The Game (22 page)

There is nothing unique to this story; only its details differ from many others like it. But because it’s about Lafleur it is notable. At the time, there were thousands like him across Canada on other noon-hour rinks, in other local arenas, doing the same. It was when he got older and nothing changed that his story became special. For as others in the whirl of more games, more practices, more off-ice diversions, more travel and everything else gave up solitary time as boring and unnecessary, Lafleur did not. When he moved to Quebec City at fourteen to play for the Remparts, the ice at the big Colisée was unavailable at other times, so he began arriving early for the team’s 6 p.m. practices, going on the ice at 5, more than thirty minutes before any of his teammates joined him. Now, many years later, the story unchanged, it seems more and more remarkable to us. In clichéd observation some would say it is a case of the great and dedicated superstar who is first on the ice, last off. But he is not. When practice ends, Lafleur leaves, and ten or twelve others remain behind, skating and shooting with Ruel. But every day we’re in Montreal, at 11 a.m., an hour before Bowman steps from the dressing room as signal for practice to begin, Lafleur goes onto the ice with a bucket of pucks to be alone.

Not long ago, thinking of the generations of Canadians who learned hockey on rivers and ponds, I collected my skates and with two friends drove up the Gatineau River north of Ottawa. We didn’t know it at the time, but the ice conditions we found were rare, duplicated only a few times the previous decade. The combination of a sudden thaw and freezing rain in the days before had melted winter-high snow, and with temperatures dropping rapidly overnight, the river was left with miles of smooth glare ice. Growing up in the suburbs of a large city, I had played on a river only once before, and then as a goalie. On this day, I came to the Gatineau to find what a river of ice and a solitary feeling might mean to a game.

We spread ourselves rinks apart, breaking into river-wide openings for passes that sometimes connected, and other times sent us hundreds of feet after what we had missed. Against the wind or with it, the sun glaring in our eyes or at our backs, we skated for more than three hours, periodically tired, continuously renewed. The next day I went back again, this time alone. Before I got bored with myself an hour or two later, with no one watching and nothing to distract me, loose and daring, joyously free, I tried things I had never tried before, my hands and feet discovering new patterns and directions, and came away feeling as if something was finally clear.

The Canadian game of hockey was weaned on long northern winters uncluttered by things to do. It grew up on ponds and rivers, in big open spaces, unorganized, often solitary, only occasionally moved into arenas for practices or games. In recent generations, that has changed.

Canadians have moved from farms and towns to cities and suburbs; they’ve discovered skis, snowmobiles, and southern vacations; they’ve civilized winter and moved it indoors. A game we once played on rivers and ponds, later on streets and driveways and in backyards, we now play in arenas, in full team uniform, with coaches and referees, or to an ever-increasing extent we don’t play at all. For, once a game is organized, unorganized games seem a wasteful use of time; and once a game moves indoors, it won’t move outdoors again. Hockey has become suburbanized, and as part of our suburban middle-class culture, it has changed.

Put in uniform at six or seven, by the time a boy reaches the NHL, he is a veteran of close to one thousand games—thirty-minute games, later thirty-two-, then forty-five-, finally sixty-minute games, played more than twice a week, more than seventy times a year between late September and late March. It is more games from a younger age, over a longer season than ever before. But it is less hockey than ever before.

For, every time a twelve-year-old boy plays a thirty-minute game, sharing the ice with teammates, he plays only about ten minutes. And ten minutes a game, anticipated and prepared for all day, travelled to and from, dressed and undressed for, means ten minutes of hockey a day, more than two days a week, more than seventy days a hockey season. And every day that a twelve-year-old plays only ten minutes, he doesn’t play two hours on a backyard rink, or longer on school or playground rinks during weekends and holidays.

