The Game (21 page)

The Bruins and Canadiens in Boston Garden is my favorite game to play: bursting with energy and commitment, our speed always threatening to break out, on the smaller ice surface their strength and muscle usually holding us back, making us be stronger, making them go faster, bringing out the fullest and best in both of us. Too cramped and bruising for pretty plays, too gut involving, it is a game of players, not skills, and without such distractions, a game where you see
people
, unguarded and exposed, and come away thinking you know them:

• O’Reilly, racing, spinning, falling, everything faster, harder, than he can control; on his knees, on his back, usually with someone else, up again before the other guy is.

• Cashman, skating bent and stiff like an old man with a sore back, chopping ahead with effort and little speed, getting where he needs to go.

• Park, like a fire hydrant on a freeway, players moving quickly by on either side of him, but knowing the lanes that players use for skating and passing, intercepting them, then starting up with his quick windmill stride, moving thirty feet to another play.

• Cheevers, playing goal like a defenseman, playing the man instead of the puck, knowing the man, knowing the situation and moving first; like a high-roller in a crap shoot, knowing if he’s wrong, his luck will change.

• Cherry, standing in back of the bench, on the bench, on top of the boards, screaming and gesturing ostensibly to the referee; standing down again, quiet, a tiny permanent grin on his face, like a ten-year-old kid holding a stink bomb behind his back.

• And the crowd, brawny and rough like its team, but without the meanness of crowds in Philadelphia or New York. Under it all, something good-natured and generous that shows through. It’s a crowd expressive and involved, building with the action, suddenly swarming over you, shrill at first, then deep and resounding, making the exciting more exciting, fusing excitement into the game before it can escape.

• And the Garden itself. old and dirty, not unlike sports neighbor Fenway Park, but its quirks unsoftened, uneulogized by the romance of baseball, and what makes Fenway a cherished anomaly makes the Garden an embarrassment. For me it is special. It has to do with three ECAC championships and two thousand Cornell fans sounding as people on pilgrimage sound. It has to do with the 1971 series, and with a game four years later, when, after a year out of hockey and struggling in a comeback, I was reminded that I still could play.

It has to do with the Bruins, Boston University, Boston College, and Harvard, good, tough competition that makes seasons interesting, exciting, and worthwhile. It has to do with winning and rarely losing, and never losing an important game.

The Boston Garden ice surface is small enough to involve me in every game. Its steep, balconied seats bring intimate, exciting contact between the fans and us, and the game. And in an age when new arenas go up like modern cathedrals, often dramatic on the outside, usually uniform and dull inside, the Garden is engagingly maladroit: its huge scoreboard clock that hangs distinctly offcenter; its commem-orative banners, on one side of center ice, thirteen large “world champions” banners, green and white for the Celtics—on the other in yellow and black those of the Bruins, one each for sixteen Division Championships and four Stanley Cups, all cluttered together, looking like the morning wash; its dull red seats that hide dirt and always look dirty; the ubiquitous flat yellow wash that covers its walls and balcony facings, the one great attempt to brighten it up, not glossy, not bright, looking at least one coat too thin. All of it together somehow fits, giving the Garden its unique personality. To me, Boston Garden is like a dishevelled friend.

First the Bruins, then us, but neither of us able to take the game in hand, finally it settles into its usual twisting, swinging equilibrium.

Then, early in the third period, when we’re behind twenty-one, Robinson ties the game on a power play; and a few minutes later, Tremblay wins it.

We pile onto the bus in a winner’s high, loud and loose, full of ourselves, full of a feeling beyond our control. At the back, strangely playful, Bowman and Ruel argue about the game, Bowman looking around, smiling, winking at those who turn to listen, Ruel arguing on.

But beneath the noise and energy, there is something else. At the front, a bus-length away from Bowman and Ruel, a voice whispers to each of us as we pass to our seats, “Need any?” and the whispered answers vary.

From two or three duffel bags almost out of sight on the floor, passed with the invisible randomness of a sidewalk spy exchange, slipped quickly under coats, into pockets or bags—beer, still chilled and sweating, dispensed like precious contraband. At our seats cans are taken out, smothered over by coats to muffle the tiny explosions as they’re opened, then elbows unraised, heads untilted, chins tuck, wrists turn, and bodies slide out of sight down the backs of seats, lower as the cans empty. Finally as each is drained, it is stuffed back into pockets or bags to be disposed of later. Officially, there is no drinking on the bus; unofficially, the same rite is performed after every game.

