The Game (30 page)

Tonight, it won’t happen. Thoroughly inferior and playing in Montreal, the Wings are waiting to lose. Watching us, they are deciding whether to contest the loss or to pack up emotionally and prepare for the next game. In Detroit, they take the initiative from the beginning, using energy drawn from the crowd to drive them on, to disorient the referee and us, in turn to give them more energy. In Montreal, trying to win with most of the game left to play, they would only rouse us into something they know they can’t handle. So they wait, and hope that we’ll wait. And we do.

And as we wait, we play as if distracted by other things. For us the Wings represent an opportunity: for Shutt, who must score fifty goals, and Lafleur, who must score more; for Robinson, who competes with Potvin and Salming; for Jarvis and Gainey, Tremblay, Lambert, and everyone else who has public and private expectations to meet. When hoped-for, planned-for goals don’t come against the Leafs or the Bruins, two or three against the Wings can save a contract bonus, an all-star team place, or a scoring title. So, until the Wings make it a game, until winning and losing seem important, we play with other things in mind. I want a shutout.

The puck goes from Jarvis to Robinson, and quickly into the Wings’(z)one. For thirty seconds, a pack of four or five players chase it from side to side inconclusively. First Huber has it, then Gainey, then Thompson and Jarvis, then Chartraw, Hamel, and Chartraw again, only to lose it, only to get it back, only to do nothing with it. One hundred and seventy feet away, I watch from a deep crouch, inching ahead, turning, flexed in readiness, playing out each play until slowly I realize the game that has occupied me all day is still far away.

Straightening, I wait; and keep moving. I sweep away ice shavings I swept away before. My eyes rebound from the puck to our bench to their bench to the clock to the puck to the clock, until I can’t move them fast enough, and my legs begin to stiffen—
c’mon, gotta be ready,
gotta be ready
. It’s been more than a minute. Their first shot, which once seemed only a perfunctory moment, is building up in me as an event. I shake my legs—
c’mon, c’mon
—and suddenly, they come.

McCourt intercepts a pass inside his blueline, hits Thompson breaking at center, and together with Libett they come upon a fast—(r)etreating Savard and Robinson. A jolt of panic goes through me.

Quickly tightening into my crouch, winding tighter and lower as they get closer, my body is telling my mind I’m ready. But I’m trying too hard, winding too tight, too low. Thompson shoots the puck into the corner to my left. I chase back to the boards, but too slowly; the puck hits my stick, flips, and rolls past me. Scrambling for the net, I run into Robinson, knocking him away from the play. Libett shoots the puck in front. My head snaps after it. For a dawdling, tortured instant, I see only blurred bodies—then the puck, on Lemaire’s stick, moving slowly out of our zone.

I breathe a deep breath but feel no relief. I pace my tiny crease, turning, turning again, sweeping away ice shavings no longer there, screaming at myself like the worst cheap-shot fan. I wanted a good start, to send a message to my teammates and the fans, to the Wings, to
me
. A solid “thumbs up” indicating I was ready and couldn’t be beaten. I wanted to put away my nagging mind and just play. I wanted teammates undistracted, unafraid that what they would do, I might undo. As for the Wings, I wanted to tighten some already painfully tight screws, to force on them the kind of cruel question no one should have to answer: am I willing to go through what surely I must, for something I will surely never get? But with an uncertain start, I’ve delivered another message, and the game will be harder for us.

From ragged play near our blueline, the puck pops loose, Lafleur racing with it for the Wings’ zone, Woods and Miller after him.

Quickly out of room he slows, looking for Lemaire and Shutt, but they are forty feet behind, and he dumps the puck in the corner and goes for a change. Labraaten is open at center, but Larson’s pass is high and behind him; Risebrough steals the puck from Harper, then overskates it; Hamel, Huber, Lapointe, and Robinson bang the puck off the boards to center; Hamel, Miller, and Lapointe bang it back in.

For several minutes, the game stutters on, searching for a rhythm it doesn’t have, seeking a commitment that isn’t there. It won’t come easily. Against the Islanders or the Bruins, one player,
any
player, can do something special and the others, sharing the feeling and needing only an excuse, will excitedly follow. But against the Wings, against any poor team, all the signs, all the shared feelings, lie on the other side of the emotional threshold on the bored, listless downward side where good plays come and go with no emotional coattails; where bad plays forgive the ones that came before, reinforcing a deadening mood, encouraging others to come after. For the handful of players who start a game with this commitment, the game will beat them down. Their mood is too different (“What’s got into them?” we wonder), the gap between them and us so large that the emotional point of contact necessary to inspire others to follow isn’t there. Lafleur and Gainey, our emotional constants, who in big games set the mood and tempo we want, are almost irrelevant. They are simply
Lafleur
and
Gainey
, playing the way Lafleur and Gainey always do. Tonight, and in games like it, it’s the swing players—Robinson, Lapointe, Shutt, Tremblay, and one or two others—who will give the team its mood.

Sometimes they feel the game, sometimes they don’t. They are our emotional bellwethers.

Bowman paces up and back, saying nothing. His chin is forward, his mouth arching up and down in a gentle sneer, his eyes stare vacant and expressionless. Here and there he reaches for an ice cube to chew, lifting his head to the clock, keeping it there for long seconds as if looking through it, its numbers smudging, fading, never seen. Moving along the bench, he taps the backs of those he wants next; on and off, twenty-five seconds, twenty seconds, changing every whistle, miming the pace he’s looking for. But the game bogs deeper. McCourt jumps over the boards; Jarvis, Gainey, and Chartraw follow. They are our stoppers; and starters. They work hard, unfailingly, visibly hard, and in moments of confusion or trouble they give us forty-five seconds of solid ground, and a standard of effort and control for the rest to follow. For them it means few goals, but fewer against; in more graceful hands, for Lafleur, Lemaire, Shutt, and others, it will mean goals.

From a flash of sticks, Jarvis gets the faceoff to Robinson. He waits unpressured, the game moving before him. First, in safe, prearranged patterns, it flows to the boards or behind the net; then, as he moves slowly up the ice, it cuts and curls into open spaces, Robinson to Savard, back to Robinson, to Jarvis, who quickly passes to Gainey as he breaks clear at center. Larson, set for a slow-developing play, backpedals, then turns and sprints after him. For two or three frozen seconds, the game stops. It’s just Gainey and Larson, a private duel of speed and muscle, and finally of will. Straightening from my crouch, I watch Gainey—his body bent parallel to the ice, relentless, driving, like a train across an open field, an enormous
force
. Watching him the crowd moans. Larson angles sharply across the blueline, meeting him at the faceoff circle. They come together, bumping, straining at each other. Slowly, then suddenly, Gainey powers by. A hard, low shot that hits the middle of Vachon’s pads is no anticlimax. The crowd settles back, a little flushed.

Sometimes a game offers such little gems, brief inspired moments, unplanned, unconnected to anything else in the game, meaningless to its outcome, that make a game better. They represent something more basic than goals or assists, something pure, something treading close on the
essence
of a game and those in it, something unmeasurable, unrecorded, quite unforgettable.

I remember another such moment a few years ago. It was early in the third period in a game against the Los Angeles Kings and Henri Richard, nearing forty but still a brilliant skater and puck-handler, took the puck near our blueline and started up the ice. In three or four strides, sensing someone behind him, he glanced back and saw the Kings’ Ralph Backstrom, a former teammate and himself a great skater, only a stride behind. Richard speeded up, turning, twisting, turning back on himself several times, but Backstrom stayed with him. What had begun as an undifferentiated moment among hundreds in a game was becoming their special moment, and they knew it. For long seconds it continued, and though they wound in and out of other players, no one intervened. Later, an emotional Toe Blake, who had coached them for many years, remembered it as how it had been in Canadiens practices so often before. I don’t know how it ended; it didn’t seem important at the time.

Now Tremblay runs at Huber, then Hamel. Lambert finesses the puck along the boards, Risebrough digs it out for Lapointe, but his shot is blocked, a scramble ensues, and the game breaks down again.

The whistle blows, the teams change, forty seconds later the game starts up, twenty seconds later the puck goes over the boards, the whistle blows again. More than thirty seconds later when a new puck is dropped, the game’s uncertain momentum is gone.

About eighty times a game it stops—for offsides and icings, for penalties, for pucks frozen under bodies, along boards, in goalies’ hands, the number varying little from game to game, though to a player or a fan it never seems that way. For when a game is exciting, it never stops, continuing through whistles and commercials in painful expectation of new excitements. But when a game has trouble, when it has only a fragile momentum on which to build, every whistle conspires against it, interrupting it, making it start and restart again and again, stopping it dead.

Greeting the game with routine excitement, the fans move slowly back in their seats, watching, waiting, nothing to cheer, too early to boo, uncomfortable in their patient impatience. The whistle blows, the organist pounds out a rollicking tune—life for the fans to give to the players to give to the game—coaxing only spiritless clapping in return. When the puck drops, the music stops, the clapping stops, and the rhythmless game begins again.

I look at the clock; it’s moved forty seconds since I looked at it the last time. The out-of-town scoreboard shows no score in the Leafs-Flyers game. The shot clock says I’ve had three shots—one from forty feet by Libett, another by Hamel from almost the centerline, the other I don’t remember. At times, I’ve felt involved in the game, but too often it’s distant, and each time I lose it. And whenever we get a penalty, whenever I see them come this way, I get the same unnerving twinge of panic, my mind nagging the same doubts, my body finding the same phony ready posture. I can’t get comfortable. I’m not bored, but I’m not enjoying this very much.

When a game gets close to me, or threatens to get close, my conscious mind goes blank. I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves—like a goalie moves, like I move; I don’t tell it to move or how to move or where, I don’t know it’s moving, I don’t feel it move—yet it moves. And when my eyes watch the puck, I see things I don’t know I’m seeing. I see Larson and Nedomansky as they come on the ice, I see them away from the puck unthreatening and uninvolved. I see something in the way a shooter holds his stick, in the way his body angles and turns, in the way he’s being checked, in what he’s done before that tells me what he’ll do—and my body moves. I let it move. I trust it and the unconscious mind that moves it.

Once I didn’t. Once, as I was told I should, I kept a “book” on all the players I knew, with notes about wrist shots, slap shots, backhands, quick releases or slow, glove side or stick side, high or low; about forehand dekes or backhand dekes, and before a game, I would memorize and rehearse all that was there. But when my body prepared for Thompson’s backhand before I knew it was Thompson, I realized that what was in my book, and more, was stored away in my mind and muscles as nerve impulses, ready, able to move my body before I could.

And once when I couldn’t see a shot, yet felt my body move, I resisted its move, unwilling to move foolishly for something I couldn’t see. Then, as I noticed pucks I couldn’t see go by me where I was about to move, but didn’t, I let myself go and stopped them. It’s what others call
anticipation
or
instinct
, and while both may be accurate, to me neither suggests the mysterious certitude I feel. It’s the feeling I get when I use a pocket calculator—pushing buttons, given no trail of figures, no hints to let me know how I got to where I did; no handwriting I can recognize as mine to let me know it was me who did it. I get only the right answer.

It’s why I work all day to blank my mind. It’s why I want a game to get close enough to absorb me. I don’t want my eyes distracted by clocks and out-of-town scores. I don’t want my mind divided by fear, my body interrupted with instructions telling it what it should do. I want eyes, mind, body, and puck to make their quickest, surest connection.

Lafleur comes onto the ice more than twenty-five times a game, and when he does, fans nudge and point and talk into a buzz, and sometimes they applaud. And when he gets the puck, there’s the sudden escalating roar of a scoring chance though he’s barely to center. And when he scores, which is often, he gets a sound reserved for no one else.

Lemaire loses the faceoff, but Shutt gets the puck to Robinson, who sends it to Lafleur at the blueline. Helmetless, he starts with a suddenness that sends his hair flipping up in back, in three or four strides pulling away at his temples, streaming out behind him like a flag in a breeze. Stooped and coiled, an ascetic, blade-like figure, he moves without the elegant smoothness of Gilbert Perreault or Mike Bossy, instead cutting and chopping at the ice with exciting effort. He crosses center. Shutt and Lemaire scramble to catch up; Hamel, Harper, and Polonich, abandoning all else, turn tail in desperate chase.

But since his early disappointing seasons, Lafleur has learned what Muhammad Ali learned before him—that if you’re quick enough, you can play a hitting game and rarely get hit. It was a crucial discovery.