The Game (3 page)

Finally Courtois smiles. “Naturally I’m disappointed,” he says, “but I am not surprised.”

I always knew that the time would come; I just never thought it would come this way. When I was young, I always assumed that hockey would just end. That some September, some coach would tell me I was no longer good enough, and it would all be over. Each year, in a new age group, it might have happened. But it never did. Eight years ago, I joined the Canadiens; I had run out of age groups. For the first time since I had started playing, it seemed that I might have many more years to play. For the first time, it seemed possible that the decision to stop might be my own.

Before my first season had ended, I was already being asked when I would retire. I was only twenty-three, but I was also in my second year of law school, and others knew that soon I would need to make a choice—a year of articling (like internship for a medical student, a law school graduate in Canada must work in a law office for up to a year before he can practice law), and six months of bar examinations, both done outside Quebec, or hockey.

And without exception, those who for years had written or dreamed the dream of sports assumed that I would retire and practice law. I told anyone who asked that I had no plans to retire, that I would continue to play as long as I enjoyed playing and enjoyed it more than anything else I might do. I couldn’t be sure how long that would be, of course, but in my mind I thought it would be until I was thirty.

Two years ago, when I was twenty-nine years old, I decided to play one more season. Before I was entirely committed to my own plan, Sam Pollock, then general manager of the Canadiens, offered me a generous extension to my contract, which had one year left to run.

The offer came after what had been for me a beleaguered season.

While (in many ways, it was
because
) the team had lost only ten games (eight regular-season, two playoff games), I had felt under constant, almost angry pressure in Montreal to justify myself as the team’s number one goalie. Outside Montreal, it was no easier. With Vachon playing well in Los Angeles, and Glenn Resch the same in New York, I kept hearing the same questions with the same harassing inferences.

I took Pollock’s offer as tangible encouragement and agreed to the new contract. It was for four years, but at any time during the contract I could give Pollock one year’s notice of my decision to retire. I told him I thought I would play two more years. Last June, having played one more season, I told him I would retire at the end of this year.

I have not enjoyed this year very much. For nearly the first time in my career, for the first time in my life, I am feeling old. I am thirty-one years old. I feel good. I feel the same: no more aches than I ever had, no special diet to follow, no regimen of extra sleep. My body seems to move the way it always has, the game moves no faster for me than it did. But suddenly age is the dominant fact of my life. After years of ignoring time, I have become sensitive to it. I look around the dressing room at younger players who look like me and older ones who have aged. I slap my stomach and say, “Ahh, I feel great,” and I never did that before. My weight remains what it always was, but it looks different. I look different. I was always the youngest in everything I did—in school, on hockey teams and baseball teams. Then on July 29, 1976, a reporter from
The Gazette
called me a “veteran goalie.” I didn’t feel like a veteran then, but I feel like one now.

I have a past I didn’t have before, and now I wonder what comes next? I have discovered that I enjoy being good at something. I like the way it makes me feel, and the way it makes others treat me. It isn’t the praise, or the generous perks of celebrity; it is the implicit, unstated respect it gives. It is a shared understanding that requires no fast talk, no big cars or flashy clothes, that needs not be argued or explained. It is simply there—
they know
. What will I be good at now?

Without the precious safety net I have carried under me all my life—(s)cholar-
athlete
, articulate
athlete
—without the athlete, what will I be?

Where will I find the feelings I have come to need—the sense of common purpose, the spirit of doing something I believe in, the feeling of doing something right? What is
good enough
for me now? Like Eliza Doolittle, filled with new and omnivorous expectations, I wonder, “What is to become of me?”

Until now, life for me has been one long continuum, and hockey has been its link. From age six to age thirty-one, I have shared the same passion and preoccupation; I have had the same pattern to my years. But that will now change. If it is true that a sports career pro-longs adolescence, it is also true that when that career ends, it deposits a player into premature middle age. For, while he was always older than he seemed, he is suddenly younger than he feels. He feels old.

His illusions about himself, fuelled by a public life, sent soaring then crashing, have disappeared just as those of contemporaries have come to full bloom. He is left bitter, or jealous; or perhaps he just knows too much. It is a life that is lived in one-quarter time. “Boy wonder,” “(e)merging star,” “middle-age problem,” “aging veteran,” all in ten short years, and now in his thirties and still a young man, he feels too old to start again.

