The Game (33 page)

I shoot, throw, kick the puck out of my net.

My father used to comment on how goalies reacted to goals scored against them, whether they showed disgust or resolution, whether they got up quickly or lingered prone in theatrical disappointment. He preferred, of course, that they get up and show resolution, and always made sure to tell me. Then, when I was about ten years old, and an overtime goal eliminated his Bruins team from the playoffs, I saw Harry Lumley break his goalie stick over the top bar of his net. Knowing I should be upset at his poor sportsmanship, I could only admire his honesty.

Pacing, sweeping, caged in my crease, I scream at myself. Then slowly, as anger turns to self-pity and finally embarrassment, suddenly weak, I feel an immense nausea that won’t go away.
C’mon, give me
another chance, two out of three, three out of five, anything. Please
. But the hope I can’t quite feel tells me something is different and will never be the same. Before I lean on my stick, bent over, my hands on my knees, I stare at the ice.

I’ve always envied the
chutzpah
of Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers.

After a bad goal, he would look so inappropriately cocky that he challenged the crowd’s memory of what they’d seen. Second guessing themselves, quickly they decided a goal was screened or deflected and not his fault at all. But staring at the ice, I deliver another message, and the crowd knows what it knew all along.

Robinson skates back, tapping me on the pads, telling me lies I don’t want to hear. When finally he goes away, and there’s no one around, I hear the crowd, this time a loud grumbling buzz. I’ve lost them.

I had them once, in the beginning. When I was new and different, when the team was good but only good, when there were teams that were better. I had them in 1971, in 1972 and 1973, when Béliveau was gone and Lafleur was timorously arriving, when the team needed a goalie to
win
games in Montreal, not just a goalie not to
lose
them. But as the team improved, and there were none better, saves that became less frequent became less important, and goals against me, occasionally odd, inexplicable goals that might lose games (but didn’t), stood out.

And slowly, with each game and each goal, the goodwill that seemed inexhaustible was stripped away.

It’s what happens to all Canadiens goalies. It happened to Vachon and Gump Worsley, to Plante and Bill Durnan before them, now to Larocque. After a few generous, exciting years of support, the support taken away, we become uneasy, sometimes fearful of playing in the Forum, preferring instead the road, where we can just play, where no matter how good the team is, it needs us to win. So little by little, a newer face takes over at the Forum, once Vachon, once me, once Larocque, soon someone else, excited, happy, made better for the support. But if a goalie survives long enough in Montreal, he can change again, if never completely. Though I prefer the road, no longer surprised by any reaction I get and less able to be hurt, the Forum doesn’t bother me as it once did. Still, undeniably, I wish it were different.

It’s not supposed to be that way. I am a professional, paid to do my job no matter the circumstances. Paying their money, my salary, the fans have the right to do as they please. It makes no difference to me. I can’t control them, I can’t depend on them, so I ignore them. They mean nothing to me. But of course they do. Being professional or not has nothing to do with it, I do only what I can. And by buying a ticket, does a fan acquire a right that a fan in the street has not? Opportunity, yes; access, yes; but any greater right? Does he acquire license to abuse me any way he likes, to say what he won’t say to anyone else, anywhere else? Is that what I’m paid for, like a lightning rod, to stand in the place of
everyman
and attract and purge the resentments from his life? Am I supposed to take it and feel nothing? Is that all part of the game? I hear it all: every

“On veut Larocque,” every angry buzz, the tone in words I don’t understand, the meanness in bitter, mocking applause. And the louder and longer they yell, the longer and straighter I lean on my stick.

I get them back for the start of each game and lose them with the first goal. Too many things have gone before, too many memories are too willingly recalled. The white gloves off, the Mulligans all played, they just wait, and so do I.
Okay, over and done with, can’t do anything about it now. Still got a
period to go. That’s what’s important. Gotta work at it, now. That’s it, here
we go. Here we go.

I’m not listening.

A bouncer from center, a penalty to Hamel, a penalty to Risebrough, a goal by Lambert, a save by Vachon; the period ends.

“That’s it, guys. That’s it.”

“Jesus Christ, we’re horseshit out there!”

We are of two minds: unhappy the way we played; ahead 2-1, scoring a late goal, playing in the Forum, worried silent that we’re overreacting, gradually not so unhappy.

Behind, but close, after forty minutes it’s the only way the Wings can beat us.