It all has to do with the way we look at free time. Constantly preoccupied with time and keeping ourselves busy (we have come to answer the ritual question “How are you?” with what we apparently equate with good health, “Busy”), we treat non-school, non-sleeping or non-eating time, unbudgeted free time, with suspicion and no little fear. For, while it may offer opportunity to learn and do new things, we worry that the time we once spent reading, kicking a ball, or mindlessly coddling a puck might be used destructively, in front of TV, or“(g)etting into trouble” in endless ways. So we organize free time, scheduling it into lessons—ballet, piano, French—into organizations, teams, and clubs, fragmenting it into impossible-to-be-boring seg-ments, creating in ourselves a mental metabolism geared to moving on, making free time distinctly unfree.

It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching-manual, hockey-school skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practiced to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organize and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create.

But without such time a player is like a student cramming for exams.

His skills are like answers memorized by his body, specific, limited to what is expected, random and separate, with no overviews to organize and bring them together. And for those times when more is demanded, when new unexpected circumstances come up, when answers are asked for things you’ve never learned, when you must intuit and piece together what you already know to find new answers, memorizing isn’t enough. It’s the difference between knowledge and understanding, between a super-achiever and a wise old man. And it’s the difference between a modern suburban player and a player like Lafleur.

For a special player has spent time with his game. On backyard rinks, in local arenas, in time alone and with others, time without short-cuts, he has seen many things, he has done many things, he has
experienced
the game. He understands it. There is
scope
and
culture
in his game. He is not a born player. What he has is not a gift, random and otherworldly, and unearned. There is surely something in his genetic make-up that allows him to be great, but just as surely there are others like him who fall short. He is, instead,
a natural
.

“Muscle memory” is a phrase physiologists sometimes use. It means that for many movements we make, our muscles move with no message from the brain telling them to move, that stored in the muscles is a learned capacity to move a certain way, and, given stimulus from the spinal cord, they move that way. We see a note on a sheet of music, our fingers move; no thought, no direction, and because one step of the transaction is eliminated—the information-message loop through the brain—we move faster as well.

When first learning a game, a player thinks through every step of what he’s doing, needing to direct his body the way he wants it to go.

With practice, with repetition, movements get memorized, speeding up, growing surer, gradually becoming part of the muscle’s memory.

The great player, having seen and done more things, more different and personal things, has in his muscles the memory of more notes, more combinations and patterns of notes, played in more different ways. Faced with a situation, his body responds. Faced with something more, something new, it finds an answer he didn’t know was there.
He
invents the game
.

Listen to a great player describe what he does. Ask Lafleur or Orr, ask Reggie Jackson, O. J. Simpson, or Julius Erving what makes them special, and you will get back something frustratingly unrewarding.

They are inarticulate jocks, we decide, but in fact they can know no better than we do. For ask yourself how you walk, how your fingers move on a piano keyboard, how you do any number of things you have made routine, and you will know why.

Stepping outside yourself you can think about it and decide what must happen, but you possess no inside story, no great insight unavailable to those who watch. Such movement comes literally from your body, bypassing your brain, leaving few subjective hints behind.

Your legs, your fingers move, that’s all you know. So if you want to know what makes Orr or Lafleur special, watch their bodies, fluent and articulate, let them explain. They know.

When I watch a modern suburban player, I feel the same as I do when I hear Donnie Osmond or René Simard sing a love song. I hear a skillful voice, I see closed eyes and pleading outstretched fingers, but I hear and see only fourteen-year-old boys who can’t tell me anything.

Hockey has left the river and will never return. But like the“(s)treet,” like an “ivory tower,” the river is less a physical place than an
attitude
, a metaphor for unstructured, unorganized time alone. And if the game no longer needs the place, it needs the attitude. It is the rare player like Lafleur who reminds us.

