It had come down to this, one final development many years coming, the Flyers its visible iceberg tip. For what happens to a game when it picks up speed and never learns to use it, when its balance of speed and finesse is disturbed, when finesse turns to power? It becomes a game of energy—an adrenaline game. Listen to its language. Listen to a coach talk about a game. He talks of “emotion,” of being “up” or“(n)ot up”; of “pressure,” two men on the puck, defense “pinching” on the boards, “hits,” turnovers, shots, all in exquisite volumes; and especially of “momentum,” head-shaking, hand-shrugging “turning points” and the irreversible destinies that flow from them. Adrenaline is important to a game, but like the batter who chokes a bat too tight, not all the time. It is important to sharpen senses, not to overcome them; to enhance skills, to push them to their high-pitched best, but not to replace them. We have lost the attitude of finesse necessary to a game, and now we pay a double price. For adrenaline has its dark side. Fouled or resisted, it turns to anger, frustration, retaliation. And inside a pattern of violence allowed many years before, it sends violence spiralling higher.
It is a hundred years since the original Montreal rules, almost fifty years since the forward pass. For us, it has been like a journey through a maze, one path, then many, and finally coming to where we can go no further, and realizing that we missed a turn along the way. Yet had the Soviets not held up a mirror to our game, first in 1972, and again this year, much of what has happened might have gone unnoticed. We had been the best, we had always been the best. So, however we played, it was the best way. And there could be no other way to play.
That the Soviets played differently was well known to us by 1972.
That their style would work against the world’s best players was not.
Nor was it seriously considered. They had taken up hockey only twenty-six years before, in 1946. But playing more months of the year, more hours of the day, they had short-cut time: World Champions in eight years, Olympic champions in ten; their long domination of amateur hockey beginning less than a decade later.
Indeed, their tardy start for them would prove fortuitous. For 1946(w)as after hockey’s great upheavals, after the forward pass, after the center red line, leaving the Soviets no accumulation of obsolete thinking to burden their future. They had, as well, a long tradition in hockey—like games such as soccer and bandy. Soccer, played by most of the world’s countries, was much more advanced in strategies and techniques than hockey. To its off-season players, the first coaches and players of Soviet hockey, the common principles of the games were quickly evident. This was of no small importance. It would give the Soviets the necessary confidence and will to develop their own school of hockey, quite distinct from the Canadian game.
In the 1972 series, we dominated those parts of the game to which our style had moved—the corners, the boards, the fronts of both nets, body play, stick play, faceoffs, intimidation, distance shooting, emotion. In the end, it was enough. But disturbingly, the Soviets had been better in the traditional skills—passing, open ice play, team play, quickness, finishing around the net—skills we had developed, that seemed to us the essence of hockey, but that we had abandoned as incompatible with the modern game. The Soviets had showed us otherwise. It would be unfair, perhaps incorrect, to say that nothing has come of it. Yet little has. What we didn’t understand, what we don’t understand now, is that body play, stick play, faceoffs, intimidation, distance shooting, and the rest have become the fundamentals of our game; that the fundamentals of any game are the basic skills needed to play it, and our present game requires those. To a dump-and-chase game, passing and team play are not fundamental. We may practice them rigorously, we may intend to use them in a game. But unless they fit in a style of play, and are rewarded, it will come to nothing. To change the fundamentals of a game, a style of play must change; to change a style of play, the attitudes and patterns that underlie it must change first.
Yet still there was room for illusion. The pendulum that was swinging away from us seemed to stop for years. They won, we won; they changed a little, so did we. And the more we played, the more their bewildering patterns seemed not bewildering at all. What had seemed to us so unpredictable—the crisscrossing patterns, the breakaway pass through center, the goalmouth pass to an unseen defenseman—was really just surprising. And when it stopped being surprising, it began to seem predictable; and less successful.
The Soviets needed open ice for their open-ice patterns and skills.
They wanted a high-tempo game, 4-on-3, 3-on-2, 2-on-1, always out-numbering an opponent, fast-shrinking numbers on a fast-shrinking ice surface. It was this way that their skills worked best. It was up to us to see that it didn’t happen. We forechecked when we were sure of not being trapped; peeled back when we weren’t. We jammed the middle to interrupt their first pass, which set their game in motion, which created the tempo and the numerical advantage they needed. We checked hard in the center zone, and retreated when we couldn’t, always certain of at least three defenders to clutter the defensive zone. On power plays we waited more patiently, watching for the offside defenseman and the offside winger we had ignored before. And it worked, more often than it should have worked against a team of their calibre.
In their intricate, patterned game, there seemed a fatal flaw. A few years ago, a friend working at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow told me he had seen the Soviet soccer team play several times. What had amazed him, he said, were its obvious similarities to the Soviet hockey team, in style and patterns of play, in its very look. Yet, on a world scale, it was decidedly mediocre, and the hockey team was not. Why? (h)e wondered.