When a game takes off, you can hear it. Sounds rush at you, cramming your head, squeezing it louder and louder, driving your mind away, and driving your legs mindlessly on. Urgent, staccato sounds: skates that bite and crunch and get back in the play; pucks clickety-clacking from stick to stick; voices screaming sounds when words arrive as echoes. And over the boards, roaring, rising, swelling sounds that empty your stomach and run up and down your spine—the mar-tial Muzak of the crowd as it rollercoasts the game.

The game has changed. For most of forty minutes, the Wings were afraid: of losing as badly as they might lose; of being embarrassed in front of 17,000 fans and two million television spectators; of what a crushing loss might do to proud parents and friends who have talked of this game for days. Afraid of getting ahead and hoping foolish hopes, of getting close enough to think they might have a chance. For what would you do if you were the Detroit Red Wings and you led the Montreal Canadiens at the Forum with forty minutes to play? or thirty-five? or thirty? First you would celebrate, then you would just feel good, better than you’ve felt in a long time, thinking, hoping, no dammit,
thinking
—tonight’s the night, confident, excited, feeling like you feel when a game is over and won. Then the puck is dropped.

Scrambles, penalties—twenty-seven minutes to go. Goalposts, missed open nets—twenty-five minutes. More goalposts—please let it be over. Please!—twenty-four minutes, eighteen seconds. Feeling it slip away. Afraid of the joy you feel. Afraid of what joy feels like when it’s played with and mocked, and finally crushed. Afraid of driving on lemming-like, punch line to your own Big Joke.
Hey, you guys didn’t really
think you were going to beat the Canadiens, did ya? Hab hah hah. That’s the
best I’ve beard yet
.

But now, down 2-1 and only twenty minutes to play, the Wings have no time to be embarrassed. There’s nothing left to be afraid of.

We’ve made a terrible mistake. When you let an underdog think he can play with you, he forgets how bad he is and how good you are and is swept along on the moment. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff, when he forgets where he is, he can do remarkable things. We’ve made it into a game we can’t be sure of winning.

It warmed up in the dressing room and started in the middle. Seven minutes later, it’s in a sprint. We are twelve rats in a box, changing on the go, in a forty-five-second relay race. The whistle blows. The game goes on, too fast to stop, too fast for anything but a penetrating burn of feeling that later, with time, will explain itself. Its smile has disappeared.

It has lost its professional cool; it is
fun
. Desperate, twisting, thrilling fun that hurts so much you want it to stop, and need it to go on.

“On him! On him! Two on ya, Bird. ‘Round the boards! Get it out.

Get it out! That’s it. That’s it…. Shoot it in, Sharty. Shoot it—look out! Back! Back! Two-on-two! Stand up! Stand up! Offside. C’mon, offside! They’re changin’. They’re changin’. Go with it, Pointu, go!

Move it up. Move it up! Stay back, Pointu. Back!… Stand up! Stand up! Right on ya! Freeze it! It’s loose! It’s loose! In front! It’s loose! Ice it! Ice it!…”

The puck moves from stick to stick and team to team. More than six times a minute, more than one hundred and twenty times a period, it changes possession. Physically contested all over the ice, the game is in constant transition. Patterns disrupt and break apart, moods skip, unsettled in one, on to the next, spiralling higher. Three quick strides, coast and turn, and turn again, and stop; three more quick strides, a pass, checked, and three quick strides the other way. Fragments, hundreds of them, each looking the same, some going somewhere, most not, and as player or fan you can never be sure which it will be.

Gradually as the period builds, as time gets shorter, there is a moment, one we can all sense, when a game will be won or lost. It is now. For fifteen minutes, the Wings have done what they were sure they couldn’t do, and with nothing more to give, can slowly feel us getting stronger. With the puck at center, they shoot it into our zone and pile after it. Four, five, six bodies, the puck bouncing between them. The moment drags on.

Then it stops. Lapointe’s shot deflects off Tremblay’s right knee through Vachon’s legs and it’s 3-1.

Every minute or two, the Wings test us. Pushing their game a little higher to see if we push back, and when we do, they know it’s over.

It’s like a cycling race, two and a half hours around and around; slowly, we looked over our shoulders, and close behind, they looked back at us. Here and there they speeded up, and we speeded up with them, always ahead. Then, nearing the end, they sprinted and we sprinted back. They pulled up alongside, nearly even, and we both went faster and faster until, finding a little more, or they a little less, we pulled ahead. Now we are looking back and, further behind, they look at us.

They slow down; we slow down. They slow some more; we slow some more. Ever slower, in control.

Montreal
Part III

“C’est ça, gang. That’s it.”

“Another two [points], guys. Another two.”

One by one we burst into the room.

