The Game (27 page)

From where I sit, in front of a TV or a newspaper, I can’t tell the difference, and I’ll never get close enough, long enough, to know.

And if that isn’t enough, all around are battalions of people anxious to help us look better. Not just flacks and PR types, but a whole symbiotic industry of journalists, commentators, biographers, award-givers. There are ghost-writers who put well-paid words under our names, then disappear; charity organizers, volunteers giving time and effort so that “honorary chairmen,” “honorary presidents,” “honorary directors” may look even better. Kids in hospitals, old folks in old folks’ homes are merely props as we autograph their casts and shake their hands to demonstrate our everlasting generosity and compassion. And never far away, photographers and cameramen to record the event. It is the bandwagon momentum and industry of celebrityhood.

In the end, for us, is one
image
.

Years ago, I saw writer David Halberstam on the Dick Cavett show after the release of his landmark book,
The Best and the Brightest
. With time running out, he allowed Cavett to play name association with him. Robert McNamara? “…brilliant, incisive…” and then a trail of three or four more adjectives, and a short, clipped phrase. McGeorge Bundy? “…brilliant, complex…” and again a similar trail, skipping from name to name. His subjects were fifty-year-old men who had lived long and complicated lives, full of twists and contradictions, things irreconcilable, all exhaustively chronicled in his book, but here they were reduced on TV to ten or fifteen words, sometimes fewer.

That was all. An image.

For me it is concrete and yet disembodied, what agents call “Ken Dryden”—
What is “Ken Dryden” like?
Recently, I asked an acquaintance, a senior executive at an advertising agency, to pretend he was trying to persuade a client to use me as commercial spokesman for his company. Having met only two or three times several years before, my acquaintance knew me mostly as others do. He wrote the following memo to his client: “…Historically I know you have had some concerns about using athletes … either because of potential problems developing out of their careers and public life, or due to simply their lack of availability. I think Ken is quite different from the rest. He is known as a thoughtful, articulate and concerned individual. I think it would go without saying he would not participate in any endorsement unless he was fully committed to and satisfied with the product. (His Ralph Nader exposure would assure that.) He is serious, respected and appears to be very much his own man. I don’t think we could ever consider using him in humorous or light approaches (like Eddie Shack) unless it would be by juxtaposition with another accompanying actor or player. He has good media presence…. His physical presence is also commanding. He is quite tall and impressive…. Other encouraging things would be his intelligence and educational background. He would be more in tune with our target audience with his credentials as a college graduate (Cornell) and a fledgling professional person (law).

Also, during production, I think this intelligence and coolness would help in case of commercial production as well as helping to keep costs under control due to mental errors….”

My image. Right? Wrong? It doesn’t matter. It is what people think, it presupposes how they’ll react to me, and how they will act, and for the ad man and his client that is what matters. Being told what others think means if I don’t like it I can do something about it. I can do things that are “good for my image.” They aren’t hard to find, or to do. I can stop doing things “bad for my image.” Or, as actors and actresses remind us casually and often, I can do things to “change my image.” Too serious?

If I run around the dressing room throwing water
at the right moment
, someone is bound to notice—a journalist with a deadline to meet and space to fill, a new angle,
news
: “Dryden misunderstood.”

And though some things take longer, others less central do not.

Want to be known as an antique collector? Collect an antique. A theater-goer? Go. Once is enough. Tell a journalist, sound enthusiastic, and above all, before you go, play well. Then stand back and watch what happens. Clipped and filed around the league, it spreads like a chain letter, to other journalists themselves without time to check it out, and
presto
, it is part of your standard (authorized) bio. And your image. It is really nothing more than selling yourself like everyone else does, at home, at the office, just trying to make yourself look better. But it is easier. As in a singles bar, everything is taken at face value, everyone is willing,
if you play well
.

