will meet in two weeks to discuss merger with the WHA. Further, it said that this time merger was likely. It has been seven years. Seven rancorous years of achievement obscured, of great reward for some, of mess and muddle—lawsuits, antitrust suits, contract wars; teams and players everywhere. There were 6 teams in 1967, one league, one hundred and twenty players, six coaches, six managers, six owners. Eight years later, there were thirty-two teams, two leagues, six hundred and forty players, thirty-two coaches, thirty-two managers, thirty-two owners. The quality of play, the style of play, the administration and stability of the game, have been predictably affected. But now the war seems over. The WHA is no longer a serious rival. Each of its teams loses money every year, its lost millions the memory that nags it on; survival its one remaining tactic to achieve merger. And the NHL, bloodied but unbowed, is slowly willing to give up its fight.

  Even the players can now sense the tired inevitability of it all.

  Beneficiaries many times over because two leagues were bidding for our services, our every gain lies precariously at stake, yet the attitude I hear is “Let’s get it over with,” and no amount of selfish good sense seems able to penetrate it
. Today, hockey is a game in desperate search of good news, a “light at the end of the tunnel,” as league president John Ziegler puts it, to turn a cynical public momentum that has swung around hard in its face; to build again. There will be a merger this time, because this time there must be a merger.

  Tucked into this little corner of February-March is a brief denoue-ment. A quiet, clear-eyed time unconnected to the retrospective mood that comes with such things as decade-endings and career-endings.

  This is rather a moment of resolution, when many of the themes and directions of the game over many years have come together, and now play themselves out. It is a moment to stop, and see where we stand.

  Two weeks ago, the Challenge Cup ended in New York, the Soviets defeating the NHL all-stars two games to one. It was a much less decisive series than its 6-0 final game score would indicate, yet it seems somehow an appropriate close to the first seven years of open international play, seven years of which I was a part. In 1972, it had begun as a party, a huge national coming-out party, with Canada the not-so-reluctant debutante. Pioneers, unchallenged champions of hockey for all its near century, Canadians had suffered through a decade of humiliating defeats, losing first to the Swedes, then year after year to the Soviets, our amateurs finally and forever outmatched, our professionals ineligible for international games. But what seemed worse, nagging at us like a secret we couldn’t tell, was the fear that the man in Nevsky Prospekt or Wenceslas Square didn’t know of our incomparable pros, didn’t know that we, not they, were the true World Champions.

  In 1972, we had our chance, in what was called hockey’s showdown. And we won, and the party was more glorious than any before it or since. Yet even before it had ended, we knew something was different, never again to be the same. The Soviets had been good, very good, much better than we had expected. And our thirty-four-second margin of victory, the cause of such explosive national celebration, became the cause of unforgettable national concern. Our birthright was suddenly at risk. It was like being shot at and missed. We couldn’t forget how close it had been, and could only worry that the next time would be different.