Later, I asked an international soccer coach the same question. He described the Soviet team much as we might the hockey team—well-conditioned, highly skilled, highly disciplined and organized, its style based on speed and passing. Yet in this patterned style was a basic weakness. For when a team knows what it will do next, soon an opponent knows too, and can defend against it. The Soviet style was too patterned, too predictable, he said, and in the large, cozy world of soccer, there could be no greater sin. Offense, by its nature, must be unpredictable. It may evolve out of earlier pattern and understanding, but its ultimate act is individual creation. No team can depend on weaving rink-long textbook patterns. They are too easily interrupted and broken. And, as with a memorized speech, when it happens you lose your place and must start again to find it. Except that then everyone is waiting.
It was what I was beginning to feel about the Soviet hockey team.
There was also something else. The Soviets were remarkably ineffective as one-on-one players. Since they were quick skaters and excellent puck-handlers, it was a game they should have excelled at, but they didn’t. They always needed the extra man. It was basic to their game.
Find the open man, and use him. But nearing a net, often there is no open man. A puck-carrier must do it himself. He must use his skills to create an advantage, his will to do the rest. But the Soviets seemed never to make that commitment—looking, always waiting for the open man until the chance was lost. It was a burden from their past, on their game, one they seemed no better at handling than we did ours.
Problems remained for us, of course (facing Goose Gossage, a batter may know what’s coming, but he still has to hit it). Still, it was something. And if instinctively I knew the Soviets had found the right direction, if not quite, I hoped, maybe believed, that our high-pressure, high-energy style could interrupt theirs, could break it down and simplify it, just as it had broken down our own; that in our game we possessed the permanent antidote to theirs.
Then came the Challenge Cup. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know how. I don’t know even if I understand it the same way the Soviets understand it. I am convinced only that it happened—that the Soviets fundamentally changed their approach to the game, that they understand finally that hockey is not a possession game, nor can it ever be.
Possession was what they we
re supposed to be about: passing, team play, always searching for the open man, regrouping to start again if their possession seemed threatened. But a puck cannot be physically carried up the ice like a football; and a hockey player is not protected from physical battering as a basketball player is. He can be overpowered, the puck can be wrested from his stick by one or two or more opponents, with little recourse except to pass it on to someone else soon harassed the same way. A possession game is hyperbole. The puck changes teams more than six times a minute, more than one hundred and twenty times a period, more than four hundred times a game, and little can be done to prevent it. And when it is not changing possession, the puck is often out of possession, fought after, in no one’s control. It is the nature of the game, North American or European. There is sustained possession only on power plays. There is possession involving several seconds at other times only when a team regroups to its own zone to set up a play. If possession is team style, it will be frustrated. Worse, if it is attempted, it will make a game cautious and predictable.
Instead, hockey is a transition game: offense to defense, defense to offense, one team to another. Hundreds of tiny fragments of action, some leading somewhere, most going nowhere. Only one thing is clear. A fragmented game must be played in fragments. Grand designs do not work. Offenses regrouping, setting up, meet defenses which have done the same, and lose. But before offense turns to defense, or defense to offense, there is a moment of disequilibrium when a defense is vulnerable, when a game’s sudden, unexpected swings can be turned to advantage. It is what you do at this moment, when possession changes, that makes the difference. How fast you can set up. How fast you strike. What instant patterns you can create. How you turn simple advantage into something permanent. It is this the Soviets have learned to do, and the balance has been swung.
In the Challenge Cup, for the first time the Soviets joined in the game. They had always stayed a little separate from it, not adjusting and readjusting opponent by opponent, moment by moment. It was as if they feared that the compromises of a particular game and a particular opponent would distract them from a course they believed in; certain that eventually they would raise the level of their game to whatever was needed so that it wouldn’t matter anyway. Then, two weeks ago, they entered our game, found its weaknesses, and exploit-ed them. They chased the puck in the offensive zone and the neutral zone, turning the tables and using the smaller ice surface to their advantage. They got the puck, with forty feet of ice, or fifty, or eighty, with two teammates or three, and created something with it; no regrouping, no setting up, a teammate in motion, the defense off-balance, a pass, a 3-on-2, a 2-on-1—instantly. It was all-ice commitment, but always under control. It was our game played their way, a game exactly suited to their skills. Their smaller bodies were strong enough, tough enough, to stand up to the game, to wrestle for the puck, to get it and move it, if rarely to punish. Their short, choppy, wide-gaited stride was quicker to start up, quicker to change direction, quicker to gain advantage and keep it. And finally they had an opportunist’s touch, a model transition game.
It worked spectacularly. It offered no patterns to interrupt, no time for us to organize and prepare. It made the unpredictability of the game seem theirs. We had the puck, then they did, and it was too late.
By pressuring us, they took pressure off themselves. And without pressure, our offense couldn’t work. So we turned up the adrenaline game higher. Only this time it couldn’t go high enough. We couldn’t move our bodies fast enough, long enough. The Soviets were too quick. We exhorted and yelled; the robot-like Soviets, annoyingly dispassionate to our eyes, played with no less commitment, but with control. Too often the puck moved past us just as we arrived. Usually it was late in periods, or late in games, when we tired slightly. Then, when we were committed and out of position, the trouble got worse. It was like throwing haymakers at a counterpuncher: the harder we threw, the worse it got. In 1972, the Soviets had seemed intimidated by our frightening will; now they turned it against us. Yet the essence of their style of game did not change. It was the final irony. In countering our game, they discovered they could play theirs more effectively.
