The Game (15 page)

When Gainey was eighteen, he joined the Peterborough Petes. A leading scorer in his Junior B league the year before, as a rookie with the Petes he scored less often, with the offensive game monopolized by older players. It was a difficult year for the Petes, normally one of the strong teams in their league. Having to replace several over-age players from the year before, they were not very good, something their coach, Roger Neilson, and the players realized early in the season. But slowly, and only out of the necessity of their own circumstances, the players learned how a team not good enough to win can win. Late in the season, Neilson brought his team together and told them what they already knew. He said that if they were to succeed in the playoffs, they would have to play as a team, working for each other,
depending
on each other. Then, unexpectedly, the shy, unemotional Neilson looked around at his players and one by one asked them if they agreed with him. Uncomfortably at first, yet with more than ritual solemnity, one by one the answers came back—yes, yes, yes. Later, Gainey would remember it as a moment of bonding, a time when a team declared a commitment to itself. That year, Peterborough won the Ontario league and went to the national final, losing the Memorial Cup to Cornwall.

Now, Gainey thinks of that moment only with the slight blush of someone who is older. But the blush is for those who wouldn’t understand, for those who don’t remember being young, and who have never been emotionally entwined in a team. When the season ended, Gainey had been left with a feeling, and from that feeling slowly came an understanding. He had learned the lesson of team sport. He had found joy in scoring goals and would continue to, but now he felt a greater joy, a greater satisfaction, a greater sense of personal achievement, than he had ever felt before. At that moment, he realized he could accomplish more, and feel more,
within
a team. It would change the direction of his game.

Like a coach, like a goalie, Gainey plays with a constant perspective on a game. But unlike a coach or a goalie, he plays a game in its passionate midst, where perspective is rare, perhaps unique to him. He is sensitive to a game’s tempos, to its moods, if it moves too fast or too slow, if we are in control, or they are, or no one is. And each time he goes on the ice, his role becomes the same. More than to score and to stop his man from scoring, it is one almost of stewardship. When he leaves the ice sixty seconds later, he wants the puck in his opponent’s zone, the tempo of the game to be right for the score and for the time of the game; he wants the game under control. Then, as the next line comes on to do what it does best, Gainey stays with the game, watching for the link between what he has done and what comes next, and if a goal is scored a minute or two minutes later, he will find satisfaction or despair that is more than just vicarious.

Once I asked him what gave him his greatest pleasure in a game.

Personally, he said, it was a big play, a hard body-check that stripped an opponent of the puck and caused a goal, or perhaps a goal itself, but something where the cause and effect, the emotional link, was close and direct. He gave as his most satisfying game the sixth game of the 1977 semi-finals, when he scored both goals in a 2-1 win that eliminated the Islanders. For the team, he said, it was the feeling he got when a game was under control. He mentioned a game the following year, 1978, the sixth game of the finals against the Bruins. After beating the Bruins in four straight games the year before, we started the same way, easily winning the first two games in Montreal. Then, shocking both ourselves and the Bruins, we went to Boston and lost twice. We won again in Montreal, and returned to Boston Garden for the sixth game. In the early minutes, Brad Park scored for the Bruins on a long screened shot. Quickly we tied the score, then at 9:20 of the first period, Mario Tremblay scored to put us ahead 2-1. It was the winning goal.

Late in the second period, the score 3-1, I was waiting for a faceoff in the Bruins’ zone when it happened. It was as if the game suddenly stopped, and I stepped outside it for a moment and saw everything as I had felt it all along. I could sense the same feeling in the crowd, and in the Bruins players. Our control was so complete, so unshakably complete, that while there were more than twenty minutes to play, and the score was close, Tremblay’s goal would be the winner, and we all knew it.

Because of his style, because of the role he plays on a team, the moment a game is under control is the moment of Gainey’s triumph.

For us, that moment usually comes when we score so often that the gap of goals is so wide and the time so short that a comeback is no longer possible. On this night, we scored only four goals, the Bruins were never far behind, and there was always time for something to happen. But nothing could happen. The tempo of the game was set; the mood was set; our control was absolute. For more than half the game, Gainey could savor that moment in triumph.