If you change the word “image” to “reputation,” as you might have done a few years ago, you would have something quite different. For a reputation is nothing so trifling or cynical. Rather, it is like an old barge. It takes time to get going, then, slow and relentless, is difficult to maneuver and manipulate, even harder to stop and turn around. An image is nothing so solemn. For us, it is merely a commercial asset, a package of all the rights and goodwill associated with a name—“Ken Dryden”—something I can sell to whomever I want. But it is a sticky question. For the image I’m selling is
your
image of me, and the goodwill, though it relates to me, is your goodwill. Whatever commercial value there is in my name, my image, it is
you
who put it there, for you
like
me or
trust
me or whatever it is you feel about me, and any prospective buyer, anxious to put my name alongside his product, knows that, and is counting on that to make you buy. And you might buy, even though it may not be in your best interests to buy what I endorse, even to buy at all. So, by selling my name, I have taken your trust and turned it against you. You like Robert Young as an actor, you trust him, you buy his coffee. Thanks, and thanks again.

I did a commercial once, six years ago. I had decided that I never would, but this one was different enough to start me into a web of rationalizations until I forgot the point, and accepted.

A fast-food chain was looking for a winter promotion; Hockey Canada, the federal government hockey advisory board, wanted a fund-raiser and a way to deliver a message to kids and their parents that minor hockey can be approached and played differently. The idea was a mini-book done by Hockey Canada, then sold through the restaurant chain to its vast market. I was to be a collaborator on the book, and its public spokesman. But after doing the TV and radio ads (for the book, but with a corporate jingle at the end), and seeing the point-of-purchase cardboard likenesses of me in the restaurants, I understood what I had done. It is a mistake I haven’t repeated. Since then, among others, I have turned down endorsements for a candy bar (“…the way I see it, a full body shot of you in the net, mask up, talking, then we draw in tight on your catching glove, you open it, the bar’s inside…”), for a credit card company (“… You may not know me without my mask, but…”), and, with several unnamed others, their names all beginning with the sound “dry” (
Dry
sdale?
Dry
er?
Dri
nan?
Dre
iser?), for a roll-on deodorant whose slogan was “It keeps you dry.”

It is a game—an
ad
game, an
image
game, a
celebrity
game.

Everyone needs someone to talk about, right, so why not about us?

Everyone needs heroes and villains. We earn a little money, get some exposure, the commercials are going to be done anyway. Besides, it doesn’t last long. A few years and images change, celebrity cools, and it’s over. It all evens out. But it doesn’t, and we all lose, at least a little.

We lose because you think I am better than I am—brighter than I am, kinder, more compassionate, capable of more things, as good at life as I am at the game—and I’m not. Off the ice, I struggle as you do, but off the ice you never see me, even when sometimes you’re sure you do.

I am good at other things because I’m good at being a goalie, because I’m a celebrity and there’s always someone around to say I am, because in the cozy glow of success, of good news, the public—or the media—(w)ant me to be good. It is my angle, and so long as I play well the angle won’t change. I am bright and articulate because I’m an athlete, and many athletes are not. “Like a dog’s walking on his hind legs,” as Dr.

Johnson once put it, “it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” But the public doesn’t believe that, just as I don’t believe that about celebrities I don’t know. Taller, brighter, more talented, more compassionate, glittering into cameras and microphones, award-ing each other awards for talent and compassion, “great human beings” (e)very one of them—wet-eyed I applaud, and believe. And all of us lose.

The public loses because it feels less worthy than it is; I, because once, twenty-three years old and trying to learn about myself, I wanted to believe I was everything others said I was, or soon would be; instead, older and having learned much, I feel co-conspirator to a fraud.

We are not heroes. We are hockey players. We do exciting, sometimes courageous, sometimes ennobling things like heroes do, but no more than anyone else does. Blown up on a TV screen or a page of print, hyped by distance and imagination, we seem more heroic, the scope of our achievement seems grander, but it isn’t, and we’re not.

Our cause, our commitment is no different from anyone else’s, the human qualities engendered are the same. Instead, we are no more than examples, metaphors because we enter every home, models for the young because their world is small and we do what they do. But by creating celebrity and mistaking it for substance, too often we turn celebrity into hero, and lose again.

