The Game

  Red? Hayward? Hey, c’mon. Barry? Yeah, Barry. That’s not bad.” A final laugh, then those around him go back to sleep. He leafs through his book to “S,” takes a pen from his pocket, and writes: SULLIVAN, Barry (wife, Anne)

  Presbyterian Minister

  Philadelphia

  (215)…

  The overcast has burned away. I try to sleep, then read. I look out the windows, at turnpike countryside, mile after mile. It’s a day to took out windows, to let energy run down, and feel it trickle back. Then feel it build again. It happens each year at this time. When I feel spring, or the playoffs, I never know which it is. It’s an instinct, as sure as the seasons. Something that happens, that cannot be rushed. When it’s time, I will know. I lean back in my seat, and close my eyes.

  “Ya weren’t sleepin’, were ya?” It’s Shutt.

  “Huh? Oh no, Shutty.”

  “I was brilliant last night, eh?”

  “Huh? Oh yeah, Shutty, yeah, you were brilliant.”

  “I was, wasn’t I? Happens every time I drink. Can’t understand it.

  Wish I could remember what I said. I oughta drink more often hee hee hee. “ It comes in a dizzying burst. I can’t keep up. He sees a pad of paper on my lap. “Hey, whatcha doin’?”

  “Huh? Oh, I was just writing down some things. May use ’em sometime.”

  “Ya writin’ a book? Hey great. Need some help? Want some of my quips? Hey, we could do it together. We’d quip ’em to death. Give ’em quiplash hee hee hee.” And he’s gone.

  I feel comfortable on this bus, with this team. I’m not sure anyone else knows that. I’m not sure even my teammates know it. I don’t say much. I often like to be alone. My background and interests are different enough to make me seem different (being a goalie forgives a lot; being a good goalie, a lot more). Still, by now I think most understand.

  I have changed in eight years. Before my sabbatical season, 1973-74, 1(h)ad little time for the team. It was due in part to my dual life as a law student, but only in part. I was young, and, in pre-dynasty times, better than the team. I had standards no one could meet. Those who didn’t backcheck as often as I thought they should, those who drank too much, let me down. They had seemed more like opponents than teammates, lined up against me, keeping me from being what I wanted to be. And, silently, I raged at them. Early in the 1973 playoffs, Bowman took me aside. He wondered if I felt myself “too big” for the team. I don’t remember what had prompted it. It didn’t matter. I was hurt, and furious. For the rest of the playoffs, I sulked, desperately sure he was wrong, afraid he wasn’t. At the end, I got my revenge. It was Bowman’s first Stanley Cup. When the team celebrated on the ice, he hugged me as he did the others. I hung from him like a rag.

  When I returned from my year in Toronto, things were different.

  I was older. My contract squabble had made me seem disagreeably normal. I let in too many goals. I improved as the year went on, and since, yet it’s never been the same. I lost something those two years—(a)n illusion of my own perfectibility. I had done many things in a short time. The rest I could do, I would do. It would only take time. I would read the classics. I would learn more science and economics. I would learn to speak French. Then I had the time, and I didn’t. On the ice, I made the same bad passes, fell for the same inexplicable reasons, eased up on long shots and sharp-angled shots with the same results.

  At the same time, the team was getting better. It became less clear to others, finally to me, who really needed whom.

  In 1976, the team and I did something together. There was a great sense of quest that season. We had not won the Stanley Cup for two years. The Flyers were champions, so we chased them over the summer, in training camp, in every game we played. We left them behind in the standings; we chased what they had been, and still might be. We chased them until May, and caught them. No Stanley Cup had felt so good. I had learned the lesson Gainey had learned when he was twelve years younger.

  Yesterday, I did an interview with a Philadelphia journalist. After some minutes, he shook his head and told me I was different from other athletes he had interviewed. His voice then got quiet, as if he thought someone might overhear him (though no one was around).

  “How do you relate to these guys?” he whispered. I sat quiet and said nothing, and he went on to something else. I think it took me so long to want to be a part of the team because I was afraid of a team. Afraid of always having to do what a team does; afraid of losing my own right to be different. When I realized that I could be part of a team, and still be different, I could then be less different. Then I realized I wasn’t very different at all. The Philadelphia journalist didn’t understand. I may seem different, as others may seem different from me. But together we have one common passion. It has taken much of our time, and most of our energy. It has shaped us. All of that we share. The rest are details.