One time, reading something which mentioned repeatedly that Gainey scored very few goals, Lynda turned to me a little surprised and said that while she had watched him play for almost five years, she had never realized that. Then she shrugged, and went on to something else, as if in Gainey’s case it somehow wasn’t relevant. While a team needs all kinds of players with all kinds of skills to win, it needs prototypes, strong, dependable prototypes, as examples of what you want your team to be. If you want it to be quick and opportunistic, you need a Lafleur and a Shutt, so that those who can be quick are encouraged to try, and those who cannot will move faster than they otherwise might. If you want a team to be cool and unflappable, you need at least one Savard, to reassure you, to let you know that the time and the team needed to do what you want are still there. If you want a team to be able to lift a game, to find an emotional level higher than any opponent can find, you need players like Lapointe and Tremblay, mercurial players who can take it there. And if you want a team game, where the goal is the team and the goal is to win, you need a player with an emotional and practical stake in a team game, a player to remind you of that game, to bring you back to it whenever you forget it, to be the playing conscience of the team. Like Bob Gainey.

Early in the second period, Lambert deflects Savard’s long shot and we move ahead 2-1. The pace of the game accelerates, moving from end to end for a time, then gradually settling into our zone.

Lapointe loses his stick, and, under harassing pressure, grabs at a loose puck and is penalized. For more than a minute, Jarvis and Gainey disrupt the Leafs’ power play, but when Robinson falls going after McDonald in the corner, we start chasing the puck, always an open man behind. Finally, with no one in front of him, Salming moves in from the point. As three players rush for him, he passes to Sittler at the goal crease and the game is tied again.

While Sittler’s line has been shut down by Jarvis, except on the power play, the Leafs’ checking line has done the same to Lemaire, Lafleur, and Shutt, giving the Leafs enormous confidence. For it was here that they worried they would be badly outmatched. But now, with each shift that passes that shows they aren’t, an excited feeling builds and spreads among their players—they now think they can play with us. The quality of the game improves, and the Leafs begin to take over.

Suddenly, Napier intercepts a clearing pass and scores. Thirty seconds later, his linemate Hughes does the same. The effect is crushing.

Juggled in and out of the line-up by Bowman, Napier and Hughes trade places with Larouche, Chartraw, or Connor, depending on the game. Tonight, with the game in Toronto, they are playing because they are from Toronto. The Leafs began this game hoping to win, but afraid that Lemaire, Lafleur, and Shutt could not be stopped; afraid that Robinson, Lapointe, and Savard were too good to allow them enough chances to score. They have stopped the Lemaire line, they have made our defense look ordinary. But within thirty seconds, two players they didn’t know would play have put them out of the game. At this moment, the Leafs players, those on the bench and those on the ice, are saying to themselves, “There is no way we can ever beat this team.”

The Leafs begin the third period with a spasm of pressure, but Williams high-sticks Jarvis and the spasm ends. The crowd chants

“Bull-shit! Bull-shit!” to the penalty call, sounding more titillated by its own chant than angry. Palmateer makes two more spectacular saves, both from rebounds he could have prevented, then Napier scores again. The rest of the game is a surly shambles. Without the feeling they had briefly in the second period, the Leafs look inept. It all looks very sad. Late in the game Mondou scores, then McDonald and Maloney for the Leafs.

After the game, I see my father, and the fathers of Risebrough and Jarvis, Napier and Hughes. They have watched their sons play many games for many years, and tonight, though they are careful not to show it, they look proud, as if it was all worth it. I walk over to where my father is standing and he introduces me to a friend he invited to the game. A few years ago, many years after she had wanted to say it, my mother asked Dave and me if we would mind if she did not attend any more games. She said that she had enjoyed going, but that the games made her worry, and she hoped we would understand. Later, my father told us that whenever she went to a game, she would watch until the puck came into our zone, then look at her feet until it had left again. Finally, she found that even that was not enough.

My father and I talk for a few minutes; the other man listens. My father says something about the game, I say something back, quickly and flippantly, trying to tell him that I don’t want to talk about it. After a few awkward pauses, we realize we said all that we wanted to say last night and this morning. We shake hands and say good-bye.

I walk out to the bus. The sidewalk is filled with a scrum of autograph-seekers, yelling, jostling, pushing out paper scraps and pencil scraps, sometimes getting the same ones back. As I near the bus, a dark, tired-looking woman, in her late thirties, asks me to autograph her hand. She holds it out and I cradle it in mine. Her pen bumps across her veins and tendons, tugging, skipping over loose skin almost illegibly. When I’m done, she thanks me, smiles, and gives my hand a gentle squeeze.