Joe McGinniss, author of the acclaimed
The Selling of the President
, 1968, later wrote a book called
Heroes
. Unsatisfying in many ways, it sketched McGinniss’s own tormented trail from being
the youngest
, to
the highly acclaimed
, to
the former
all before he was thirty, at the same time ostensibly searching for the vanished American hero. He finds no hints in traditional sources, in mythologists or philosophers, in critics or poets; he gives us none in the theories he offers. But along the way, he makes some discoveries, and so do we. He travels to talk to George McGovern and Teddy Kennedy, to anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan, to General William Westmoreland, to John Glenn and Eugene McCarthy, to author William Styron, playwright Arthur Miller, and others, some of them heroes of his, all of them heroes to many. But, like chasing a rainbow, he finds that as he gets closer, his heroes disappear. In homes and bars, on campaign trails, jarringly out of heroic context, they are all distinctly, disappointingly normal. They are not wonderfully, triumphantly, down-to-earth normal, as normal appears from a distance. Up close, breathing, drinking too much, sweating, stinking, they are unheroically normal. Normal. And for heroes, to McGinniss, normal isn’t enough.

We are allowed
one
image, one angle; everything must fit. So normal in one thing begins to look like normal in the rest. Unlike the Greeks, who gave their gods human imperfections, for us every flaw is a fatal flaw. It has only to be found, and it will be found. For in moving from celebrity to hero, there is a change. It’s the difference between a city and a small town. In a city, the camera’s eye is always proximate, yet distant; in a small town, it peers, leers, offers no place to hide. John Glenn, astronaut, first American to orbit the earth—at home with his wife he is friendly, likeable, to an interviewer’s prying eyes only “the next junior senator from Ohio,” seeming as if he could never have been anything else. A hero? Or not? It doesn’t really matter.

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first oversell,” as Wilfrid Sheed wrote in
Transatlantic Blues
. Superficially created, superficially destroyed, for the hero, for the celebrity, it all evens out. Except along the way a price is paid. So still we lose. The public because, saddened and hurt by heroes who turn out not to be heroes at all, it turns cynical and stops believing. I, because I’m in a box. For what is my responsibility? Is it, as I’m often told, to be the hero that children think I am? Or is it to live what is real, and be something else?

Recently, a friend asked me to speak to his college seminar. Near the end of two hours, we began to talk about many of these same questions.

A girl raised her hand. She said that a year or two earlier on the Academy Awards, she had seen Charlton Heston receive a special award for his “humanitarian” work. Heston had made the same point, the girl said, that thousands of volunteers had done far more than he, and that they deserved the award, that in fact his own contribution was quite small. I asked her, then the class, what the story had told them about Heston. Several hands went up; that he’s even modest, they decided. A few of the students laughed; then one by one others did the same.

SATURDAY

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

—W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children”

Montreal
Part I

The talk has localized and quieted. On our wide gray bench, on the floor, in identical white longjohns shrunk identically up our calves and forearms, we sit or lie and wait for Bowman. At 6:31 p.m. he enters.

Instinctively we straighten, our heads turning as one, following him across the room. Short, with bull-like shoulders and neck, his head tipped back, his prominent jaw thrust ahead of him as both lance and shield, he strides purposefully to a small blue chalkboard. We wait quietly. With his back to us, he looks to one side of the board, then to the other, turns, turns again, and screams,

“Eddy! Pierre! Where’s the chalk?”

We blink; the mood breaks. There is surprised laughter all around.

Bowman writes the Detroit Red Wings’ line-up on the board, grouping defense pairs and forward lines together, adding three or four unconnected names at the bottom. Turning, he looks at us briefly, then throws out his jaw, his eyes jerked upward to a row of white cement blocks directly above our heads, where they remain. He’s ready.

