The Game (17 page)

On May 15, 1967, Boston traded Gilles Marotte, Pit Martin, and goalie Jack Norris to Chicago for Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge, and Fred Stanfield. With the Hawks, Norris would play briefly, then move on to Los Angeles, where, after a career total of fifty-eight games, he would leave the NHL and soon retire. Martin would do better. A smooth-skating, all-purpose center, in Chicago he fulfilled the abundant promise he had shown as a junior and gave the Hawks ten useful seasons. For Chicago, however, the key player was Marotte. Short, squat, a thunderous body-checker—“Captain Crunch” as he was later called in Los Angeles—unlike Potvin and Robinson, who came later and used the body-check sparingly and selectively, Marotte’s defensive game was based on it. It was a style made gradually anachronistic since the forward pass speeded up the game more than fifty years ago. But Marotte would continue to deliver checks that others still recall with a shudder and a laugh; he missed too often, however, and less than two years later, he too was gone from the Hawks.

It would prove the most one-sided trade in NHL history. It was not so much a disastrous one for Chicago, since Esposito, Hodge, and Stanfield had been disappointing and minor figures there, as one of incredible good fortune for the Bruins. In Boston, Hodge and Stanfield became important players; Esposito was a revelation.

A late-developing junior, Esposito had blossomed as a scorer in two minor-league seasons, and was brought to the Hawks, where he settled in to a comfortable career as Bobby Hull’s center, averaging nearly twenty-four goals a year over three seasons, not insignificant totals in pre-expansion times. But the Hawks were an established team, presided over by two great superstars, Hull and Stan Mikita. On and off the ice, its relationships were set, its roles carved out, and in time, little could change because Hull and Mikita were too good, and too young. Hull was the goal scorer, Mikita the playmaker, and the rest, including Esposito, fit in around them as support. On the ice, it was Esposito’s job to get Hull the puck; off the ice, an emotional and spirited man, he became that other part of his personality, the funny-man, the clown. So when Hawks general manager Tommy Ivan traded him to Boston, he traded a funny, playmaking twenty-four-goal scorer who had no room to be anything else, and perhaps never would have. Years later, at all-star games, and as teammates in the 1976

Canada Cup, after Esposito had broken Hull’s scoring records many times, they would come together as if time had frozen in 1967. There remained the same deference, a relationship that Hull never forced, but that Esposito insisted on. Bobby Hull was still the goal scorer.

In Boston, Esposito would move into Orr’s shadow, but with each playing a different position, and in different roles well-suited to them, they were perfect complements for each other—Orr the great generator, Esposito the great finisher; Esposito, ebullient and mercurial, Orr the driven perfectionist to keep him in check. With the Bruins, a team just taking shape, Esposito could create his own role. So with Hodge and Wayne Cashman to work the corners, he moved to the front of the net, wrestling defensemen for position, using his extraordinary strength and reach to free the big-bladed stick he used to receive their passes.

Then, seven or eight times a game and often more, without hesitation, he redirected those passes towards the net. Never a sniper like Mike Bossy or Rick Martin, he was a volume shooter. Entangled with defensemen as he was, few of his shots were hard enough or accurate enough to guarantee a goal, but over time many would go in. Taking tentative steps at first, he scored thirty-five goals his initial season in Boston, forty-nine his second. Then, as if the fifty-goal standard belonged only to a scoring elite—Richard, Hull, Geoffrion—that didn’t include him, he backed away, scoring only forty-three the next season. A year later, in 1971, he scored seventy-six goals.

Had he scored fifty, or even fifty-five, goals, he would have forced inevitable comparisons with Richard and Hull. He wouldn’t have fared well, predictably, because there is nothing spectacular, nothing legendary, about his game—no primeval fire in his eyes, no irresistible will that carries defensemen from the blueline to the net, no fifty-foot slap shots hard enough to kill a man.

He was just a slot player, unseen in a crowd that surrounded the net, somehow connected to a red light that flashed behind the goalie.