As I think about next year, I feel myself slowly turning inward and away from the game. I feel that absorbing commitment I always felt only occasionally now. My highs are not so high, my lows no longer so depressingly low. It comes with age and a broadened perspective, but it is an emotional fudge. I don’t want to feel the same precarious swings any more. I want to feel comfortable and secure; I want to control what I do, and how I feel. I have become detached and incessantly analytical.

From the referendum on Quebec’s independence to the “Son of Sam” (m)urders, I find almost everything “interesting,” and if pressed for more, I offer
explanations
. I show that I “understand” how such things happen, and I go no further. But as I hold back, giving less of myself, I find that I’m losing my enthusiasm for the game. In an athlete, it is not the legs that go first, it is the enthusiasm that drives the legs. I go to optional practices, I work as hard as I ever did, but my motivation is different: where once I felt joy, now I feel joy mixed with grim desperation. I will not get any better. I must fight to keep what I have.

I have one goal left in hockey. Other people, sensing I might retire, have urged me to stay another year or more, to turn three (after this season perhaps four) consecutive Stanley Cups, Vézina Trophies, and first all-star teams into five or a record six. But there is achievement in having good seasons, and in not having bad. I just don’t want to be bad.

I have always played hockey because I like to play, and true as that was when I was six years old, it is still true today. If I continue to play, it could only be for a different reason, and I won’t let myself play that way. Two weeks ago, we had a game in Vancouver. The night before, I talked with my sister Judy and her husband on the phone and told them something they had probably already sensed—that this would be my last year. The next night, after the game, we went out for a late dinner. After some unusually strained minutes, Judy said that she hadn’t enjoyed the game very much. She said that she couldn’t help feeling sad, watching, knowing that this was the last time she would see me play. I said nothing. On the verge of tears, I felt touched but embarrassed; I could no longer feel what she was feeling.

I have not enjoyed this year very much, but it has been a necessary year. If I had retired a year ago, I would have left with doubts. I have none now.

Early this fall, I met with Grundman and told him what I had told Pollock in June. He said that he was aware of our conversation, and suggested we meet periodically through the season so that he could be kept informed of any changes in my plans. A short time later, he called and we met in his office. He said that he understood my reasons for retiring, but wondered if my contract was a problem, and offered to discuss a revision to it. I was surprised at first and a little angry, for it seemed he hadn’t understood at all (then I realized he was only doing his general manager’s job). I told him that that was not the problem.

He suggested we meet again later.

He called again about a month ago, this time for a meeting that would include Courtois. Courtois said that he knew I was anxious to pursue another career, but wondered if some sort of special arrangement might be made that would allow me to continue to play. He made a suggestion: a slightly reduced game and practice schedule while working part-time as a lawyer with his law firm or in the legal department at Molson’s. It was the kind of hockey-law arrangement that had brought me to Montreal in the first place eight years before, but it came as a great shock to me. We talked of the problems it might create (including the initial one, the six-month bar exams I would need to take in Ottawa, more than one hundred miles away), and of how we would work them out. It seemed a wonderfully simple and obvious solution. I told them I would think about it, as they said they would, and we promised to meet again a few weeks later.

I called the director of the bar course in Ottawa and asked him if he thought such an arrangement could work; he assured me he thought it could. For several days I thought about this combination that seemed to offer everything. But as the final meeting with Courtois and Grundman approached, I began to change my mind. It wouldn’t work. The team was already splitting apart from the success of three Stanley Cups—a fourth would make it one more year divided; a Stanley Cup defeat, and it would demand the kind of special commitment I could not give. And for me it would mean only more years dabbling at the edges of a law career, a part-timer in a full-timer’s game. But much worse, I would become a part-time goalie again. I had been one once, with the Voyageurs, but what was right for that time and that stage in my career would not be right for this. I would be available to the team only on my time, not on the team’s, giving it what I could give, not what it needed; giving up a goalie’s joy and satisfaction, his
need
to feel linked with, and in some way responsible for, the fortunes of his team. I have played only four or five fewer games this year than in other years, yet I feel like a hired hand, in for a few games, out for a few games, interchangeable, unimportant, and not playing the way I can. Next year, I would play less often and, as I would be unable to be around all the times I was needed, the team could only look to someone else.