“We had a guy watch [the Wings] in Boston last week,” he begins quietly, “and these are the lines they went with,” reading off what he’s just written. “But they’ve had a lot of guys in and out of the line-up, so there may be some changes.”

His tone is calm and conversational, even subdued, and while he often begins this way, we’re never quite prepared for it.

“What we gotta do is work on some of these guys,” he continues slowly. “McCourt,” he says, pointing to center Dale McCourt’s name, “(t)his is a real key guy. He likes to hold onto the puck and make plays, a lot like Mikita.” His voice picks up speed as if he is suddenly interested in what he’s saying. “If ya give him the blueline, he can hurt ya.”

Then it slows and deepens to a rich baritone, in his eyes a look that wasn’t there before. “We gotta get on this guy!” he blares, his right palm hammering the point into his open left hand. “Right on him!”

Then, just as suddenly quiet again, “We gotta skate him,” he says gently, still talking about McCourt. “This guy doesn’t like to skate,” and as that thought triggers another, his lips curl and tighten over his teeth. “We gotta
make
him skate!” he roars.

With only the slightest pause but with another change in tone, he discusses Vaclav Nedomansky, the former great Czechoslovak player (“He handles the puck well, but he’ll give it up,” Bowman says flatly, “(s)pecially in his own zone”), hard-shooting defenseman Reed Larson (“We gotta play him like Park or Potvin,” he insists. “You left-wingers, play him tight”), Errol Thompson, Willie Huber, penalties and power plays, the Wings’ defense, on and on like a never-ending sentence; and my attention span collapses. I look around and see bodies dancing on the benches from buttock to buttock, eyes ricocheting around walls, off ceiling and floor—Bowman’s lost us. Then something he says reminds him of something else, and he gets us back again, “…and for crissake,” he shrieks, his voice a sudden falsetto, “somebody do something about that squirt Polonich,” referring to the Wings’ pesky little goon Dennis Polonich. “I’m tired of him running around thinkin’ he runs the show.” Then more slowly again, his voice an angry baritone,

“
Put that guy down!
” But before his last message can completely register, he quickly mentions Dan Labraaten’s speed, interrupting himself to talk about Thompson’s shot, then Jean Hamel and Nick Libett. He loses us again.

It’s as if his mind is so fertile and alive that each thought acts as a probe, striking new parts of his brain, spilling out thoughts he is helpless to control, each with its own emotion. A transcript might read garbled, frustratingly short of uninterrupted thoughts, but his message is clear. It is attitude more than information. And though he drones on about the Wings, the message is about us. For the Wings, nearly a last-place team, are irrelevant if we play well, and Bowman won’t pretend otherwise. So every few seconds, triggered by nothing in particular, he throws out a new thought, in an angry, insistent tone, and gets our attention back.

Some nights he talks only ten minutes; a few times, to our wound-up agony, twenty-five minutes or more. When he finishes, we mock what he says for most of an hour after he says it, until just before game time. Then as we panic to cram in all the last-minute thoughts and emotions we suddenly feel we need, we throw back at each other what he told us an hour before, this time in
his
tone.

Restless, bored out of our own private daydreams, we discover each other. Under cover of hanging clothes, we make jungle sounds, stick fingers up our noses, laughing wildly, silently, Bowman continuing as if unaware. Lapointe, his face loose and denture-free, stares at Lemaire innocently fingering the tape on his stick. Knowing what’s coming next, we watch one, then the other: Lemaire looks up; Lapointe grins dementedly. Grabbing a towel, Lemaire buries his giggle and covers up. Then, like a slap in the face, Bowman interrupts himself and gets us back. “…and that Woods,” he says, referring to Paul Woods, a small, quick center, who once played with the Voyageurs, “is there some reason we can’t touch that guy?” he asks pleasantly. Then angrily, “Is there? For crissake, I see Lupien pattin’(h)im on the ass,” and before he can go on, we start to laugh. Startled, at first he seems not to understand the laughter; then, enjoying it, he begins to camp it up, “And Mondou,” he continues, hunching over, wrinkling his nose, “sniffin’ around him, ‘Hiya Woodsie. How are ya, Woodsie?’ and the guy’s zippin’ around havin’ a helluva time.” Unable to hold back, we scream with laughter. We’re with him now. Then the look in his eyes changes. The joke’s over. “You’re not playin’
with
him!” he roars. “Hit him!”