“That’s it, guys. That’s it.”

Equipment is thrown to the floor. Drinks are grabbed up and swallowed thirstily. The room goes quiet. Houle looks up, uneasy.

“Hey, good third [period], gang. Good third,” he blurts. But no one seems to hear him. Again, “Big four-pointer, gang.” Nothing.

There is a muffled cheer from the arena. Tremblay charges through the door, the first star of the game. We look up.

“C’est ça, Mario,” we yell. A few seconds later, it is Lambert.

“C’est ça, Yvon.” The noise picks up, then fades. Silence. This time we can all hear it.

“Hey, get ’em any way we can, guys.”

“That’s right. That’s right,” Robinson begins earnestly. “Takes a good team to win when uh, uh…” He doesn’t finish. There is a longer silence. Lambert, last in the room, explodes.

“
Câlisse
, gang. Mad when we win, mad when we lose. Let’s be happy. We won,
tabernac
. We won!”

The mood changes.

“Hey yeah, c’mon we won, guys. We won.”

“That’s right, guys. That’s right.”

“We got our two. That’s all we wanted.”

Lapointe warms up, “Yeah, let’s have some noise in here.” Instantly there is noise.

“That’s it. That’s it. Now we’re goin’.”

The noise begins to die. Robinson jumps in.

“Hey Lambert, play that funn-ky music!” he shouts.

There are more shouts, loud and enthusiastic this time. Lambert disappears around a corner; Lapointe behind a divider across the room. From the stereo, there is a hard, heavy, pulsating beat. Lights strobe on and off in time. The room comes alive. Tremblay starts dancing, then Lambert.

“Aww-right! Aww-right!” we shout happily.

“Hey, that’s it, gang. Now we’re goin’. That’s the old gang.” A few minutes later, the music stops.

SUNDAY

“More often than I like, I am saddened by a historical myth….

I can’t help thinking of the Venetian Republic in their last
half-century. Like us, they had once been fabulously lucky.

They had become rich, as we did, by accident…. They knew, just
as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to
flaw against them. Many of them gave their minds to working
out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern
into which they had crystalised. They were fond of the pattern, just as
we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.”

—(C. P. Snow,
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
) Philadelphia

Slow, relentless rain drizzles down. I clutch the curtains around me like a cloak and peer at the soggy outback of the airport across the road. It is Sunday morning in Philadelphia. No planes are in sight, no cars streaming off and on the busy interchange below, nothing but cold, tired, day-long rain. Behind me Risebrough snores, warm and contented in last night’s darkness. I close the curtains and go back to bed.

I don’t like the feeling I get in Philadelphia. It is a hollowness, deep and disturbed, as if something is about to happen that I don’t want to happen but can’t stop. Before the day ends, I will feel threatened and physically afraid. I will hate fiercely (and admire). I will scream and curse, and get angrier than I ever get. In victory, I will gloat. Then slowly the hollowness will return, and I will be left to wonder about feelings I didn’t know I had, about the nature of what I do, about things I never wonder about at other times. Only the Flyers do that to me.

It used to be it was the way the Flyers played. Now it is them. I have no room left for tortured ambivalence. I once saw the admirable and contemptible side by side, the simple, courageous game they played, their discipline and dedication, Bobby Clarke, Bernie Parent, their no-name defense, Fred Shero. It was the way they turned a hockey wasteland into something vibrant and exciting. It wasn’t the brawling and intimidation that finally turned me. It was their sense of impunity. They were bullies. They showed contempt for everyone and everything. They took on the league, its referees and teams; they took on fans, cops, the courts, and politicians. They searched out weakness, found it, trampled it, then preened with their cock-of-the-walk swagger— “C’mon, ya chicken. I dare ya!” For two years, they were kings of the mountain. Not many years from now, those two years will be symbols of the NHL’s lost decade. For Clarke, Parent, and a few more, I feel sorry.

It has been a decade of turmoil: expansion, the WHA, the Soviets, the Flyers, the haves and have-nots, money in new and disturbing quantities, violence, the courts, the legislatures. “The sport of the seventies,” hockey was called; its decade almost over, it was a promise that was not kept. It was just thirteen years ago that the NHL was a cozy six-team enclave in the northeast, an overnight train ride east and west, north and south. Prosperous, inbred, deeply conservative, like a collection of old-world barons, the Montreal Molsons, the Boston Adamses, the Chicago and Detroit Norrises, the Toronto Smythes, the New York Kilpatricks, held in their contented hands the tight little world of hockey. Four of its teams were highly competitive, the Bruins and the Rangers provided competition for each other, and occasionally for the rest, while the league operated at more than ninety percent of its seating capacity.