And as I thought about it, other things became clear. I realized that what had excited me most about the offer was the challenge of working two careers. It wasn’t to practice law. I had known for some time that I had little interest in that. Indeed, I was looking for an excuse. I knew that otherwise I would never allow myself to play another season, that I would taunt and abuse myself—too weak, too comfortable, too willing to put off a time I knew was coming if I tried. But if I practiced law while I played, maybe I would let myself go on. Just as the team was looking for a way, so was I. Then I realized something else. It came to me late last week as I sat alone in my office. Shocked and disappointed in myself, I realized that I didn’t want to play hockey either.

After I had told Courtois and Grundman of my decision to retire, and after Courtois had replied, we sat silent a moment, all of us, I think, a little relieved.

A few hours later, I drove home—my elbow in, my window closed, my radio silent. When I walked in the front door, Lynda rushed from the kitchen to meet me. She asked me what Courtois and Grundman had said. I told her. We exchanged glances.

TUESDAY

“The conductor plays not a note, but he must be musician,
teacher, charismatic healer, foreman, administrator,
psychologist and public relations man, and he must do all
these things superlatively well.”

—Bernard Holland,
The New York Times
Montreal

Lynda and Sarah are in the kitchen; Michael, aged one, plays with his trucks in the hall. I walk downstairs, saying “Good morning” over the banister to them and continue to the front door for the newspaper.

“Good morning, you guys,” I repeat affably, “did ya have a good sleep? Good, good,” I continue, not waiting for an answer. “Huh?

Michael did?” suddenly hearing what Lynda has said. “You’re kidding.

I didn’t hear you at all, Mikes. You okay now? Good, good.”

Sarah and Michael run around the kitchen; Lynda is cleaning up.

I drink my orange juice and read the paper. I start with the front page.

“Mommy, Mommy,” Sarah screams triumphantly, “look what I can do,” and as we watch, she somersaults down the hallway outside the kitchen door. I turn to the sports section for the scores. “Mommy, come quick,” Sarah screams again, rushing into the kitchen.

“Michael’s trying to climb on the dining-room table.”

Lynda runs out behind her.

Some minutes later, my juice finished, the paper read, I look up.

“Well, what’re you guys up to today?” I ask, and while Sarah is telling me, I interrupt, and with a laugh, threaten, “Hey, I’m gonna get you guys.”

Sarah and Michael run off screaming with delight and I chase them into the living room. Like a favorite uncle, I lift them up and twirl them around. We roll on the carpet laughing and screaming.

Soon, Lynda calls them to get ready to go.

“G’bye, Sari,” I call to her, “have a good time at Mrs. Swan’s [nurs-ery school].”

“Daddy,” she says with a four-year-old’s exasperation, “I just told you, today I go to the library.”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” I say weakly, “have a good time. You too, Michael. See you guys later.”

I feel good; like yesterday, like Sunday night, but with a certain solemnity that wasn’t there before—
this is my last season
. But what pop in and out of mind, too often and too fast now, are thoughts of next year, and they unnerve me. I feel empty. Next year seemed a long way off until yesterday. Yesterday I only wanted not to play. Today I must think of what comes next. I have lived with this moment for many years, planned for it as others, thirty years older, plan for their retire-ments. Why don’t I feel better? What will I do?

There are just three months to go. I know this is the time when I should dedicate myself to the rest of the season, to my last chance, but when I think of it, I feel no surge of commitment and I disappoint myself. Yet somewhere inside there is a quiet, penetrating feeling. It has nothing to do with “going out on top,” as others often remind me to do; that is
their
pleasure. I simply want to do it right; I want to do it in such a way that years from now, when I forget it had nothing to do with going out on top, I will feel no regret and others will feel none for me.

There has always been next year, another chance to do and think and feel what today I had no time for. Suddenly there are so many things left to be done, so many unanswered questions, and so little time. What does Lapointe look like? How does a dressing room sound? How does it feel to make a save, to let in a goal, to hear the crowd? What does a game feel like? What about Lafleur, Robinson, Houle, Gainey? I want everything to stop. I want to remember.

The next time I think of it—my last season—I say something to myself, too fleeting, too much in passing to be a vow, as I do in a game when the moment is right but I can’t quite feel it, just a quick “Okay, here we go”; and I embarrass myself when I do.