The lights are turned off, the bus is dark. I lie back in my seat.

Outside, through the bus’s tinted windows, scores of people stare, bobbing their bodies, straining for a familiar face, and when they see one, pointing at it, yelling for friends to see what they are seeing.

Inside, someone makes a sound like a chimp.

“That’s it, you bastards,” another voice shouts. “Look at the ani-mals. Take a good fuckin’ look,” and here and there I hear laughter.

I’m angry—at the last two goals, at the game, at the Leafs, at the Gardens, at me; at people who all day have promised me a Leafs-Canadiens rivalry. There is no Leafs-Canadiens rivalry. It’s dead: the Leafs killed it.

I feel duped.

THURSDAY

“Our friends, the enemy.”

—Pierre-Jean de Béranger,

L’Opinion de ces demoiselles

Boston

It is early morning. The beer has been drunk, the meals have been eaten, the exuberant sounds that winners make when they win have been made, and now, drained out, are gone. It is quiet. Typewriters that hammered out word of our victory for an audience still hours away, backgammon boards, playing cards, have all been packed up and put away. The aisles of the plane are empty; the cabin, its overhead lights turned off, lies at dusk. For the thirty-five players, coaches, trainers, and journalists who make up this travelling band, yesterday is finally over. We sink back in our seats, suddenly weary.

I close my eyes, then open them again and stare out at the night.

From under the wing, a red aura of light flickers on and off hypnoti-cally. Down below, small unconnected islands of white and yellow light, the towns and villages of western Massachusetts, inch by several seconds apart. I lean forward and rest my head against the window, feeling its coolness, fogging it with my breath, blinking at the filigree landscape as it drifts beneath me.

Ahead, the patches of light broaden and run up against each other and I know that Boston is not far away.

The plane banks sharply to the right, south over the northern coastal towns of Swampscott, Lynn, and Nahant; then, levelling off, it leaves the coast and moves out to sea. Out from behind the plane, I see the moon for the first time, brilliant and full, its crystal-white light reflecting on the water, turning it the shimmering black of slate. The right wing of the plane dips gently, then steeply, driving me deeper into my seat, and the plane spirals back towards land. Over Hull, Cohasset, Quincy, and South Boston, over Boston Harbor, casing lower and lower until every light disappears for long suspended seconds, and we hit the runway. It is 2 a.m.

I stir, then I hear it again. Sharp and penetrating, again and again, until, gradually awake enough, I know what it is. “Yes?” I yell, my voice still muffled with sleep.

“Just checking for occupancy, sir,” a voice sounds, and everything goes quiet again. It is the universal hotel maid, a pass-key in her hand, standing in front of my door inches from a sign that hangs from its handle and reads “do not disturb.”

A few seconds later, I hear the same sound, then again, less sharp and penetrating each time as she moves from room to room along the hall. It is 8 a.m.

On the Road Again

For two days in the East, for four sunny, warm days in the West, I like the road. I like the feeling of moving, of being in a hurry, of doing something even when sometimes I’m not. Of being in one place, and a few hours later being some place else. I like the energy I get from airports and planes, from hotels and tall buildings, from downtown sounds and traffic jams of people. I like travelling a continent to walk on its streets, to see its people, to know its names and places, to observe, to get a sense of it before I leave; then weeks, months, years later, to go back to see if it or I have changed. I like finding the places I’m supposed to find, and then finding others, no undiscovered gems, just public places I can make private and important to me, that I return to each time—to Stanley Park, lush and green on rare and rainless days in Vancouver; to the mountains in Colorado, and deserts in California; to bookshops in Greenwich Village, to Washington Square at New York University for the menagerie of life’s performers that gathers there; to Harvard and MIT, and along the Charles River which joins them, moving with Boston’s joggers, cyclists, and crews as they push back the winter and reawaken with the spring. And by the time I leave a place, to feel some vague reassuring comfort, as if coping with freeways and frenetic life-styles, with the Rangers, Bruins, and Kings, means somehow I have made it there.

