The Game (34 page)

“Once again the day will mirror the two styles prevalent in modern football,”
The Times
said, previewing the game. “The Hungarians, like the Austrians and South Americans, put their faith in swift short passing, often carried out at a bewildering pace, and with supreme dexterity, a style of game which excludes the hard tackle and shoulder charge so much a part of British football.” The English style, it went on, “is none the less artistic in its way. Certainly it may not possess quite the same rhythmic beauty as the other, but it has a more human quality. It is not a cold, precise, almost inhuman mathematical science.”

It then summed up presciently, “The outcome may not necessarily prove anything conclusively, but may be no more than a pointer to the way things may develop in the second half of the century.”

“A New Conception of Football,”
The Times
headlined the Hungarian victory the next day, concluding ominously, “English football can be proud of its past. But it must awake to a new future.”

Articles followed for many weeks, the tone and the message always the same. “The aftermath of the fine Hungarian display… has been as spectacular as the contest itself,” an editorial proclaimed more than a week later. “The air is loud with prescriptions for re-educating English footballers and those who train and direct them. Whether they like it or not, a million or more spectators at to-day’s League matches have…new standards of quality of performance by which to judge their favourites.” It likened the game’s effect to that of appearances in London of the Russian ballet and the musical
Oklahoma
! Both had shown the elementary need for imagination and technical perfection, it said, “lessons which…English footballers, resting too much on the pioneer laurels of the past, badly need to learn.”

It sounded very familiar; and so too did the prescriptions: improved technique, more imaginative team play, team play based on offense not defense, on ball control and speed, better conditioning and better finishing around the net. And to make it all possible, increased emphasis should be placed on the national team at the expense of “the interminable league program,” as one newspaper put it, to give players more time to play together, as the Hungarians and others insisted on. Change a few of the terms, colloquialize the language slightly, and it might have been written in Canada, about hockey, in 1972 or since.

The Canadian and English reactions were similar, perhaps because they came from countries sharing a common culture for many years, and sharing parallel traditions in their respective sports. But that is only part of the story. Everyone, every country, has a watershed moment like this sometime, about something. The point is, what happens next? With all that had been learned, what happened to English soccer in the more than twenty-five years since?

I am told by my friend and others that the stereotype English style remains, that even with its greater pace and stamina, the essence of the game has not changed. Indeed, if anything the gap in global styles has widened. But why? For more than twenty-five years, the English have seen the problem and understood it as well as it can be understood, always with the will to bring about the necessary changes. So what stops them? Why are they so powerless to do anything about it? Why indeed. It is the burden of their soccer history. A whole glorious culture of ideas, beliefs, myths, and traditions preserved, shared, and passed along. They won in the past, they lose in the present; it must be in the past that the answers lie. But there are no answers in the past, only clues as to what went wrong along the way. They know it, yet they can’t stop themselves from looking, and hoping.

When I was at Cornell, I was a history major, but I managed to graduate with little sense of history. With most of my courses organized by century or epoch or personality, focusing on political, diplomatic, or military events, I got little hint of the social currents underlying each, which affected each so profoundly. It wasn’t until I began uncovering some of the roots of hockey that I discovered my own best metaphor for what history and culture can mean.

For me, it began a few years ago. I was in a friend’s house in Ottawa and while he was called to the phone, I picked up a book lying on a table in front of me and began to browse through it. It was called
The Hockey Book
. It had been written in 1953 by a journalist named Bill Roche, who had covered professional hockey from the mid-1920s until 1940. During that time, he had begun collecting stories and rem-iniscences of players, coaches, managers, and referees from the past, finally putting them together in a book. It was the recurring themes that startled me most: hockey as big business, the decline in interest in the United States, the NHL’s pandering to the American fan, the increase in fighting and brawling—all were themes we had been led to believe had begun with our generation. Even more fascinating were references to different styles of play.