But changes were coming, big changes in sports, that were beyond their control. The continent was booming west and south; commercial jets were turning miles and days into comfortable hours, turning regional leagues into anomalies. Everywhere there were new “big league” cities, looking for “big league” status; everywhere local politicians and first-generation money were looking for the same. So franchises moved. The baseball Dodgers and Giants moved west, the Braves south to Atlanta, other teams, other sports, following. But it was too little, too late, too slow for bullish times, and soon rival leagues sprang up—the AFL in football and the ABA in basketball, while baseball expanded by four teams to head off Branch Rickey’s proposed Continental League.

In this same environment, the NHL faced the same dilemma—to expand or not? It had expanded forty years before, from four teams to ten, as it moved into the United States for the first time, but the results had not all been good. The league acquired a broader, more substantial base, and new expectations; the Rangers, Bruins, Hawks, and Red Wings (née Cougars, later Falcons) survived; the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Quakers, St. Louis Eagles, Montreal Maroons, and New York (later Brooklyn) Americans did not. It had seemed a lesson—major-league hockey was not for everywhere; without a large indigenous player base in the United States, there was a similar absence of broad-based fan support. A city would need to be in Canada, or proximate to Canada, in a traditional American hockey stronghold, or need to be so large that even a cult-like percentage of followers could attract 15,000 people for a game.

For twenty-five years, through war and emerging prosperity, the league stayed put. When the subject of expansion came up, as it rarely did, it was argued away—
this
city,
that
city,
this
owner,
that
owner always unsuitable, by standards that seemed fortuitously to rise according to the quality of the applicant. In fact, the league didn’t expand because it didn’t believe it to be in its interests to expand. For why would owners like Conn Smythe or James Norris want expansion? Their arenas were full. It was a gate—receipt league; radio and TV brought them little in revenue. How could teams in Los Angeles or Atlanta possibly help them? Indeed, an expanded league would only mean fewer games with old rivals, teams that had kept those arenas full. Would Los Angeles and Atlanta teams be as good and exciting, would they fill their arenas just as full? These men may have been“(h)ockey enthusiasts,” as then-league president Clarence Campbell described them, owners with “one foot on the bench,” but first and foremost they were businessmen. They needed fans in Toronto and Chicago, not somewhere else, not later.

But in the 1960s, it changed. With extant rival leagues, the status quo would no longer guarantee them prosperous peace. Moreover, TV had become a factor. Once considered a dangerous leisure-time competitor, TV had emerged as both partner and promoter of sport’s new growth. In 1966, CBS and NBC paid $26 million for the rights to NFL and AFL games, NBC $10 million for major-league baseball.

For the NHL, playing to near-capacity crowds in barely expandable arenas, its tickets priced to what the market could bear, TV was a new, potentially immense source of revenue where few others existed. This was no pie-in-the-sky dream. Pro football, for decades in the shadows of its college cousin, had boomed in the late 1950s, a phenomenon of TV. Offering a similar recipe of speed, violence, and excitement, hockey could do the same. It has “all the potential of pro football,” TV(s)ports-guru Roone Arledge announced to a
Newsweek
reporter in 1966. And so it seemed.

But there were problems. TV in the 1960s meant network TV, and network TV meant shows that could play in Birmingham and Bakersfield as well as in Boston. Hockey would need a national audience. With tens of millions of viewers with no hockey pedigree, where would it come from? The answer, of course, lay in the innate attractiveness of the sport, and in expansion. To get Mahomet to the mountain, it would be necessary to bring the mountain to him. So, in 1967, the league expanded. Midwest to St. Louis and Minnesota, west to Los Angeles and Oakland, again into Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, doubling its size. Three years later, Vancouver and Buffalo were added; in 1972, New York and Atlanta. In only five years, the league had spread to much of the continent. It had done so to thwart the emergence of a rival league, and position itself for the fruits of network TV. In neither case did it succeed.

Yesterday, a brief item appeared in the paper. Coming at the end of a story previewing our game with the Wings, it said that NHL owners will meet in two weeks to discuss merger with the WHA. Further, it said that this time merger was likely. It has been seven years. Seven rancorous years of achievement obscured, of great reward for some, of mess and muddle—lawsuits, antitrust suits, contract wars; teams and players everywhere. There were 6 teams in 1967, one league, one hundred and twenty players, six coaches, six managers, six owners. Eight years later, there were thirty-two teams, two leagues, six hundred and forty players, thirty-two coaches, thirty-two managers, thirty-two owners. The quality of play, the style of play, the administration and stability of the game, have been predictably affected. But now the war seems over. The WHA is no longer a serious rival. Each of its teams loses money every year, its lost millions the memory that nags it on; survival its one remaining tactic to achieve merger. And the NHL, bloodied but unbowed, is slowly willing to give up its fight.