But he had scored seventy-six goals, forcing people to say he was
better
than Hull,
better
than Richard, and few were willing to do so. Instead, resentful, they disparaged him, blaming his success on expansion, attributing it to Orr. A year later, playing without an injured Orr and an ineligible Hull (who had signed with the rival WHA), Esposito led Team Canada through eight desperate games with the Soviets, and an eventual 4-3-1 series victory. While he was the leading scorer in the series, that is almost forgotten.
The
scorer was, and is, Paul Henderson, with three game-winning goals, including the series winner thirty-four seconds from the end of the eighth game. Instead, Esposito is remembered for his remarkable all-round play, for being the emotional heart of his team, the man who made a poignant impromptu speech to the nation on TV after the crushing fourth-game defeat in Vancouver.

Ironically, as time passes, the enormous accomplishment of Henderson, the goal scorer, fades, dismissed as a quirk of sports, more fluke than achievement, while Esposito’s accomplishment, this time less empirical, not built on statistics, continues to grow.

Then there was Orr.

It is not easy for a hockey player to dominate a game. A goalie, any goalie, can make a bad team win or a good team lose, he can dominate a
result
, but that is not the same thing. He cannot dominate a game, because, separate from the action of a game, he is not quite part of it.

In basketball, one man
can
dominate: usually a big man—Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Willis Reed, Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—able to play most of the game’s forty-eight minutes, and, as with any goalie, it might be
any
big man. It comes with the position.

But in hockey, seventeen players are rotated more or less equally five at a time, and rarely does anyone play much more than half a game. A forward or defenseman, a
special
forward or defenseman, might with unusual frequency find the right moment in a game and make a play that will swing a result. But for too long periods of time, the game goes on without him, and his impact can rarely be sustained. In the 1970s, only two players could dominate a game. One was Orr, the other Bobby Clarke. Clarke, a fierce, driven man, did it by the unrelenting mood he gave to a game, a mood so strong it penetrated his team and stayed on the ice even when he did not. Orr did it another way.

Great players have skills that set them apart. Virtuoso skills—

Hull’s shot, Lafleur’s quickness, Frank Mahovlich’s power and grace—skills that separate them from their opponents and from the game, but also from teammates less able. It is a platitude of sports that a great player makes everyone around him better, but when it is true, the effect is often just spillover and coincidental. Indeed, more commonly it works the other way—the great player has everyone around him to make
him
better. When a superstar comes onto the ice or onto a playing field, a game changes and is drawn to him. It is he who is at the center of the action, commanding it, directing it, his teammates little more than courtiers or spectators, their initiative sapped, their skills seconded. It is no petulant power play of a selfish superstar, it is the force and magnetism of his skills that have this effect. It is why great players rarely work well together (there can only be
one
ball or
one
puck at a time), and are more effective with players of complemen-tary and subservient skills—and so Cashman becomes Esposito’s cornerman, Jim Braxton O. J. Simpson’s blocker. Orr was the profound exception.

Perhaps it was because he lined up as a defenseman. Set back a few feet from the game with the time and perspective that offered, he could watch it, “taking pictures” as Bowman would say of him, finding its pattern, its rhythm, then at a moment he could choose, accelerate into its midst to turn two-man attacks into three, three into four. Orr was a brilliant skater, fast, quick, wonderfully maneuverable. While the speed of Hull, Mahovlich, and Lafleur, as forwards, often isolates them from teammates who cannot keep up, and robs them of the time necessary for effective combination play, as a defenseman, Orr gave his teammates a head start. With more ice in front of him, Orr could play full out, using all his special skills, and never lose contact. From behind, he could shape the game. He could see where it might go, then with no forward’s lanes to hold him back, he could take it there: pushing teammates, chasing them, forcing a pace higher than many thought they could play, supporting them with passes, bursting ahead, leading them, forcing them to rise to his game, always working with them. From behind, with several defenders in front of him, he
needed
his teammates, who in turn needed his extraordinary passing and intuitive skills to bring out
their
skills to make
him
better, in turn to make
them
better. It was what made him unique. By making everyone a con-tributor, he made everyone feel part of his own success, of their success. From last place to a Stanley Cup in four years, it could only happen because, as catalyst and driving force, Orr brought the Bruins along with him.