Until then, I hadn’t known that hockey was once an onside game (where back passing was permitted but forward passing was not), that hockey had been played by seven players a side, that the forward pass was something introduced late to the game, or that there could be any connection between the forward pass and stickhandling, between stickhandling and body-checking. The “dump and chase,” for me, had been a feature of expansion, but here it was being vilified in the 1950s in almost the same words as we vilify it today. Later I would realize that anything in one time can be linked to anything in another, that there is always someone who took a slap shot in 1910 or built a car in 1880, even if the recollection is exaggerated and the connection artifi-cial. More important now was the discovery that hockey before my time was more than just tales of “Cyclone” Taylor’s goal while skating backwards, George Hainsworth’s twenty-two shutouts in forty-four games, Howie Morenz’s death from a broken leg and his subsequent funeral in the Montreal Forum. And if there was a connection between the forward pass and stickhandling, maybe there were other connec-tions as well. There suddenly seemed to me a story I had never heard, a link between present and past that might tell us why we play as we do. So I went back to the beginning to find out.

In the early 1870s, a group of Montreal lacrosse players were looking for a winter game. At first, they simply put on skates and tried to adapt lacrosse to ice, but quickly they found that unsatisfactory. One of their group, J. G. A. Creighton, suggested that they use shinny sticks and a ball instead (shinny, an ancient stick-and-ball game, was something like today’s field hockey). The experiment proved more successful. But with lacrosse discarded, they would need a new model for their game. As many of them were rugby players as well, they decided to make it English rugby. So a scrum became a “bully” or a faceoff; and hockey became an “onside” game (with no forward passing). Its “first ‘public’ exhibition” was held on March 3, 1875, in Montreal. The
Gazette
previewed it this way: A game of hockey will be played at the Victoria Skating Rink this evening between two nines from among the members.

Good fun may be expected, as some of the players are reputed to be exceedingly expert at the game. Some fears have been expressed on the part of the intending spectators that accidents were likely to occur through the ball flying about in a too lively manner, to the imminent danger of lookers-on, but we understand that the game will be played with a flat, circu-lar piece of wood, thus preventing all danger of its leaving the surface of the ice.

Though hockey-like games had been played for centuries, this was the sport’s true departure point. Rules were drawn up, and with rules came organization, and with it a continuity and structure that in time would draw to it and gather up all other ad hoc variations.

It was a far different game from any we now know, yet present in it were principles that would affect how we play a century later. Perhaps most obvious was its ponderous, slow pace. There were nine men to a side, later seven, finally six by 1911, and, importantly, no substitutions were permitted except for injury. It was the accepted sporting tradition of the time. Sports were character building exercise, it was argued, so games were a “test,” and suffering, more than efficiency, their noblest characteristic. Football players played “both ways,” hockey players all the time at an all-the-time pace, the patterns and skills of the game, the nature of the contest, held back and limited. (Later, when rosters increased and non-injury substitutions were permitted, hockey used all of its available players, rotating them in greater numbers of lines and defense pairs. Other sports kept most substitutes in reserve as injury replacements or “special team” players. It meant that only in hockey would an injury require a team to play undermanned. As a result, the ethic of playing with injury, often a painful, dramatic injury, although disappearing from other sports, has remained.) But there were other reasons for the disappointing pace. Early skates had long, heavy, unrockered blades, like those of today’s goalie skates, making turning awkward and difficult. Games were played in thirty-minute halves, the ice, unflooded at intermissions, gradually becoming slow and snowbound. But most important, hockey was an
onside game
. To sportsmen of the time, there seemed something vaguely unethical about a puck (or a ball) being passed forward, as if territory gained this way was somehow unearned, so a forward pass was whistled down as offside. The puck could be advanced only by the puck carrier, invariably the centerman, his wingers left and right and slightly behind, mere secondary figures, watching him, reacting to him, waiting. The defense was out of the offensive play entirely.