So where do we stand? There can be no more illusion now. We have followed the path of our game to its end. We have discovered its limits. They are undeniable. More and better of the same will not work. The Soviets have found the answer to our game and taken it apart. We are left only with wishful thinking. We must go back and find another way.
We have paid an enormous price as originators and developers, as custodians and keepers, as unchallenged champions of the sport. That others coming later, unbound, would take greater, more creative steps is understandable. That we should fail to fight back is not. Yet there is a fatalism about Canadians that extends beyond hockey. To a child of celebrated parents (England and France’s progeny), raised in the shadow of a southern colossus (America’s neighbor), others have always seemed to do things bigger and better; others always would. So, never precocious, never rebellious, reasonably content, we ride their coattails and do pretty well. In hockey, now that we’ve been caught from behind, we wonder why it took so long.
Except that in sports, it doesn’t have to happen that way. The biggest, or richest, or most scientific does not always win.
The Yugoslavs beat the Soviets in basketball; the Argentines, the Dutch, and others do the same in soccer. For us, the first and biggest problem is not the Soviets, it is ourselves. If we can do little about our national state of mind, we can do a lot about rethinking our national game. Most of our traditions date back fifty years. Since then, there have been two major rule changes, a revolution in all things speed, and the emergence of a new hockey model. But the league never carried through the logical consequences of its own changes, and others got their chance. Now we forget what those consequences were. We must go back and find them, ask ourselves if traditions and myths that once made sense make sense any longer.
Mostly, the answer is no. But the value in tracing a game to its roots is to find out why it is no; to realize that once there were reasons, often good reasons, for why things were as they were; to realize that in time good reasons can become obsolete; to watch those same reasons take on a life of their own; to see what happens when they are enshrined as treasured myths; to see that a game can be changed, and to see what change can do. Then to take a game forward in time, to use those lessons, and look again. Our message is clear: ice surfaces may be enlarged, painted lines removed, nets moved forward, old fundamentals practiced and perfected, but until the patterns of the game change, nothing else will. Simply, speed must be harnessed and directed, the forward pace must be made to work.
The Soviets pass better than we do because their crisscross diagonal patterns allow it, and demand it; because passing is a fundamental of their game, fostered and encouraged by their leadership; because the instincts and skills necessary to it develop naturally from practice and use. We need no less. We must abandon our tethered, straight-ahead style, up and down like tablehockey players. Offensively, it has made no sense for fifty years. Defensively (“picking up our wings”), it makes sense only because the offense is so strangled. We must find open ice, moving on diagonals to present a better target, a target that skates in front of us, not away from us, using the width of the ice for more space, more time, to pick up more speed, to make those unburdened by the puck the creative figures. We must take the focus off the puckcarrier, to turn ours into a team game. We should remove the individualist’s instinct to skate several strides with the puck; we must force a pass—one touch—to pick up speed, to create an advantage and press it. We should use more of the ice, make the game less congested. Like big fullbacks running into a line, we skate always anticipating contact, straining against it even when it isn’t there. Breaking into the open, we feel naked and clumsy, as if robbed of our skills. We must become more comfortable with open ice, make quickness and creativity seem like more than just flash. And the league must deliver a message, c
lear and uncompromising: hooking, holding, and high-sticking will be penalized, so that the quick and skilled are not, so that open ice created will not be taken away.
We must develop new fundamental skills, create new positional stereotypes. We must make size less crucial, we must exchange speed for quickness, power for skill, bigness for muscular strength. We should adapt long, graceful quarter-miler strides to a sprinter’s game.
Defensemen should become both the stopping point and the starting point of the action, developing transition game skills. For in a transition game, it is out of defense, resilient and forceful, that offense emerges. Body-checking should remain an inevitable and attractive part of their game, but with a new function: not accident, strategy, or a means of intimidation, but as part of that transition; used as a way to get the puck, to set a game in motion, not to stop it dead in its tracks, to allow a game to hit and run.
We must free the game from the dump and chase, break the congestion of hits, shots, screens, deflections, rebounds, and scrambles.
We should make it seem like more than just patternless chance, more than just fury, mayhem, and the law of averages. Let fans follow it. Let them see goals, and goals in the making. In open ice, a puck can be seen, it isn’t hard to follow. And if collisions cause angry, violent feelings, fewer collisions will cause fewer of them. To break the pattern of violence, we should get the game out of the corners, away from the boards. Get it into open ice.
The violence of our game is not so much the innate violence in us as the absence of intervention in our lives. We let a game follow its intuitive path, pretending to be powerless, then simply live with its results. The game now has more Americans and Europeans who play it, it is trained and developed more often in schools and universities, yet its conservative culture remains.