He has been going nearly fifteen minutes. The periods of calm now longer, the emotional bursts more infrequent, he has just one left.

Telling us to tighten up defensively, particularly the Lemaire line, he reminds himself of something very familiar: “And when we got the puck in their zone,” he yells, “for crissake, don’t just dump it out in front blind. That’s the worst play in hockey.” Mouthing the last few words with him, we look at each other and smile.

He pauses for a breath, and his tone changes one last time. Calm and conversational, as he was when he started, Bowman sums up:

“Look, don’t take this team lightly. They’ve had their problems, but they’ve had injuries and they’re getting some of their guys back. And now they’re comin’ on a bit. They’ve only lost one of their last three, so we gotta be ready for a good game. We gotta think of our division first. This is a four-pointer, and we got ’em back in Detroit next week.

Let’s put ’em down now and we won’t have to think about ’em the rest of the year.”

His eyes leave the row of blocks above our heads and move to the floor in front of him, “Okay, that’s all,” he says quietly.

We leap up clapping and shouting. When he’s out the door, the room goes quieter. Leaning back, Shutt carefully folds his arms. “Scott was very good tonight,” he offers cheerily. Then, looking at the clock,

“Cut in on my backgammon time though. That’s gonna cost me some bucks.” Standing, he looks over a room now busily in motion, “Okay, who’s my pigeon?” he asks. Several heads pop up, then, seeing who it is, turn away, ignoring him. He tries again, “C’mon, who’ll it be?”

Seated beside him, as if tugging on his master’s pant-leg, Lafleur mutters a half-hearted challenge. Though he beats him less often than he likes to admit, Shutt, a look of disdain on his face, turns and pleads,

“Come on, Flower, give it a rest. Think what you do to my conscience,” and looking around, he asks again. Nothing. His point now made, “All right, Flower,” he sighs theatrically, “let’s go,” and with a grin and a board under his arm, he walks from the room, Lafleur shaking his head behind him.

With Robinson and Tremblay, I go to the weight room. Nearly as big as the dressing room, a few years ago when the Soviets showed they were good enough on the ice to make what they did off it seem important, the room was renovated and packed tight with weight equipment to encourage off-ice training. But since we have won so often without it (“don’t change the luck”), the equipment has been forgotten or ignored by all but a few. Instead, we use the room in other ways: after games, Lafleur and his pack of interviewers come here to unburden the clutter of the dressing room; before games, it is a place to go when the game is far enough away it can still be escaped, when a roomful of players with nothing to do, anxious and uneasy, builds up the mood of a game before it wants to.

Lafleur and Shutt set their board on a bench. I lie on the carpeted floor near Risebrough, easing into some exercises. Across the room, eyes extruded, Engblom reddens from the weight of a bench press, Lambert reads a newspaper, Robinson glances at some mail, Chartraw here and there bangs at the heavy bag, Houle and Tremblay, half seated on a pop cooler, stir their coffee and talk. It is like a Sunday afternoon at the club—easy, unconcerned, the game still far away.

Lying on my back and barely conscious, I stretch through old, well-worn routines, nothing new, nothing unexpected, counting holes in ceiling tiles until the holes and tiles disappear, nothing to jar me into remembering where I am and what I’m doing it for, moving only enough to blank my mind.

Some minutes later, aware of a sound, I stir. “Seven o’clock!” a voice cries again. “Everybody in the room.” It is trainer Meilleur, and hearing him this time, I look up, and everyone is gone.

I walk back to the room, the game inescapable.

Shin pads, shoulder pads, socks, pants, and sweaters cover the floor.

The random movement in and out of the room has stopped. Voices that can’t shut up rebound from its walls—the build-up has begun.