There is a sense of destiny about Lafleur that is present only in a great player, and Lafleur has been a great player most of his life. A national figure at ten as star of the Quebec pee-wee tournament, moving up to Jr. A at fourteen, he amassed unprecedented scoring totals with the Remparts, and by seventeen was the kind of unmistakable star that a team will plan for and scheme for years ahead if it can. In May 1970, with two lower draft picks already acquired from other teams, the Canadiens traded Ernie Hicke and their first-round pick to the California Golden Seals for François Lacombe, cash and the Seals’(f)irst pick in the 1971 draft. In a draft that included such prospects as Marcel Dionne and Rick Martin, the Canadiens, with the first pick, selected Lafleur.

It was a propitious moment. Days before, with a triumphant tenth Stanley Cup, Béliveau, captain, aging hero and idol to Lafleur, had played his last game, announcing his retirement some weeks later. The torch was passed, the line of pre-eminent French-Canadian superstars beginning with “the Rocket,” Maurice Richard, more than thirty-five years before would continue unbroken. For a poor boy from a small pulp-and-paper town on the Ottawa River, the world was unfolding as it should—destiny calculated, manipulated, controlled by others; destiny none the less.

Now, eight years later, it is in a sense no less evident. He is a dazzling star, the best of his sport, his team more dominant than any since the last years of the Rocket. Wealthy, celebrated, emerging off-ice as a poised if not wholly polished public person, he has years of success ahead of him. Béliveau, the institutional embodiment of the team now elegantly blue-suited in upstairs offices, will eventually retire; Lafleur will retire and replace him, the torch will pass again.

It is an old story, now a rare one, confined mostly to the pages of adolescent fiction: a player, a team, and his sport. But now, with free-agentry to tempt him away, a player’s loyalty and self-interest divide, then collide, the rift wider, the collision more destructive, self-interest the winner at an ever younger age. Still, Lafleur seems untouched. No well-placed tattoos, no self-promoting blood of Canadiens’
bleu, blanc,
et rouge
coursing in his veins, you can hear it in simple, uncoaxed words—“hockey’s my life,” he says often; too young to know, he knows, and no one argues. It’s a life immutable; not my life, not one I would want, still a life
someone
should live, pure, simple, romantic—(a)fter all, what’s wrong with adolescent fiction?

I have known Lafleur for nearly eight years. In that time, I have been to his home only once, for a team party; he has never been in mine. We have never been roommates on the road; we have never talked for more than a few coincidental moments at a stretch; only twice have events stripped away teammates and left us alone and together. In the playoffs three years ago, an RCMP informer told of threats he had overheard to kidnap Canadiens players, somehow interpreted as Lafleur and me. Advised to tell no one else, we nodded and smiled to each other our common plight, alarmed, amused, with gumshoes looking unmistakably like gumshoes behind newspapers and potted palms, in driveways and rearview mirrors twenty-four hours a day for several days. Then, early this season, with Lafleur looking to renegotiate his contract, an erroneous report of my salary in a Montreal paper became his public ammunition, and, uneasy, we came together again. Still, watching him from three dressing room seats away, stuttering, stumbling through early career disappointments, suddenly in glorious triumph, I should have known better. But for nearly all that time, I have misread him.

For there is a life there, and in destiny and romance there is no room for life. Painted as they are with broad brush strokes, vivid and lush, they find shape and pattern only with distance. The person who lives them is too close. He feels sweat as well as triumph. He understands what others see, but feels none of it himself.

In the 1971 playoffs, as a twenty-three-year-old law student with only six NHL games behind me, I led an underdog team to a Stanley Cup. Romance? Destiny? Not to me, though at times I’ve tried to make it so. “It’ll hit me in the morning,” the celebrant gushes, apologizing at the same time. “It hasn’t sunk in yet.” Tomorrow it sinks in—satisfaction, immense pleasure, but no romance. For what is romantic about life between the highs, the plane rides and bus rides, the crushed hopes and fears, the morning-to-morning headaches every bit a part of the same experience? Even now, eight years later, I can’t forget enough to get outside my story and see it as others do. Instead, remembering just enough from along the way to know the boundaries of the rest, I stifle the imagination that makes romance possible.