  I look around the bus. What will happen to this team? There will be changes soon. Cournoyer, Lemaire, Savard, Lapointe, each is now past thirty. Not old, but old enough. Excepting Cournoyer, each may yet play several more years. But maybe they won’t. Maybe they can’t. Like a man of sixty, each is at an age where there can be no more surprise, no sense of tragedy, if something happens. Who will take their place?

  Where will the next Cournoyer come from? The next Lemaire and Savard? The next Pollock and Bowman? There has always been someone. In twenty-three years, Plante, Charlie Hodge, Worsley, Vachon, Doug Harvey, Tom Johnson, Talbot, Ted Harris, J. C. Tremblay, Laperrière, Harper, the Rocket, Henri Richard, Bert Olmstead, Floyd Curry, Moore, Claude Provost, Ferguson, Bobby Rousseau, Backstrom, Gilles Tremblay, Donnie Marshall, Dick Duff, Roberts, Béliveau, Geoffrion, Pete and Frank Mahovlich have all been replaced. So have Selke, Blake, and Pollock. In twenty-three years, fourteen Stanley Cups have been won. The team goes on. But what now?

  It will be harder. The historical advantages of thirty years are gone, or going. What you see on the ice is very nearly all there is. There is no farm team somewhere “better than most NHL teams.” Most importantly, the store of draft picks that nourished the success of the 1970s looks now like everyone else’s. But great teams need great players; and great French-Canadian teams need great French-Canadian players. Where will they come from? Who will carry the torch of Richard, Béliveau, and Lafleur? Not Mondou, or Tremblay, or Larouche; they are spear-carriers. No one now on the team; no one in Halifax with the Voyageurs. It will be someone somewhere in Quebec.

  But who?—and when he grows up, will it be with the Canadiens?

  Thirty years ago, the answer would have been yes. NHL teams could sponsor amateur teams; the Canadiens monopolized Quebec.

  When sponsorship ended in favor of a universal draft in the 1960s, the Canadiens were given a concession. They were allowed two picks prior to the draft for players of French-Canadian parentage (in lieu of their first- and second-round picks). That concession expired for the 1970 draft (and Gilbert Perreault). Yet the answer remained a tentative yes. Pollock had used the fruits of Selke’s farm system to rebuild the Canadiens dynasty, its rejects to bargain for the future. Expansion teams, vulnerable at the box office and on the ice, needed players.

  Pollock had them. In return, he got nameless draft picks, who would turn out to be Lafleur, Robinson, Shutt, Larocque, Nyrop, Connor, Risebrough, Tremblay, Mondou, Chartraw, Engblom, and Napier. A new dynasty was built; the torch was passed. Perreault, Dionne, Potvin, and Bossy got away, almost unnoticed; so did many others; Hangsleben, Micheletti, Hislop, Hunter, and about a score more, all drafted but signed by the WHA. None seemed a great loss. The WHA had become a kind of development league for the Canadiens. If any proved themselves, they could be signed later. Yet they were important. Descendants of Randy Rota, Ernie Hicke, and others, they were the barter that would become the draft picks, that would become the future Lafleurs, Robinsons, and Hangslebens, on which succeeding dynasties would be built. For much of the decade, the Canadiens have had to do without them. The stockpile of
draft picks has diminished.

  When the NHL-WHA merger takes place, most will be gone for good. For the Canadiens, this is a crossroads.

  I’ve often wondered what makes this team so good. It’s a question we’ve all had frequent practice at answering, yet I’m not sure any of us has done very well. We each have our pet theories, the latest and most obscure, the most undeniably our own, the best. Yet, it seems there should be one reason, more central than others, on which the others rely.

  Management perhaps. Certainly the Canadiens are a textbook study: stability (three managers, five coaches in forty years), competence ( professional managers, whose qualifications aren’t goals and assists; who are secure enough to hire the best people; who win), dedication (Pollock, Bowman, Ruel, and others didn’t marry until well into their thirties), attitude. They feel it’s their “God-given duty to be the best every year,” (f)ormer coach Al MacNeil once said. It’s a message we all sense. The team is a business, yet its bottom line seems only to win.

