The Game (12 page)

He was a star in Rouyn; later in Thetford Mines, he had scouts at many of his games, but it wasn’t until he reached Montreal and starred for the Junior Canadiens that he thought he might be good enough to be an NHL player. Asked how it finally happened, he answered quickly,

“I was lucky,” then stopped himself, and quietly started again. “No, not lucky,” he said. “Lucky’s a funny word, eh?” and pausing while I nodded, he continued again, “I was given the chance to prove I was good enough.”

When we were rookies together in the 1971 Stanley Cup playoffs, as teammates talked of money and pride, Houle, wide eyed at the magic, kept repeating, “I wanna kiss the Stanley Cup.” (It became a dressing-room rallying cry of sorts—“C’mon guys, Reggie wants to kiss Stanley’s cup.”) Two years later, he signed a lucrative contract with the Quebec Nordiques of the WHA. He had been torn between his enthusiasm for the Canadiens and his even more instinctive quest for financial security. Three years later, he was back with the Canadiens, this time with the contract he wanted.

He has always been careful with his money, investing much of it in annuities to guarantee his future, but in recent years he has seen inflation rise and his annuities—secured future shrink agonizingly away.

For the first time, he has seen the end of his hockey career—three years, four, perhaps five years away, but sometime; and soon. It was his one gift, his one chance, the source of security he never had, the source of confidence he always needed, the rallying point for the people he has learned to crave, the underpinning of his way of life—he could feel it slipping away, with nothing to put in its place.

He was clearly bothered by it all, though his friendly, open, self-mocking manner never changed. He read “doom and gloom” (f)inancial newsletters, and magazines; he announced out loud each jump in interest rates, each fall in the dollar, until teammates, noticing his torment, gleefully announced them to him first. There had seemed such an urgency about him; he seemed always to be running after“(d)eals,” promotions, endorsements, openings anxious to conspire on the latest and hottest tips, wheeling for nickels and dimes like a French-Canadian Sammy Glick. He began even to look the part, wearing three-piece pinstripe suits (closer to Frank Nitti than to Brooks Brothers), smoking big cigars. Yet always there was that laugh.

At our hotel in Newport Beach a few weeks ago, he looked out over the pool, his hands in his vest pockets, puffing on a big cigar, and said,

“You know, I oughta be a millionaire. I got all the moves,” then, laughing at himself, “I just don’t have the money.”

But this season, I have begun to notice in him an ease that wasn’t there before. He still talks constantly of inflation and interest rates, but the edge in his voice has gone, as if he does so now only because the team expects it of him, as part of his team persona. I see him reading biographies of Moshe Dayan, Martin Luther King, and Trudeau, talking politics with Savard or with one of the reporters, sitting quietly in a lobby with piles of newspapers he has brought from home. He seems involved in more and different things with new people who like being around him, and, doing well, he seems happy with himself. All his life he has searched for confidence and security, and now it seems he has found them. Their original source may have been hockey, but when hockey leaves, they will remain. The nicest part of his story is that he is now beginning to realize it himself.

What does Houle do for a hockey team? Any team, even a great team, has many more Réjean Houles than it has Lafleurs and Robinsons. Grinders, muckers,
travailleurs
, they form the base of any team; they do the kinds of diligent, disciplined, unspectacular things that every team must do before it can do the rest. But more than that, players like Houle make it fun to be on a team; it is a rare skill.

A few days ago, over breakfast, I asked him how he felt. With characteristic eloquence, he said simply, “I feel just the way I want to feel.

I feel great in my skin.”

The door swings open and Pierre Meilleur strides in, looking like someone whose brother is the toughest kid on the block.

“The Leafs are off [the ice],” he sneers. “‘Piton’ [Claude Ruel] says if ya aren’t on right away, don’t bother goin’ on.”

Only Lapointe looks up. “Hey Boomer, see this,” he says, holding his stick upright, pointing to its butt-end, “sit on it.”