The bus starts up, the beer spills down, and words begin to flow.

One by one, laser-like reading lights extinguish; one by one tiny orange discs appear, glowing brightly with each languorous breath, as cigar smokers, with the world by its tail, settle into their mood. And slowly, as the bus turns from dusk to dark, the talk softens and runs out of steam. It is now when a game feels best, when bodies and minds clenched all day suddenly release and feelings gently wash over you.

Lying back in my seat, my eyes wide open, I let it happen.

Nearing the airport, the bus bounces to an abrupt halt. Left unse-cured on a seat, an empty beer can jumps to the floor and shatters everything. Backs settled in comfortably spring upright and freeze, and wait; and there is more silence. But when the driver starts up again, the can begins to roll. And roll. Under seats, between feet dancing to get in its way, on and on for long, anguished seconds. “Jesus Christ,” we murmur and scream at the same time, “somebody stop it!”

But no one can. Then, just as abruptly as it all began, it stops, and is silent again. Our shoulders still hunched, our heads unmoving, we wait. But the voice at the back says nothing. Relieved and excited, we can’t believe our luck. We’ve gotten away with it again.

Of course, at the back of the bus, Bowman and Ruel know exactly what’s going on. They know about the beer, they can guess at the duffel bags, the coats, and everything else. But by being discreet, we have made it seem possible that they don’t know. We’ve allowed them to avoid the uncomfortable position of having to accept what they feel they cannot, or reject what they know they should not. Instead, far from the action, they can officially “not know.” And they will continue not knowing until indiscreetly we lose a few games. Then, what went so long unseen will mysteriously flare to their attention—

“That’s it, drink up,” the voice at the back will say. “Ya forget we lost, Tremblay?” But tonight we played our parts well, and so will they.

Officially, it must have been a pop can.

Last Sunday, the Sabres reminded us that we could still play the way we need to play; tonight, we confirmed to ourselves that nothing much has changed. Though almost the same thing, there is in fact an important difference. For the Sabres game, bringing with it no special expectations, need not have happened, at least not then. But tonight could have been no other way, no other time. In the career of any player, there is a time when he will not get any better, when he can only work and struggle, and hope not to get worse. In the cycle of any team, it is the same. For the team and me, it is that time now. Disappointed that we’ve shown our special skills so rarely, excited here and there when we do, frustrated again when they go away, none the less we can be optimistic that tomorrow or the next day or next week those skills will return for good. For we have seen them and felt them; we know they are there. But other things can’t be passed off until tomorrow.

They must be met as they come, as they always had been met, and if they aren’t, it will mean something is undeniably different, something which now cannot be reversed. We might have played poorly and lost to the Sabres, for we often do. We can’t play poorly against the Bruins and not know something has changed. So moments ago, in the sound of words and laughter streaming loudly through the bus, there was excitement, and immense relief.

Like a stop-watch to a sprinter, it is the reliable opponent that tells a team where it stands. The Bruins are not as good as we are, and so in Montreal we win, and in Boston we tie or win; but the difference between us is small, and by playing their best as they always do, they force us to play our best, so each time we play them we find out what our best is. And I find out mine. It is an important thing to know, and year after year, only the Bruins do that for us.

As a senior at Cornell, I was co-winner of Boston University’s“(m)ost honored opponent” award, given for games against BU through a college career. Though I had won other, more prestigious awards, it was one that meant much to me, for BU had meant much to me as a player. Our closest Eastern rival, they were the necessary other side in many of my most fundamental moments, the inspiration and competitive prod for them, irrevocably and fondly associated with them. My first season, starting because of an injury to the team’s senior goalie, I played through several promising but undistinguished games, on the verge of something more, yet timorously waiting. After a 3-3 double overtime tie with BU, I suddenly felt I could make it the way I wanted to make it. I had broken through. A few months later, we played twice within a week: in the first period of the ECAC final, I survived great pressure to learn something about myself I needed to know; then, during the warm-up for the NCAA championship game, feeling skates, pads, gloves, and stick move the way they never did, I could feel myself a real goalie for the first time. There were other games other years with lesser BU teams, not quite good enough to expose new strengths or weaknesses in us, but good enough to make us confirm what was already there, which games against other teams seldom did.