  Maybe it’s the Montreal environment, that conspiracy of expectations, of fans, press, management, coaches, players, that makes losing intolerable. Or it’s the team itself. Its mix of ages, sizes, and styles of play; personalities, attitudes; French and English. There is something distinctly different about Richard, Béliveau, Lafleur, Plante; and about Mahovlich, Moore, Gainey, Dryden—something incompatible, or richly varied and strong. Maybe it’s the presence of great players like Béliveau and Lafleur. The attitude of a team depends so much on its best player. A coach and a manager can be neutralized; a best player has followers, and must be a leader. He must have the character and personality to match his skills. It’s why the Flyers won and the Sabres didn’t; why the Kings and Blues never went far; why the Islanders needed the emergence of Trottier. Or maybe it’s talent—the first and easiest explanation; the first forgotten. We would prefer that it be hard work, for hard work seems less a gift, more a reflection on us. But without talent, “hard work doesn’t work,” as journeyman defenseman Bryan Watson once put it. With talent, bad games and a bad season can still be won.

  Really, it is all those things, and more. When a team wins once, it can be for one central reason. When it wins for three consecutive years, nine times in fourteen years, it’s for a crush of reasons. Winning brings with it such an immense momentum. Everything fits, everything works. Every new thing is made to fit and work. Everything just is. Reasons blur and disappear. It becomes a state of mind, an obligation, an expectation; in the end, an attitude. Excellence. It is that rare chance to play with the best, to be the best. When you have it, you don’t give it up.

  It’s not easy, and not always fun. “Satisfaction for me never came during a season,” Jimmy Roberts, a veteran Canadiens player, once told me. “There was always too much pressure…. It was so sudden and gone again because there was always another game. Then, when a season was over, I’d realize, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t live off this. I gotta do it all again next year.’ Then I’d get all worried about next year.” But it gives you a range, and depth, of feeling no also-ran can have. “Now I look through the old scrapbook,” Roberts went on, “at my trophies on the mantel, and try to remember if they were good days or not.

  Then I look at what I’ve got.” He smiled. “It was really nice.”

  But it’s a state of mind that can get tired. When you win as often as we do, you earn a right to lose. It’s losing to remember what winning feels like. But it’s a game of chicken. If you let it go too far, you may never get it back. You may find its high-paid, pressureless comfort to your liking. I can feel it happening this year. If we win, next year will be worse. But who’s going to stop it? Where are the legendary figures that refuse to fall? Pollock is gone. Bowman may soon leave. Cournoyer, Lemaire, Savard, Lapointe. There had always been someone. It’s the Canadiens’ tradition. Who now?

  Irving Grundman continues the line of professional managers. But he came late to hockey. Competent, decent, he learned its language quickly. Can he learn its idioms? Can he deliver the same palpable message? A year of losing and the spirit will rekindle. But more than spirit is needed. Great players, great coaches and managers, must be replaced in kind. In 1960, the Canadiens won their fifth successive Stanley Cup. Richard retired, Harvey and Plante were later traded, and Geoffrion retired. In due course Selke retired, replaced by Pollock. A new generation rose from the farm system, and, after winning in 1965, won three times in four years. There is no farm system now. Nor is there the stockpile of draft picks that built the next generation of success. With Pollock’s departure, management is thinner than it has ever been, and unhappy. It’s not 1960 again. It’s not the fal-low end of a cycle. Like snakes and ladders, when the slide comes this time there’s less to stop it, and there’s farther to fall.

  If dynasties come for a crush of reasons, dynasties die one reason at a time. It starts like a slump. The immense momentum of winning slows; the slump doesn’t end. The momentum turns. Everything that fits doesn’t fit. Obligation turns cranky; expectation and attitude disappear. It’s what each of us has felt at times this year. Slowly the team is joining the pack. It must learn to live, and compete, like everyone else.

  Except, unlike everyone else it must win; and the French-Canadian character of the team must not be disturbed. The team created the expectations; now it must live with them. Fewer than fifteen percent of the league’s players are French-Canadian. Since Lafleur, Perreault, and Dionne in the early 1970s, few of them have been superstars. Now there are more teams, more reluctant to trade draft picks, in the market to compete for them. Lafleur must have his heir; the team must win. Ahead may be a tragic irony. Without the strength of the past, the team may face a choice—to win, or to be French-Canadian?