It meant a game that moved at the pace of the puck carrier, dependent always on him for its initiative and creativity. Since his options were limited, defenders could defend him in large numbers with little risk. They could skate slowly in front of him to slow his pace, or funnel him helplessly towards their salivating teammates. It was usually with no other play to make, and nearing the blueline, that his wingers came into play: a back pass, a lateral pass left or right, often ahead and offside, more often the puck just taken away.

Yet it was out of this slow and static style that the priority skills of our game emerged, and in many ways have never changed. Offensively, it was skating and stickhandling; defensively, bodychecking. Bodychecking had not been a feature of the original game, but made its appearance soon after. I have found no explanation for it, yet using other circumstantial evidence, a reasonable hypothesis emerges. It had to do with an often small ice surface (though the Victoria Rink was of contemporary North American dimensions, two hundred feet by eighty-five feet, many early rinks were a curling-size one hundred and twelve feet by fifty-eight feet), cluttered with eighteen players, then fourteen, many of them out-of-season rugby players used to body contact, their hockey skills new and primitive, their equipment clumsy; the unavoidable result would be frequent if inadvertent collisions. But, inadvertent or not, early players soon discovered that in a puck carrier’s game, collisions were effective deterrents. So from accidents emerged our basic defensive strategy. As for skating and stickhandling, with no forward pass there was no other way to advance the puck. Skating was the fundamental skill, of course, but speed (which itself might take a player around or between opponents) was not yet a consistent tactic. Instead, it was by stickhandling that scoring chances were earned.

It took more than fifty years for the forward pass to be introduced.

In that time, the tiny, curling-size rinks had more than doubled in size to a nearly contemporary one hundred and eighty-five feet by eighty-six feet, nine-man sides had diminished to six-man sides, rosters growing to twelve, then to fifteen, as non-injury substitutions were permitted; and many of the game’s myths and attitudes had become firmly entrenched: its straight-ahead, straight-line playing patterns, bodychecking and body contact, the puck carrier as focus and creative man, and the consequent slow, congested attitude of the game. The game was tied up in lines and rules and ice surfaces, and it had never been allowed the freedom of open ice. (By contrast, Soviet hockey emerged out of soccer and “bandy”—a game something like field hockey on ice—each with large playing surfaces, giving it an open-ice attitude that remains.)

The forward pass should have changed all that. Borrowed from basketball, more recently from football, it was brought in to restore hockey’s offense-defense balance, and give it a much needed aesthetic boost. For defense had taken over the game. NHL teams had averaged nearly five goals a game in 1920. Five years later, it was three, in 1929(f)ewer than two (Canadiens goalie George Hainsworth recorded twenty-two shutouts in forty-four games that season, and seven of the league’s other nine goalies had ten shutouts or more; Ace Bailey of the Leafs won the scoring title with thirty-two points), a figure dangerously low for a league trying to sell itself to a new American audience.

The rule was introduced in stages, was tinkered with for a few years, and was finally settled into place for the 1931 season. With no centerline (it was not introduced until the 1943-44 season), two bluelines divided a rink into three parts roughly equal in size—the offensive, defensive, and neutral zones. Under the new rule, the puck could be passed forward in each of the three zones, but not across either blueline. It should have revolutionized the game, but it didn’t.

Offensively, it opened up the immense possibilities of team play.

Before, the game had been tied to the puck carrier for its pace and initiative, for its creativity. Now the focus could change. It could be on the others, darting ahead into open spaces without the puck, creating the play, pushing the pace of a game to the sprint speed of a pass.

Moreover, defensemen could now join in on offense. In the past, playing at the rear had meant a permanent defensive exile for them, as those ahead were offside to any pass. It meant infrequent forward “runs” by the even more rare defenseman who took them, or most commonly, lofting the puck high down the ice while teammates, as if covering a punt, raced beneath it. But with the forward pass, a defenseman could set the game in motion from behind, then move up, adding support, quarterbacking a five-man attack inside the offensive zone.