Until recently, teams had only a “morning skate,” often in civvies or sweatsuits, simply for players to test that their skates were properly sharpened. But for a player, putting on skates means picking up sticks, and sticks mean pucks, and sticks and pucks mean easy shooting and informal games. That means the risk of an injury and the need for full equipment. And with full equipment, coaches began to ask themselves, why not have a practice? So for fifteen or twenty optional but demanding minutes, we practice.

I don’t like practicing the day of a game. I am afraid of getting hurt, not seriously, but perhaps a bruise on my catching hand, or on my arm or my shoulder, just enough to nag at me through the day and make me wonder how well I can play. What a morning practice does, and does well, is kill time, something not unimportant on the day of a game. On a day when nothing matters until the day is nearly complete, it is something to get out of bed for, to get dressed for, to get to, to get undressed and dressed for, to do, to get undressed and dressed again, to get back from—to get us through more than two hours of a purposely uneventful day.

We file out singly to the ice, along a narrow rubber path that comes out behind the net at the north end. The ice is still being resurfaced after the Leafs’ practice, and, cursing Ruel and Meilleur, we pool up near the boards and wait.
Hurry up and wait
. The bright TV lights have been left off and the Gardens lies in a kind of amber twilight.

Half the ice surface away, two or three Leafs players stand behind their bench, being interviewed for the 6 p.m. sports. We sit in the seats, bored, impatient, our legs propped over the seat backs in front of us, or pace on the spot beside others who do the same. Tremblay yells something not quite in the direction of the Zamboni driver, then quickly looks away, but the driver doesn’t hear him. It is the day of a game, repeated eighty times and more a season. With too much energy, too much time, and not enough to do—hurry up and wait.

I look around, then again more slowly, gradually aware of what I see. The enormous Sportimer is gone; an even larger, more versatile scoreboard-clock, the kind you might find in any large arena, is in its place. Foster Hewitt’s gondola was taken down last year; the portrait of the Queen, the bandshell, and Horace Lapp’s giant Wurlitzer were removed nearly twelve years ago when more than 1,500 unobstructed seats were added. The “reds” are now “golds,” though they appear more a mustard-color; the “blues” are “reds,” except in the mezzanines; the “greens” and the “grays” and the aisles that always looked clean remain.

I don’t much like the Gardens now. Competing against a child’s memory, that is perhaps inevitable, but it is more than that. The building’s elegant touches are gone, but anachronistic perhaps even in that other time, most deserved to go. It has been expanded and modern-ized for contemporary needs—more seats, more private boxes, a bigger press box—but I dislike the haphazard, graceless way it was done.

There is a veneer of newness about it now that doesn’t quite fit. It has been stranded in awkward transition; no longer what it was, it cannot be what it wants to be. Now, after nearly fifty years, there is nothing special about it. It is just another rink; just another place to play.

The Zamboni drives off the ice and we burst on. For twenty minutes we skate easily, then harder, whistled into drills by Bowman—one-on-ones with the goalies, three-on-two line rushes, two-on-ones—like every other practice except each drill is shorter and quicker. When it is almost over, as we are changing from one drill to another, I look up in the seats and see Johnny Bower.

Now a scout and goaltender coach for the Leafs, Bower, in 1958, at the age of at least thirty-three (because he had enlisted in the Canadian army in 1941, it was often thought he was even older), joined the Leafs for only his second NHL season. It was a time when the Leafs were assembling and maturing into a team that would win four Stanley Cups during the next decade, and Bower, a relentless worker and competitor, with an awkward, almost comic, style, became an important member of those teams. A few miles away, I was nearly a teenager and playing in my last few backyard seasons. I felt too old to pretend in quite the way I had done before, but when I did, I was Johnny Bower.

Last year, I met Bower for the first time. It was at an NHL awards luncheon in Montreal, and, leaving the hotel together, we shared a taxi to the airport. We were both uneasy at first, but gradually we just began to talk. As we were nearing the airport, he was telling me about his goaltending partners Sawchuk and Don Simmons when suddenly it struck me—he was speaking to me as a fellow goalie, as a colleague.

It was not NHL star to star-struck kid; it was as if we were equals. For the length of the cab ride, it was just Johnny and Ken.

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.