  “Hey bussy! Turn up that radio.”

  As we near New York, the singing begins. Then it stops. From an introductory few bars, we know what’s coming. “Hey, Reggie!” we shout. Houle’s ready, his voice a pristine monotone.

  “You took a fine time to leave me, Lucille…” he wails; we cheer, then go quiet. “Four hungry children…” (dramatic pause, catch in his voice), “…a crop in the field.…” We cheer again. His accent strains at the words, turning the song into a touching/hilarious lament. “I’ve had some bad times, been through some sad times…” Here and there, others join him. But it’s Reggie’s song, and always will be.

  Practice is optional; all but Savard and Lemaire go. It feels good to put on equipment, to sweat, to stop shots when no one tells me to, to feel washed-out, tired-out good at the end. It’s a practice that has only to do with us. No one mentions the Islanders. The Islanders don’t matter. It’s up to us. It’s time to feel good about ourselves. Later, Bowman has arranged a team dinner. Afterwards, some are going to the race-track, others to a movie. Other years, I’d take a train to Manhattan, to the theater. Tonight, I’m going to the movies too.

  * * *

  TUESDAY

  “Like an army on ice, we march south every winter, We return in the spring the conquerors!”

  —Sebastien Dhavernas, translated by Rick Salutin, Les Canadiens New York

  We don’t lose when we need to win. We win, we always win. We lose when it doesn’t matter, when nothing’s on the line, when illness, injury, fatigue, boredom, laziness, personal problems, travel—when the law of averages beats us. There’s no law of averages in big games.

  Big games we gear to win. And win. We don’t lose when it’s us on the line, when something must be proved, when we can’t lose. We don’t lose showdowns. I don’t lose showdowns.

  But we lost tonight. To the Islanders.

  I don’t know what to feel. I’ve thought about this moment, what it would be like. But it’s different. I’m not angry, or even disappointed. I feel a strange peace. Reporters come by, my voice comes out softer and slower, the questions I hear sound the same. Maybe I’m numb. Maybe I’m afraid to feel what I really feel. Maybe I’ve had enough. Maybe I don’t want to fight and struggle and pret
end any more. Maybe I want to lose. I feel such a wash of sympathy. So wonderful, cozy and warm. No more nagging voices, no more self-hating words. It’s over. There are new targets now. The king is dead; maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all.

  I pack up my things and go. At the door, I see Bowman. I see Gainey and Lemaire. We look at each other. They look almost serene.

  But in their eyes, just beginning, is a glint. I can feel it too. This is what Bowman’s been waiting for. This is what we’ve all been waiting for. I walk out the door. Inside, I feel a smile.

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  “It was a dream, and everything I dreamed came true.

  Now my dream is finished. That’s a new life for me.

  Because what I do now, what I keep on doing is something I never dreamed of.”

  —Henri Richard

  Nothing happened the way it was supposed to. The Islanders caught us, then we caught them. In the season’s final game, we needed a tie against Detroit for first place, and we lost. The Islanders, waiting to be crowned, lost to the Rangers in the playoffs. And we won again. It was no triumph; we only survived. After the season we had had, we could hardly hope for more.

  It was my last playoffs, something that never quite left my mind. I felt no real nostalgia, no sudden paralysis at the brink. Yet I kept looking back, for I needed a guide. Nothing in the present was making sense. I felt like a chess player at a scrambled board. I was playing poorly, and couldn’t stop. I searched for answers, and found none; for patterns and precedents that would tell me how it would all end. I discovered the symmetries in my career: the Bruins, Boston Garden; coming in a winner, going out a winner. When nothing else gave comfort, they did. There seemed a kind of perfect destiny.

  Then we lost three times in Boston Garden. The Bruins took us to seven games. There were no tidy circles, no symmetries—a cruel punch line at the end. Irony was my pattern. My town, my team, my rink, my solid ground, my first and lasting reputation with less than four minutes left in the seventh game, Rick Middleton scored from behind the net. The Bruins were ahead. Savard was closest to the play.