Breakfast done, the paper read, it is mid-morning and my day is finally beginning. Today is a “practice day,” as yesterday was; tomorrow and the next day are “game days.” Today, we are “at home,” tomorrow we’ll be “on the road.” If someone were to ask me the day of the week, I would think for a moment and say it is Tuesday, though I wouldn’t be sure. And if they wanted to know more, I would tell them it is February, but I don’t know the date. I almost never know the date. And while sports life runs on time (and because it does, actually fifteen to thirty minutes
ahead
of time), I wear no watch. On “practice days” it is “before practice,” “practice,” or “after practice”; on “game days,” “before the

[team] meal,” or “after the meal.” Occasionally, usually travelling to or from the West Coast, we have a day with no game or practice, a “travel day.” Less often, perhaps once a month, we have an “off-day,” a day at home. This is the “hockey season”; three months from now, six months ago, it was the “off season”—these are the seasons of our year. While others live by a calendar and a clock, we live by a schedule.

For eight months in a year, our time is fragmented and turned upside-down. Awake half the night, asleep half the morning, with three hours until practice, then three hours until dinner; nighttime no different from daytime, weekends from weekdays. At home, in the rhythm of the road; on the road, needing to get home. Then home again, and wives, children, friends, lawyers, agents, eating, drinking, sleeping, competing in a kaleidoscopic time-sprint, for thirty-six hours, or thirty-eight or fifty-four—and we’re on the road again. It is a high-energy life lived in two- or three-hour bursts, and now, after eight years, I don’t know how to use more. I am not very good at off-days. Weekends, which I get only when injured, disorient me. I go to the store, make a few phone calls, take the kids to the park, and it is barely noon. I start on something that takes longer, and don’t finish; tomorrow and the next day and the next few weeks, I have no time.

Always rebounding from one thing to the next, I’m always on the way to some place else; in contact with families, friends, and outside interests, but never quite attaching onto any of them.

I will not retire “to spend more time with my family” (whenever Lynda reads that of an athlete or a politician, knowing better, she gets furious at the hypocrisy and self-promotion). But what I will enjoy is being around day-to-day while Sarah and Michael grow up.

The house is quiet. I don’t like daytime solitude as I do the night.

I wish the kids were here. I pick up the mail at the front door and go to my office. One letter is from the Ministère du Revenu du Québec, and I open it first. It is a notice stating that I owe a small additional amount on last year’s taxes. Below, it gives an explanation, in French, which I can only partly understand. Before I remember that this is a French-speaking province, I get upset.

It is an uneasy place to live now. Soon—the newspapers speculate it will be in late spring or early summer—a question will be put to Quebeckers by referendum and the answer they give will affect Quebec and Canada profoundly. No one yet knows what the precise question will be, though most now know their answer, and in the next few months, with these hearts won, the minds of the undecided will be fought for, in a paper war of studies, polls, and editorials, and finally with
the question
, the one the Parti Québécois (PQ) hopes will deliver the right answer. A few days ago, both the PQ government and the Opposition Liberals released their referendum position papers—the PQ

“
D’égal à égal
” and the Liberal “
Choisir le Québec ET le Canada”
—and for the time being, there’s a pause in the cycle of commentary, charge, and counter-charge that started three years ago. Yesterday, the front page of
The Gazette
told Montrealers that the price of beer is going up sixty-five cents a case. Today we learned that CTV has been enjoined from showing an interview with Margaret Trudeau until after her book,
Beyond
Reason
, is published. Tomorrow or the next day, there will be a new study or a new poll, and referendum talk will take over again.

On November 15, 1976, the people of Quebec gave the PQ a majority of seats in the one hundred and ten-member Quebec National Assembly. At a victory rally in Paul Sauvé Arena in the east end of Montreal, more than eight thousand “Péquistes” celebrated and welcomed their leader, René Lévesque, the new premier of Quebec. A few miles across town that same night, more than sixteen thousand people watched as the Montreal Canadiens beat the St.

Louis Blues, 4-2.

There was a different atmosphere in the Forum that night. It was as if the crowd was watching with vacant eyes, their minds committed somewhere else. A near miss, a save, a goal, the kind of event normally anticipated then climaxed with a loud Forum roar, brought a muted and delayed reaction, and sometimes nothing at all. At first, we tried to ignore it, but as the crowd’s distraction became our own, the game bogged down. Late in the first period, the message board flashed some early election returns—“Lib 8…PQ 7”—but there was little reaction.

Some minutes later, at a stoppage of play in the second period, the message board flashed again, slowly, each letter bouncing from the right side of the board to the left, one space at a time, in French and in English, so that before the message was complete, the puck had dropped and the game had begun again. I glanced back and forth between the game and the message board, until the board finally flashed to a stop “— 15…Lib 9.” The rumble that had accom-panied the first movement of letters turned to a silence deep and disturbed. Something was happening, and we were all beginning to know it.