More than that, I like the spirit and freedom of the road, the chance to be alone in a life overcrowded with people. I enjoy walking downtown and going unrecognized; watching others, as in Montreal they watch me. With wife and children miles away and no family life to lead, I like to get up, to eat, to sleep, to walk, to talk, to shop, to read, to rent a car when I want to. With only a game to prepare for, with many hours to fill, I enjoy having unbusied, unbothered time
for
me
. And for the team. With no appointments to keep, no agents, no lawyers or accountants to interrupt us, it is our chance to rediscover the team. It happens over a meal, at a table of empty beer bottles, on planes or buses, in card games or golf games, wearing clothes that seem right, but laughingly are not, in the awful, outrageous stories we tell that we’ve told too often before; it is our time, as Pete Mahovlich once put it, to “act stupid together.”

But life on the road comes at a price. The energy it gives, the freedom you feel, it takes away, and more—twenty-six weeks a season, eighty games, from bus to plane to bus to hotel to bus to arena to bus to plane, to a leagueful of cities three times a week. A rhythm like any other rhythm, it is one you get used to; except this one is always changing and you never do. Like a skillful runner in a distance race, it sets the pace and plays with you; going slower than you want it to, speeding up before you are ready, gradually wearing you down, until after four games in five nights in four different cities, you are weak and vulnerable, and it sprints away from you.

Several times a year it happens to me—a game at night, chartering into the early morning, waking up in you-don’t-know-where and you really don’t care, hung over from fatigue, arms and legs aching for sleep, last night’s snack five hours stale in your mouth. A shower, a shave, and they all go away; twenty minutes later, they’re back. You take an afternoon nap to get you through a game; a game, a flight, a new hotel, and you can’t sleep because you slept in the afternoon. It means going from nap to nap and from game to game, just one never-ending day with no big sleep to send you on to the next one. Then the phone goes off like electrodes in your brain, and you’re up again.

Morning, afternoon, a plane, a game, you don’t know which and you really don’t care. There are newspapers on the bed, shirt, jacket, and pants are slung in a chair, a tie, tied and untied until it’s seersuckered, lies sprawled on the floor, still tied. You reach for your suitcase; inside you find fresh clothes, freshly wrinkled, and what the hell, you grab the old ones and put them on again. In. Out. Two points and a season to go. You’re on the run and you’ll never catch up until it’s over.

It’s life in a revolving door—home, away, home again—spinning around and around until Montreal is one more stop on the road, and you’re never really anywhere but on the way. Just picking up, packing up, and moving on, you are never around to see how things turn out.

A bump on the head, a trip to the hospital, and 2000 miles later you say, “How’re ya feeling, Sarah?” You have an argument, time’s up—

“We’ll talk about it when I get back.” It’s a road mentality, popping in, performing for the troops, popping out again. There are no commitments, no responsibilities; we let absence become the tie that binds.

Then one day, “Daddy’s coming home”—and lives get rearranged; new dresses are put on, rooms get cleaned up, and special meals are prepared. We arrive with gifts, are treated like special company, and everything is wonderfully the same. Except this time, where once you left loneliness, where you left a family to live off the goodness of neighborhood fathers, you come home to a family that has learned to cope; a family that has built a life without you.

I turn over and try to sleep, but quickly give up. Fumbling for my glasses on the bedside table, I roll upright to the edge of the bed, my elbows on my knees, eyes still closed. Slowly, they open. A few feet away, Risebrough stirs and is asleep again. I look around. The color of the wallpaper, the arrangement of the room—I have been here before.

I try to remember yesterday, and piece it together—the game, the flight, the bus ride from the airport—and it comes to me. This is Boston. Slowly in my stomach and legs I get a feeling, a gnawing uneasiness, then in my chest and throat a fear.
I don’t want to play
tonight
. I don’t want the hours of anxious waiting that must come first.

The spasms of memory—the Bruins, my last game in Boston—that will interrupt me through the day; I don’t want the two and a half hours that will come at the end, hours I can’t control, that will make me work and sweat, that might embarrass me, that will give me a mood to carry around until the next game. I don’t want it, any of it. In Boston, ready or not, I feel trapped, with no way out but to play.

Twenty minutes later, I am showered, shaved, and dressed, and the feeling is almost forgotten.