What BU was, what the Bruins are now, is a good opponent, a rare and treasured thing for any team or player. For a good opponent defines a player or a team. By forcing you to be as good as you can be, such an opponent stretches the boundaries of your emotional and playing experience, giving you your highest highs and lowest lows; your best and worst and hardest moments. When you get to an age or to a moment that causes you to look back, you realize how important that is. After years of games and feelings, it is only those boundaries, those special highs and lows, that remain; the rest, with nothing special to distinguish them one from another, gradually just disappear.

It is why good teams and good players, good enough to stand alone, stand straighter and more vividly with a good opponent: the Yankees with the Dodgers, Borg with McEnroe, Ali and Frazier, names permanently linked because in fact they needed each other.

After days and weeks of Red Sox and White Sox, Wepners, Nastases, and Mildenbergers, each needed a good opponent to make him best, to make him memorable, to give him cherished lifelong feelings. So, when a career ends, when the passion of the game subsides, towards a good opponent you feel only gratitude.

FRIDAY

“Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.

Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.”

—Bertolt Brecht,
Galileo

Montreal

Eddy Palchak left the forum at 3 o’clock this morning. When our charter from Boston landed, as we walked to cars that would take us home, Palchak, with assistant Pierre Meilleur, was unloading equipment bags from the plane into a van that would take them to the Forum. There, he and Meilleur unpacked the bags, hanging the equipment to dry, piling underwear, socks, jocks, and sweaters in the laundry room to be washed by a Forum assistant when he arrived early this morning. Then, with only a few hours’ sleep, at 9:30 a.m. he was back, setting out a second set of underwear, sharpening several pairs of skates for the noon practice. By 3:30 this afternoon, more than an hour after the last player has left, he will leave the Forum again. Tomorrow, with a game at night, he will arrive for our morning skate an hour earlier than usual, at 8:30, leaving again at 1 p.m., arriving back at the Forum at 5 p.m., finally finding his bed in a Philadelphia hotel, after the game, after the plane ride, after unpacking the bags and hanging up the wet equipment at the Spectrum, some time after 3 a.m.

For Palchak, a friendly, conscientious man with a round pillow face and wonderful Buddy Hackett-like smile, it is a familiar routine. In the two hundred and fifty days between mid-September and mid-May, he will work every day but Christmas and two or three others that he won’t know about until the day before. For more than twelve years, first as assistant trainer, now as trainer, of the Canadiens, it has been his life-style, and now, late in the season, he is beginning to feel it as he always does.

He is tired. It happens to him slowly, but with next week always worse than the week before, until about now, listless and drained, he hits bottom. Tomorrow, he thinks, with a good night’s sleep he’ll feel better, so today’s work is put off until tomorrow, and by mid-afternoon he’s back in his apartment for the sleep he knows will never come. A few hours later, still awake, he goes to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

Then, instead of a movie or going to the race track as he might have done in October, he returns to his apartment, watching TV until he falls asleep. Tomorrow, he wakes up one day more tired, with more than one day’s work to do. A bachelor, Palchak has a girlfriend, but working during the week she finds it hard to go out on week nights; Palchak, occasionally free during the week, works weekends. Friday was once their night, the night their schedules brought them together. But now, for Palchak, nearing forty and feeling it, Friday is a night to rest up for the weekend.

Though he never complains, for the last few years he has found each year a little harder. The travel seems worse, though it probably isn’t, the equipment bags, trunks, and everything else have come to feel heavier, and they aren’t. And though he suffers none of the back problems beginning to plague some of his veteran NHL colleagues, since dropping a portable skate-sharpening machine on his left knee last season he’s had trouble with all the lifting his job requires. But mostly what gets him down, when anything does, is the hours: every day for most of the day, for much of the year, a life-style that allows little else to intrude. When others eat, when others sleep, when others go to the movies or to the track, Palchak can’t. Instead, he gets by on snacks, sleeping when he can, eating on the run, everything else waiting for the season to end. On planes, sitting in the middle of a card game—asleep; working through lunch and dinner, eating mid-afternoons and midnights, a life even farther from the mainstream than our own. Yet it’s a life he enjoys. For he knows the feeling he has now will soon disappear, that as playoffs draw close, energy systematically drained away by a season will mysteriously reappear, the feeling forgotten until next year at this time. He may get tired at times of acting as nursemaid and general “go-fer” for twenty high-strung athletes, and easily forget that he is part of a team, but tomorrow, Sunday, Tuesday, soon, he knows there will be a big win, an excited “My skates were super, Eddy,” and everything will feel different again.