“Need this one, guys. Gotta have it.”

“Yessir gang, gotta be ours.”

“Big one out there. Big one.”

But still twenty-two minutes until the warm-up, it’s too serious, too soon, and, feeling uncomfortable, we back off. The mood changes.

“It’s a four-pointer, gang,” Houle reminds us, unaware of the change.

“You’re right, Reggie,” Savard says absently. “If they beat us they’re only forty-seven points behind us.”

“Yeah, then we gotta think about ’em the rest of the year,” mocks Shutt, and there’s loud laughter.

Risebrough looks across at Chartraw: “Hey Sharty, you think about ’em?” There’s no answer. Chartraw, lying on the floor, a towel over his head, didn’t hear the question. Risebrough asks again. The towel moves. “Who?” Chartraw asks.

“The Wings,” he is told.

“The Wings,” he repeats, and says nothing more.

Feeling the mood swing too far, something in all of us becomes panicky.

“Hey, c’mon guys, gotta be ready.”

“Goddamn right, guys. These guys are playin’ well.”

“That’s right, that’s right. They only lost one of their last three.”

But still too early, again it breaks.

“Yup, only one of their last three, only eleven of their last thirteen,” chirps Shutt, and there’s more laughter.

“I hope you were listening, Tremblay,” Robinson shouts, thinking of something else. “Ya don’t just dump it out in front blind. You heard him, ‘It’s the worst play in hockey.”’

Gainey looks at Lapointe. “Hey Pointu, what number we up to now?” he asks.

Lapointe, who knows such things, shrivels his eyes. “Uh, lemme see,” he says, thinking aloud, “‘the worst play in hockey,’ number one hundred and seventeen, 1 think,” then, more sure of himself, “Yeah, one hundred and seventeen.”

“Hey, what was one hundred and sixteen?” someone asks.

“Shootin’ it in your own net,” a voice shouts, and there’s more laughter.

Every practice, every game, more than one hundred and fifty times a year, every year, I put on my equipment the same way—inner jock first, then longjohns, sweat socks (the left ones first), outer jock, garter belt, hockey socks (the left one first), pants (left leg first), skates and pads (left ones first), arm vest, and finally sweater (left arm first).

Dressing in layers as we do, the order can’t vary much, but when it does, when I put on my right skate before my left, it doesn’t feel right and I take it off again. It isn’t superstition, it’s simply habit and what feels right.

When I put on my equipment, it must go on at a steady, preoccu-pying pace: by 7:07, pants; 7:12, skates; 7:17, pads; 7:20, arm vest and sweater. After each is put on, as if reaching a checkpoint, I look back at the clock behind me: too fast, and with time and nothing to do I think about the game or whatever else crosses my mind; too slow, and I rush, and by rushing wonder if somehow I’ve affected how I will play. Not wanting to wonder, not wanting to think about the game or something other than the game, I keep rigidly to schedule. After a somnolent day of newspapers, naps, walks, TV, ceiling holes, and hypnotic exercises, I want to arrive at game time undistracted, my mind blank, my emotions under control. I know that if I can, the rest of me is ready.

It never quite happens, of course, and after this long I know that when a game begins, none of it matters anyway. Still, to keep worried, nagging voices under control, it is a routine I won’t give up.

Suddenly remembering something he’s heard, Shutt blurts, “Hey, ya hear Pit [Pete Mahovlich] got into a fight at a Penguins team party?

Yeah, some guy knocked him down.”

He gets murmurs of interest, but no surprise.

“Hell, doesn’t take much to knock Pit down at a party,” a voice mumbles.

“Or anywhere else.”

“Poor old Pit,” Robinson laughs, shaking his head, “no wins, eighty-four losses.”

Waiting his chance, Tremblay jumps in before he is ready. “That’s like you, Robinson,” he growls, and, startled, we look up. Houle stifles a grin.

“Ooh Larry, that’s a shot. You’re not gonna take that, are ya?”