Liberal supporters, too afraid to think of what that might be, sat silent; Péquistes, also silent, were too afraid to hope. Later in that period, there was one more message—“PQ 33…Lib 15.” This time, the crowd reacted, not in large numbers, but like fans in another team’s rink, with a loud and spirited roar.

In the dressing room between periods, we sat quietly at first, then hoping and pretending that nothing was as serious as it seemed, and the one-liners began in earnest; nothing very funny, but we laughed long and hard.

“Jean-Pierre Mahovlich, I’d like ya to meet Jacques Roberts.”

“Hey Kenny, thanks for everything. It’s all yours now, Bunny.”

In the middle of the third period, the message board flashed again—“Un Nouveau Gouvernement.” No longer afraid to hope, thousands stood up and cheered and the Forum organist played the PQ anthem. And when they stood and cheered, thousands of others who had always stood and cheered with them stayed seated and did not cheer. At that moment, people who had sat together for many years in the tight community of season-ticket holders learned something about each other that they had not known before. The last few minutes of the game were very difficult. The mood in the Forum had changed.

Since that night, Canada has been a battleground of emotions.

Guilty, fearful of change, and suddenly aware of a feeling for Canada and its duality stronger and deeper than they had imagined, Canadians, especially English-speaking Canadians, have spent three busy years holding conferences, setting up cultural exchanges, sending telegrams of “love” to their Quebec brothers, desperate to affect the events they can feel affecting them. About a year ago, the pace of conferences and public hearings had clearly worn down as if suddenly there was nothing new to say, and first the academics took over, and now the politicians. In a few months, on referendum day, after an unofficial campaign longer than a U.S. presidential campaign, it will be up to the people of Quebec—the focus of all this attention—to say“(y)es” to a process which will create the momentum for independence, or to say “no” to stop it dead for a time. It may be a choice like other hard choices, one that most would prefer not to make, but it represents a chance to do what twentieth-century non-colonial societies can rarely do: decide democratically their own political and national future. To anyone who has asked me about Montreal for much of the near-decade I have lived here, I have always said the same thing: “There is no more interesting place to be.” But that is only partly true.

I was twenty-one years old before I came to Montreal for the first time. It was summer 1968 and I came to visit Man and His World, which the year before as Expo 67 had helped give Canada in its cen-tennial year the exciting spirit of a modern, bilingual, and unified country. A year later, I found an amusement park, a
big
amusement park, but with some of Expo’s pavilions dismantled, and all of its spirit gone. I left the next day.

Two years later, Lynda and I stopped in Montreal on our way to Europe on our honeymoon. There I signed a contract with the Montreal (now Nova Scotia) Voyageurs and arranged my transfer to McGill University law school. In early September, less than four months later, we were back as residents of Montreal, something we have continued to be for all but one of the last nine years.

Our first lesson in Montreal came the day we arrived. Coming in late in the afternoon, we found a restaurant for dinner, then went for a walk along St. Catherine Street, the city’s main street. Just west of Guy Street (which, knowing the French pronunciation, I was careful to call “Ghee,” until baffled French-speaking Montrealers realized I meant “Guy,” which they pronounced the English way), we saw “Toe Blake’s Tavern,” owned by the former great player and coach of the Canadiens. It was one of the few landmarks we had heard of (the others being the Forum, Expo, the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, McGill, Delorimier Stadium, and Maurice Richard’s “544 Tavern”—the latter two we later learned no longer existed). So we crossed the street and went in. At first, we heard what sounded like cheering, so we looked around until we were sure it was directed at us, then realized it wasn’t cheering, but shouting. A waiter approached us and quietly explained that this was a tavern, and that in Quebec, women were not allowed in taverns. More embarrassed than angry, we left.

A little more than a month later, British Trade Commissioner James Cross was kidnapped, followed six days later by Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. On October 16, citing an apprehended insurrection, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, and troops were moved into Montreal. For more than a month, as I walked along McGregor Avenue from the law school to the Forum, I passed army trucks, jeeps, and armed soldiers, but, preoccupied with other things and new to the province, I had little sense of the momentous events going on around me. Like everyone else I went home each night and learned the exciting details of the day from TV, and everything looked the same as it had in every other drama I had seen, except this time I recognized the setting.