The elevators stop and go with the early-morning rush, opening and closing at every floor but too full for anyone else to get on. In the lobby, men, or men with women, in suits and ties, and carrying briefcases, stand in check-out lines, watching their watches, moving ahead one step at a time. Others crisscross hurriedly to the newsstand, to the front desk or the bell captain’s stand, emptying up escalators to restaurants on the mezzanine, filing from restaurants and elevators, emptying to parking lots and taxi-stands outside. Near the front door, his back against a square lobby—high pillar, Larry Robinson is reading a newspaper.

Taller, broader, younger than those around him, he shuffles his body and straightens up as I get closer, and looks much bigger. Erect, angular like an Easter Island statue, a bush of curly brown-red hair covering his head, he is not football-big or basketball-big, but, pushing as he does the limits of
normal
big, to those who pass unable to keep themselves from taking a second look his size seems remarkable.

If you were to close your eyes and think of Larry Robinson, before you thought of his occasional punishing body-checks, or his amiable rawboned farmboy look, you would think of his size, It is his defining feature. As a boy, it was what held him back, and gave him his chance; what made coaches wonder and pro scouts drool; what gave him his potential, and made him slow to realize it. Maturing, slowly gaining control of his distant parts, it was what finally made him a star, and created the Bunyanesque expectations of him not always fulfilled. Like other big men, like a rich man’s son or a beautiful girl, he has spent much of his life denying what he is, anxious to prove, ostensibly to others but really to himself, that he is more than just big, that he is what he is by his own merit, not by a quirk of genetics.

Although I must have seen him in two training camps before, I have no memory of him until his first NHL game in Minnesota. It was early January 1973, and with injuries to many of our defensemen, Robinson was called up from the Voyageurs. When I walked into the dressing room before the game, there he was, already half dressed, looking taller, more rawboned, more angular than he does now. With our defense depleted, seeing Robinson didn’t make me feel any better.

But he played a remarkable game poised, in solid control defensively, moving surprisingly well, with only a hint of lanky awkwardness. And what I recall most vividly, a goalie’s memory, was that he blocked shots. (It wouldn’t last long. After the first burst of rookie’s enthusiasm wore off, he became like the rest.)

When our injured defensemen returned, Robinson remained with the team, but for the rest of the year and for much of the next three, he was only occasionally as good. Alternating long moments where he did little with shorter frenzied bursts where he tried to do everything to make up for it, he seemed disoriented, as if searching for a game to play. A pet project of Al MacNeil with the Voyageurs, he became one with Ruel, spending long additional time with him on the ice before and after practice. Gradually his choppy, legs—akimbo stride length-ened and grew forceful; the dangerously erratic shots that had sent teammates from the front of the net to the relative safety of the corners now came in low enough often enough to bring them back for rebounds; his puck-handling and passing more confident and certain, he was becoming an immense ragbag of rapidly developing skills. But he needed something around which to organize these new skills: like Lafleur’s quickness, Bobby Hull’s shot, Maurice Richard’s insistent passion, something to focus his game, the stereotype skill to which the others could attach and find meaning, something that was his own.

The one original part of his game around which it might be done he seemed anxious to deny. He had been a “big stiff” all his hockey life, the promise of muscle and intimidation his major
raison d’être
. Now he wanted the satisfaction and self-respect he felt in another game. And so he continued to search and experiment. At times copying the all-ice consumption of Bobby Orr, at other times swooping around the defensive zone with the elastic grace of Salming, most often he played with the same non-violent elegance and disinterested cool as Savard.

But nothing quite worked.

Then, in 1976, out of two separate events four months apart, Robinson became an original. The first was the Stanley Cup finals with Philadelphia. After they had won two consecutive Stanley Cups, this was the last go-round of the “Broad Street Bullies,” but with Dave Schultz, Jack Mcllhargey, Don Saleski, Bob Kelly, and others, they were still a hugely intimidating team. We knew that to beat them we would need to neutralize their intimidation (in order to free up the rest of our game, which we knew to be superior); so Bowman lined up Bouchard, Chartraw (in Philadelphia), Risebrough, Tremblay, and Robinson against them. We won the first game in Montreal, and were leading midway through the third period of the second, when Gary Dornhoefer, a tall, lean, irritating winger for the Flyers, moved across our blueline. From his left defense position, Robinson angled over to play him. In most arenas, when struck by colliding bodies, the boards whip obligingly out of shape, absorbing much of the force of the blow before whipping back into position again. Not so in the Forum.