Even the players can now sense the tired inevitability of it all.

Beneficiaries many times over because two leagues were bidding for our services, our every gain lies precariously at stake, yet the attitude I hear is “Let’s get it over with,” and no amount of selfish good sense seems able to penetrate it. Today, hockey is a game in desperate search of good news, a “light at the end of the tunnel,” as league president John Ziegler puts it, to turn a cynical public momentum that has swung around hard in its face; to build again. There will be a merger this time, because this time there must be a merger.

Tucked into this little corner of February-March is a brief denoue-ment. A quiet, clear-eyed time unconnected to the retrospective mood that comes with such things as decade-endings and career-endings.

This is rather a moment of resolution, when many of the themes and directions of the game over many years have come together, and now play themselves out. It is a moment to stop, and see where we stand.

Two weeks ago, the Challenge Cup ended in New York, the Soviets defeating the NHL all-stars two games to one. It was a much less decisive series than its 6-0 final game score would indicate, yet it seems somehow an appropriate close to the first seven years of open international play, seven years of which I was a part. In 1972, it had begun as a party, a huge national coming-out party, with Canada the not-so-reluctant debutante. Pioneers, unchallenged champions of hockey for all its near century, Canadians had suffered through a decade of humiliating defeats, losing first to the Swedes, then year after year to the Soviets, our amateurs finally and forever outmatched, our professionals ineligible for international games. But what seemed worse, nagging at us like a secret we couldn’t tell, was the fear that the man in Nevsky Prospekt or Wenceslas Square didn’t know of our incomparable pros, didn’t know that
we
, not they, were the true World Champions.

In 1972, we had our chance, in what was called hockey’s showdown. And we won, and the party was more glorious than any before it or since. Yet even before it had ended, we knew something was different, never again to be the same. The Soviets had been good,
very
good
, much better than we had expected. And our thirty-four-second margin of victory, the cause of such explosive national celebration, became the cause of unforgettable national concern. Our birthright was suddenly at risk. It was like being shot at and missed. We couldn’t forget how close it had been, and could only worry that the next time would be different.

And some day it would be different, we were sure. We were up against a country more than ten times our size, sharing our winter climate and our passion for the game, but with a more insistent ideology, a more disciplined and committed system, a more scientific and modern sporting approach. In only twenty-five years, the Soviets had done what had taken us nearly a century. And now, close to our shoulder, they continued at full sprint. It seemed for us a simple, hopeless equa-tion—numbers, climate, commitment, approach. In time, we would surely stand no chance. And to cushion that inevitable day, we pretended that it was nearer than it was, reading in every sign the final evidence of its coming. Never again as a nation would we commit ourselves as we had in 1972. Never again would we put our national psyches so nakedly on the line. If we couldn’t be sure of being the best, we would step back. Maybe hockey shouldn’t be so important to us after all, a part of each of us decided.

Yet with that hedge safely in place, we have responded—with studies and government inquiries, with clinics, books, films, seminars and symposia, hockey schools and coaching programs, off-ice training and a return to the “2 Fs,”
fun and fundamentals
. A game that is in our blood was finally put on the couch and examined. And it has changed. Yet after seven years of inconclusive results the Soviets beating the WHA all-stars in 1974, Team Canada winning the Canada Cup two years later, Soviet club teams winning the majority of games with NHL teams, but often losing to the better teams—the Challenge Cup tells another story: only three games during four days in February, reversible by three other games another year. But this time, there was something different, something definitive and clear: though we have changed, the immense traditions of our game still overwhelm us, and, slaves to our past, we look undeniably the same; and the Soviets, stuttering for a time with problems of their own, now seem to have found an answer.

After the 1972 series, a friend told me of being in London in the early 1950s when Hungary beat England at Wembley, 6-3.

Motherland of soccer and long its dominant power, England had never before been beaten at home (except by other teams from the British Isles). My friend likened the reaction that followed to what occurred in Canada after the opening 7-3 loss to the Soviets in Montreal in 1972. Last week, still in a self-pitying daze after the Challenge Cup, I went to a library to read microfilm accounts of that game from English newspapers. I found the parallels astonishing.