Neither management nor player, Palchak inhabits the delicate middle ground, getting along with both at the expense of neither, trusted by both even when sometimes we don’t trust each other. Quiet and unobtrusive, he enjoys the background and manages the role with instinctive ease. When either side tries to gain quick advantage, as each sometimes does, and looks for his help—Bowman by asking him the off-ice habits of players; the players about travel schedules which Bowman keeps to himself—Palchak hasn’t heard anything, he hasn’t seen anything. And if it’s clear he has, he will skillfully avoid the question, without confrontation, without hard feeling, or direct it to where it more properly should go. He knows that if he compromises the dual trust he holds and becomes a “player’s man” or a “coach’s spy,” he can never reverse the compromise, and cannot do his job. For it’s up to him to be the unseen man, to do what needs to be done, without flash, without fail, without disturbing the players or coaches from what they must do. He is a survivor in a survivor’s job. Palchak has gone through four coaches, four sets of owners, and two generations of players; he will go through more.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired. It is how February feels and it’s how I feel this morning. I wake with a cold I didn’t have when I went to bed a few hours ago, my body sore like the second day of training camp, stiff and tight like eggshells, breaking apart with brittle pain each move I make. A few years ago, it was a feeling I almost enjoyed, the pain a reminder of what I had gone through to feel that way, feeling old, and knowing I wasn’t; knowing that the pain would soon go away to make me feel even better. But now, though it will go away and be gone when it must be gone, it stays longer, just long enough to make me wonder if this time it might stay.

After I park in my usual place, I shuffle slowly down Atwater, past Sherbrooke and Lincoln, changing from limp to limp until finding one more comfortable. It is mild enough to feel warm, and I open my ski jacket. Remnants of Tuesday’s snowfall melt into sudden pond-like puddles, dirty and ankle deep, that will be frozen again by tomorrow.

Up ahead, partly obscured by a high-rise apartment building, are the back and side of the Montreal Forum. Counterpart to baseball’s Yankee Stadium, to soccer’s Wembley, the Forum is hockey’s shrine, a glorious melting pot of team, city, and sporting tradition. Yet from this angle, from any angle, it seems a little disappointing. It is not elegant, not dramatic, not exciting or controversial; it is a cautious, box-like mix of browns and beiges, pebbled concrete, glazed brick, and alu-minum that but for its height might look more at home in a suburban industrial park. Indeed, it makes but one compromise to architectural packaging. In its lobby, four escalators cross, and when lighted they can be seen through tinted glass windows to form two enormous crossed hockey sticks.

Inside, at first it seems little different: an elongated bowl of red, white, and blue seats, richly enamelled, its ice a glacial blue, here and there touches of neon, bright, attractive, a nice building to be sure, but with nothing to dominate your eye—no dramatic color schemes, no wagon-wheel ceilings, no giant replay screens. Yet, in its unassuming elegance, it offers the right environment for hockey in Montreal. On the ice and off, it’s an environment that doesn’t try too hard, that doesn’t need to, where everything fits fans in stylish winter furs, usherettes in bright, tasteful uniforms, an operatic tenor, a special team, a style of play, and most of all a game. It is the Forum’s unique achievement.

Expansive yet intimate, exuberant yet unselfconscious, it supports and complements a game, never competing for your attention. And when a game ends, fading away, it gives you nothing to detail the impression it leaves—just a memory of the game and the unshakable feeling that you’ve watched it in its proper place.

Six or seven tiny, parka-ed figures meet me at the corner, none of them Peter. He has been absent from school lately and no one seems to know where he is. Shaking their heads, they think he must be sick.

Inside, a Forum workman straightens up from washing an executive car and flashes a thumbs-up sign, as others near him smile and nod the same. I smile back, trying to think of something to say, when suddenly “Doc” appears. At least fifty, a tiny whitehaired sprite not much more than a hundred pounds, Doc works in the purchasing office by day, and by night helps the visiting team’s trainers for home games, always dressing up in one of their emblemed shirts, calling them “my team,” roguishly playing the part. Playing theirs, the visiting players scream “spy” at him when he walks in their dressing room the first time; playing our part, we scream “traitor” when we see him in ours, threatening all manner of consequences if he ever comes back. Doc, stiffening as if for a fight, just threatens back, snarling that we’re going to lose, that his team is ready. Then we chase him out of the room, Doc laughing as he goes.