He was the rare player who changed the perceptions of his sport.

Until Orr, defensemen had been defenders, usually stocky and slow-footed, their offensive game complete when the puck had cleared the defensive zone. Even so-called “rushing defensemen” in pre-Orr times, Red Kelly, Tim Horton, and others, rarely went much beyond the center line, moving up only as a forward moved back, dropping out of the play as soon as they made their first pass. It was Orr who broke down the barriers separating offense and defense. Lining up as a defenseman, when the puck dropped, he became a “player,” his game in instant and constant transition, until with no real transition at all, neither defenseman nor forward,
both
defender and attacker, he attacked to score and keep from being scored against; he defended to prevent goals and create chances to score. It was what soccer commentators would call a “total” game, what we knew as hockey of the future, and it became the model for all defensemen to follow.

Earlier this season, after six operations on his left knee, after nine seasons spanning thirteen years, Orr retired. He has left defence a much-changed position. He has given it new perceptions, a new attitude that makes further change easier; but he left no heirs. The best of his contemporaries—Robinson, Potvin, Lapointe, Park, Salming—have tried at times to emulate him, but without the prodigious skating and puck-handling skills necessary for his all-ice, all-out, all-the-time game, they have settled back, never completely, not quite comfortably, into something more measured, more restrained. It is what works best for them. The style that was the style of the future remains very much that.

Orr and Esposito were the two great superstars of the time, and around them were the “big, bad Bruins,” winners of the Stanley Cup in 1970, source of the “Boston flu”—a groin-pull, hamstring pull, anything-pull to keep the faint-hearted out of Boston and safely away from them. It was a team of great personal chemistry, free-spirited in the worst of times, now as champions rousing and carousing like a pier-six brawl ready to happen. Hard living, hard laughing, a team both on and off the ice, they seemed the image of what every team should be. And on and off the ice, the wind finally at their backs, in the glow of good feeling that had taken over the city and their fans, they built an enormous roll of momentum.

When a player speaks of momentum, when a journalist nods and his reader nods with him, what each understands is an almost tangible feeling, in that player and in his team, that a season moving in a clear and distinct direction will not easily change. But while momentum comes and goes with wins and losses, it follows a player and a team when a game ends, and returns with them stronger for the next game.

For off the ice, surrounded by suddenly smiling faces, everything seen from the angle of victory, everything easier, happier, every next thing easier still, living itself seems easier and fuller, and brimming with energy and confidence; playing does too. It is what happens when all teams used to losing finally win, but the Bruins, carrying the spirit of the team with them wherever they went, seemed to do it better.

Scoring a record three hundred and ninety-nine goals and finishing easily in first place, as much as talent and muscle it was this powerful, uninhibited force so much a part of their personality that made them seem unbeatable.

Yet today, looking at a roster of the 1971 Canadiens, at first it seems hard to understand why we were such prohibitive underdogs.

With players like Jacques Laperrière, Terry Harper, Lapointe, and J. C. Tremblay on defense; Béliveau, Cournoyer, Marc Tardif, Houle, Henri Richard, Lemaire, John Ferguson, Pete and Frank Mahovlich up front, it seems a formidable team. And in the playoffs that year, it was. But it was a team of players we remember from a different time: Béliveau, Frank Mahovlich, and Richard from the late fifties and sixties; Lemaire, Lapointe, Tardif, and Pete Mahovlich from the mid and late seventies; a team a little too old and a little too young, both past its prime and before it. Indeed, of all its players, only Cournoyer was at his peak in 1971. But for six weeks in the spring of that year, older players whose best years were past found what had made them special one last time, and younger players, their reputations still years away, found it for the first time, and we met the Bruins on even ground.

It was an eleven-day, seven-game kaleidoscope of scrambles, hotels, plane rides, and feelings, but very few memories now remain: