The Game (32 page)

As Shutt takes the pass, he looks up and sees Miller, dead ahead, throw out his hip. Panicked, Shutt dances to his right, glancing off him, skipping by, catching up to the puck on the other side. Stranded at the blueline, Miller turns to watch. Shutt snaps a quick low shot. Vachon kicks out his pad and stops him.

Delivered mid-ice with shoulder or hip, a body-check is the universal symbol of Canadian hockey. Hard, clean, elemental, a punishing man-to-man contest, as it fades from our game it is more and more symbolic of glories themselves past. A lost art it is called, its practitioners—Ching Johnson, Red Horner, Bingo Kampman, Bill Ezinicki, Bill Gadsby, Leo Boivin, Bobby Baun, Doug Jarrett, Gilles Marotte—(q)uickly dying out, their quality dying before them. But while coaches, general managers, journalists, fans, and ex-players all lament its passing, in fact, each generation since the 1930s has done the same, blaming each subsequent generation for its loss. For the body-check, like its obverse skill, stickhandling, began its (remarkably) slow decline as a victim of the forward pass. It is now a lost art whose time is past.

When Vachon stopped Shutt, I silently cheered. It was a cheer for a brilliant save, a fellow goalie, a beleaguered underdog, also for a friend. Then, moments later, remembering it’s a 1-0 game we might lose, I admonish myself for cheering.

I don’t like playing against friends. My loyalties divide, ultimately in favor of teammates, but that division distracts me, leaving me without the one-dimensional commitment a game requires. Against Vachon or Wayne Thomas, another goalie and former teammate, I want only for the game to end 1-0; against my brother, there is no satisfactory result. But a 1-0 game, hoped for, is easily 1-1, or 1-2, so whenever I think of it, angrily I lecture myself to stop, that Vachon is on his own.

Six players and the boards push in an isometric stalemate. The puck pops loose, Labraaten breaks with it. Swinging wide of Savard, over the blueline he is hammered into the boards, this time by Chartraw.

Labraaten is a Swede, and Swedes, we are told, don’t like to get hit, so they get hit often. It’s a test, and long after non Swedes have passed and been left alone, a Swede faces it again. You test him as you test anything you think might be weak and broken—you bang him, you bend him, you look for cracks, you bang him again, you bend him some more. He may be strong, he may not be broken; if you test him enough, he’ll break.

Slowly the Wings enter the game. For thirty minutes they’ve been the unseen part of our show. Playing Abbott to Costello, the Washington Generals to our Globetrotters, they are our straight man and our victim, here only to make us look good, nothing more. But letting them stay close, we’ve made them feel like partners in the game, and now they want something more.

The game moves to our zone. Thompson beats Robinson to the puck, McCourt hooks it away from Savard; they bang it off the boards to Larson and Huber at the point. In front, Polonich, Libett, and Woods high-stick, cross-check, slash with Lupien, Lapointe, and Robinson. Eyes on the puck, referee Harris pretends not to see.

Larson, then Huber, slap the puck towards the maze with “Go to the front of the net,” “Tie up the defenseman,” “Screen the goalie,” “Let it hit ya” goals in mind. Ricocheting around, the puck finally shoots to the corner, pursued by a scrambling, flailing pack.

At the bench, Bowman is transformed. Angry, he pounds the boards with his fist, bellowing at Harris. Angrier, his body jerks into fast-forward, jumping up on the bench, down again, racing to the penalty box, yelling, his rich baritone now a whiny falsetto. It is more than the moment demands, like a three-year-old’s tantrum, and we watch both amused and embarrassed. In the first period, stuttering to find a rhythm, Bowman quietly orchestrated what he wanted. Now, with the game in an unconcerned drift—ahead 1-0, in Montreal, against the Wings—with nearly thirty minutes to play, he wants to slap us out of one mood into one more urgent. He knows it’s his job to give a game, to give us, the mood we’re missing.

Before Bowman and the crowd can settle, Shutt, with a half-step but going nowhere, feels Larson’s stick tug at him, hooking him off balance, allowing Larson to catch up. At his next tug, Shutt launches himself in a head-first dive, skimming across the ice on his belly, content to slide as long and far as he can. When he comes to a stop, still on his belly, leaving a twenty-foot trail of freshly dusted ice behind him, on cue Harris shakes his head vigorously—no penalty. The crowd boos.

Shutt dives often and well, as often and as well as Bill Barber of the Flyers, as the Leafs’ Borje Salming. Occasionally, when the mood is right and a referee reacts too quickly, he draws a penalty. But growing too predictable, more often now he draws nothing but some scattered boos and in-joke chuckles from those who watched and felt privy to it.

The irony, of course, is that Larson deserved a penalty. Not from Shutt’s dive, which was self-inflicted, but from the hooking and hin-dering that stopped Shutt just as surely. Indeed, airlifted into North American hockey from soccer by way of European hockey to dramatize undetected fouls, gradually the dive has come to dramatize only itself. So far as all those who watched Shutt and Larson are concerned, what happened a moment ago was that Shutt took a dive.

Yet if the score was not 1-0, if the Wings were not deservedly competitive in the game, if their presence was not so fragile that a penalty and a goal might take them out of it, if this wasn’t the Forum, if our power play was not so productive, if we weren’t so superior that a non-call would hurt our chances, if this was the first period, or earlier in the second, if Lapointe had not gone uncalled in a borderline decision moments before, if Harris was not the referee, if someone else was, it might have been called differently. It is called discretion, and for an NHL referee,
it
is the rule.

NHL refereeing is an impressionistic exercise. A referee finds the mood of the teams, the direction they’re going, and applies the rule book, a penalty here, several uncalled penalties there, letting the game find its natural rhythm, hoping in the end it looks like the game it should. For a hockey game is filled with infractions, more than can be called consistent with the other values of the game. So some penalties are called, most are not. Our only guide is a referee’s reputation, the standard he imposes early in a game, certain basic refereeing principles—a scoring chance created or denied, the likelihood of injury—and the kind of “scenario officiating” all of us understand. It is refereeing by the clock, by the score, by what’s come before, so that at any moment we can all sense who will be penalized next and, fla-grant or cheap, what it will take.

Beyond this obvious inadequate consistency is a much deeper problem. Because a penalty disturbs a game, changing its rhythm, often (more than twenty percent of the time) its score, only a limited number of penalties can be called without infringing on the referee’s credo—
Don’t interrupt the “flow” of the game
. So though a game may have fights and brawls, and its players may be heavily penalized, only four or five times does a team hook or hold or slash enough to play shorthanded.

Any more and that critical flow becomes disjointed; or worse, a game gets decided on power plays (directly), or by a referee (indirectly).

No doubt it’s an important principle, but its side effects can be worse. Because of the self-imposed ceiling, the greater the number of infractions committed, the greater the proportion that go uncalled.

Larson tugs once, twice, a third time—it’s a penalty. So he stops, but so does Shutt. A permissible foul. No penalty. A staccato of hacks to arms and legs, a quick grab, and the black and white turns gray and the gray gets darker; and the players understand. It’s not what’s a penalty, it’s what the game allows. And the more it allows, the more it gets, and the more it gets, the more it allows. It becomes a player’s game just as it should be. Who pays to watch a referee? But hooked, held, and muscled back, what kind of game is it?

Hockey is the most difficult of professional sports to officiate well.

There is just one referee, whereas in basketball there are two, in baseball four (sometimes six), in football one, though he is assisted by several others. A hockey referee is required to move with the play, changing and rechanging direction as he does, often out of position, his vision usually at least partly obscured. As in basketball, it’s refereeing on the run; in football, officials take up strategic, mostly stationary positions; in baseball, the action comes to the officials. Yet though the game is more difficult and less precise to referee, a penalty in a hockey game is more important than it is in other games. One goal in every four is scored on a power play, two goals a game, and unlike basketball, where points resulting from infractions are scored in tiny increments, a penalty (and a goal) in hockey can swing the mood and momentum of a game.

But mostly it is the extent of a referee’s discretion that makes hockey so difficult to officiate. In baseball, the best-officiated sport (if replay cameras are any judge), there is virtually none. It is ball-strike, safe-out, fair-foul, and except for balks, doctored balls, brushbacks, and a few other rarely called infractions (each a cause of great contro-versy); there are no non-calls. In hockey, officiating is like doing spot-checks on New Year’s Eve. Anything signalled is bound to be an infraction, but sensing the randomness, those stopped ask angrily,

“Why me?” And so good calls can seem like bad ones, everything becomes arguable, and no one is happy.

In the mid-1970s, the Flyers figured out the system, played it to cynical perfection, and won two consecutive Stanley Cups. Penalized more than anyone else but far less than they might be, with the league as unintended co-conspirator, they benefited hugely from the informal penalty ceiling and the league’s commitment not to appear to intervene in a game’s outcome. Some years later, the abuses of the Flyers largely gone, more subtle abuses increase. What the league never understood about the Flyers, what it doesn’t understand now, is that it cannot be the passive actor it wishes to be. That like any
laissez-faire
, non-inter-ventionist approach, there are consequences predictable and certain that follow for which it is responsible, and by deciding not to intervene it is in fact intervening just as surely on behalf of those consequences.

A league, through its referees, sends messages to the game, the players react, the game takes on its form. But what is the message, and what is the form? And what would it be like if the message was different?

Woods has the puck in the corner; Robinson winds around him, but the puck dribbles out in front. I bob and weave, searching for the player I can’t see but I know is there.
Whaack
. A shot speeds for the net.

My eyes hack at legs and torsos in front of me, but it’s no use. I see nothing. Unaware, my arm moves, my legs split to either side, my fingers pull away, then snap back tightly closed. From a crush of noise, there’s profound silence, then suddenly a roar. I look in my glove—a good save, maybe better.

My chin, my backbone, tighten and set; arms, shoulders, thighs flex; fingers clench, teeth bare, nostrils flare, burning/chilling, bursting, I feel ten feet wide. I do not pace my crease like a duck in a shooting gallery, or sweep at ice shavings no longer there;
free
, my nagging doubts are gone. The Wings change; we change. New players come onto the ice to slap my pads. Unmoved, I say nothing. The clapping goes on.

I’m not sure when I began leaning on my stick. Perhaps at Cornell, perhaps sooner; it was a resting position at first, a habit, in time a personal trademark of sorts, and though I’m never conscious of doing it, after a good save or a bad goal I always hold the pose a little longer, as if wanting to deliver a message. Wishing to appear crushingly within myself—“A great save?” it says, with curious indifference, “Not even a test. You might as well give up.” A bad goal? In a quietly defiant way it reminds fans and opponents, “You’ll never get to me.”

Slowly losing its energy, the applause continues nonetheless. It is too much praise, and suddenly uneasy I begin to pace, turning away from the sound again and again. Stop, I say to myself
C’mon, get on
with it. Drop the puck, make it stop
. But like the performer who holds up one hand for silence, with the other, off camera, I motion it on. Just once I’d like for a game to stop. For a referee to say, “Take your time, Ken. Ready when you are,” and with everyone fading to the side, to look up at the crowd, eyes closed, and listen to live the moment fully and completely through, to feel the sound and the save
together
, as long as they both shall last. Forgetting messages to fans and opponents, forgetting phony invincibility and what comes next. For them to get to me, just once.

I lean on my stick; the noise stops. I get cocky. “Hey Wally, Wally,”

I yell to Harris, “how’re ya doin’?” but what I say doesn’t matter. I’m acting out a feeling, the first imperious moment of command.

“Bird!” I yell, interrupting the faceoff. “Hey Bird, c’mere. Bird,” I say, repeating his name, “gotta wipe that guy out in the corner. C’mon, we need it,” and Robinson nods. About to skate away, I ease up. “Hey Bird, ya see anybody shoot like that Larson?” I ask, then too quick with my own set-up, “’Cept maybe Reggie, eh? Heh heh heh.”

I look at the clock, the shot-clock, the scoreboard, and invincible intoxicating thoughts fill my mind—shutouts, goal average (…38⅔(g)ames, 84 goals; two times 38⅔, 77⅓; from 84, 6⅔; 38⅔ is the same as 116/3; 6⅔ is 20/3; so 20/3 divided by 116/3, cross out the 3s, 20/116, 10/58, 5/29; 29 into 50, 1,…), Vézina Trophies, the Flyers, Islanders, North Stars, Kings, parade by me in my moment of triumph; it is some time before I’m back to the game.

A fan, seeing the save, watching me with Harris, then Robinson, seeing Robinson smile, is impressed.

It doesn’t take long. Terry Harper, a former teammate, has the puck at the point. Tall, stiff, he slaps at it torqueless and two dimensional like a table-hockey player. Thompson and Libett are in the corners with Robinson and Jarvis, Gainey and Chartraw are at the points, Savard is on the ice near the faceoff circle, the front of the net is clear except for McCourt. Standing about ten feet away, he sets himself for an easy deflection. Harper’s shot approaches in a slow, unconcerned way. I shift my weight to the right, to the puck’s new direction. McCourt angles the blade of his stick, and waits. He misses. The puck races undisturbed to my left. I lurch back, feeling nothing against my pad or skate, nothing against my stick, my glove. Nothing. No! Maybe it missed the net, maybe it hit the post or one of their players or one of ours. I throw my head around, listening for the boards; the glass; the post; the near-miss gasp of the crowd, the yell of further play. Instead, I hear two or three quiet, penetrating shouts, then eloquent silence.