Now he skips down the Forum steps and is past me before he can stop. “Good game, sir,” he rasps with his usual mock formality. “Better watch my team tomorrow though.” Then, quickly looking around to see if anyone is watching, he leans over to me. “They’re hot,” he whispers, and knowing it’s the Wings and knowing they’re not, with a raspy “heh heh heh” he’s gone. He’s the kind of Runyonesque character traditionally associated with race tracks and boxing gyms, the guy on the fringes who gives sports its flavor, the guy who is now disappearing.

The Forum is disturbingly empty: just a few players sit quietly cocooned away in a dressing room; twenty-five or thirty staff work in distant upstairs offices; throughout the rest of its vast insides a few dozen men are busy washing, painting, fixing, tidying things up.

There is one other person. Entering the corridor to the dressing room, I hear muffled, reverberating sounds from the ice, and before I can see who it is, I know it’s Lafleur. Like a kid on a backyard rink, he skates by himself many minutes before anyone joins him, shooting pucks easily off the boards, watching them rebound, moving skates and gloved hands wherever his inventive instincts direct them to go.

Here, far from the expedience of a game, away from defenders and linemates who shackle him to their banal predictability, alone with his virtuoso skills, it is his time to create.

The Italians have a phrase,
inventa la partita
. Translated, it means to “invent the game.” A phrase often used by soccer coaches and journalists, it is now, more often than not, used as a lament. For in watching modern players with polished but plastic skills, they wonder at the passing of soccer
genius
—Pele, di Stefano, Puskas—players whose minds and bodies in not so rare moments created something unfound in coaching manuals, a new and continuously changing game for others to aspire to.

It is a loss they explain many ways. In the name of team play, there is no time or place for individual virtuosity, they say; it is a game now taken over by coaches, by technocrats and autocrats who empty players’ minds to control their bodies, reprogramming them with X’s and O’s, driving them to greater
efficiency
and
work rate
, to move
systems
faster, to move games faster, until achieving mindless pace. Others fix blame more on the other side: on smothering defenses played with the same technical sophistication, efficiency, and work rate, but in the nature of defense, easier to play. Still others argue it is the professional sports culture itself which says that games are not won on good plays, but by others’ mistakes, where the safe and sure survive, and the creative and not-so-sure may not.

But a few link it to a different kind of cultural change, the loss of what they call “street soccer”: the mindless hours spent with a ball next to your feet, walking with it as if with a family pet, to school, to a store, or anywhere, playing with it, learning new things about it and about yourself, in time, as with any good companion, developing an
understanding
. In a much less busy time undivided by TV, rock music, or the clutter of modern lessons, it was a child’s diversion from having nothing else to do. And, appearances to the contrary, it was creative diversion.

But now, with more to do, and with a sophisticated, competitive society pressing on the younger and younger the need for training and skills, its time has run out. Soccer has moved away from the streets and playgrounds to soccer fields, from impromptu games to uniforms and referees, from any time to specific, scheduled time; it has become an
activity
like anything else, organized and maximized, done right or not at all. It has become something to be taught and learned, then tested in games; the answer at the back of the book, the one and only answer. So other time, time not spent with teams in practices or games, deemed wasteful and inefficient, has become time not spent at soccer.

Recently, in Hungary, a survey was conducted asking soccer players from 1910 to the present how much each practiced a day. The answer, on a gradually shrinking scale, was three hours early in the century to eight minutes a day today. Though long memories can forget, and inflate what they don’t forget, if the absolute figures are doubtful, the point is none the less valid. Today, except in the bar-rios of Latin America, in parts of Africa and Asia, “street soccer” is dead, and many would argue that with it has gone much of soccer’s creative opportunity.

When Guy Lafleur was five years old, his father built a small rink in the backyard of their home in Thurso, Quebec. After school and on weekends, the rink was crowded with Lafleur and his friends, but on weekdays, rushing through lunch before returning to school, it was his alone for half an hour or more. A few years later, anxious for more ice time, on Saturday and Sunday mornings he would sneak in the back door of the local arena, finding his way unseen through the engine room, under the seats, and onto the ice. There, from 7:30(a).m. until just before the manager awakened about 11 a.m., he played alone; then quickly left. Though he was soon discovered, as the manager was also coach of his team Lafleur was allowed to continue, by himself, and then a few years later with some of his friends.