The Game (35 page)

It should have meant a whole new set of basic skills, for the defenseman and everyone else. Passing, of course, and skating should have become critical, and so too the creative mind that made both work. Stickhandling would no longer be important. A slow, intricate art, like dribbling in basketball or soccer, it was an artistic self-indulgence, out of touch with the themes of speed and team play that had emerged with the new rules.

On the other side, as the offense changed, so too would the defense. The change of focus from the puck carrier to the rest that would give the game its new variety and pace—and take away the stickhandler—should have taken away the body-check. Needing a slow, static, predictable game to be effective, a body-check should have worked no longer.

This is, of course, what should have happened, but it didn’t, and it never really has. Fifty years of history, fifty years of habit and tradition, intervened. There was no revolution, no conquest of styles, no abrupt change, no players suddenly obsolete and extinct. The forward pass became simply part of the game, part of an ancient game played on an ancient grid that was unsuited to it. And because change did come, because more goals were scored and the game was speeded up, it seemed a success, and few wondered what other possible changes were missed. This was the turning point. The limits of the forward pass were never explored. The limits to our game were set. It was from this moment that other nations, with other styles, got their chance.

Why did we not foresee the possibilities of the forward pass as others later would? It was what Clarence Campbell called the “snow-bankers” tradition of our game. The boy becomes a man; the player a coach, a manager, a scout, a father; a game is passed on like tribal history, one voice, one mind. There was no bigger picture, no history in like games, in soccer or basketball, no parallel traditions in schools or universities, no critical mind, no oblique other eye to break the relentless continuum; there was simply no other way to play. Our writers and journalists, those outside the game, were experts with no vision, or with vision, no audience. And without external competition, without incentive, there was no chance that this would change. So, locked in our rooms with nothing but our own navels to look at, we saw nothing, and missed our chance.

Since then, for nearly fifty years, the story of hockey has been speed. It was the forward pass that gave speed its chance; later it was the center red line, better ice conditions, better equipment, better training and conditioning of players, and shorter shifts that accelerated its impact. But it was speed unaccommodated, never allowed to work, because the playing patterns, skills, and attitudes of our game were never changed to make it work. As a result, the major develop-ments in our hockey-forechecking, the dump and chase, escalating violence, the slap shot, tactical intimidation, the adrenaline attitude of the game—are all logical implications in a pyramid of implications with unharnessed, undirected speed as their root.

But this is a view in panorama. The story of a game moves much more slowly, one step at a time.

In the 1930s, forechecking appeared. In response to the forward pass, defenses began packing five men together near the defensive blueline, making passing and puck control more difficult, poised to strike in counterattack. Offenses continued to pass ritually into their midst, usually without success, but the new forward momentum of the game carried the players into the offensive zone, often into the vicinity of unclaimed pucks. It was the beginning of forechecking. Nothing so relentless and systematic as that which would come later, yet greatly troublesome for defenders unused to its pressure, and obliged by the rules to carry the puck across the blueline, not to pass it. Moreover, forechecking represented an important discovery: offense could be played without the puck. Until then, checking had seemed a strictly defensive skill. But if offense was in part territorial, then checking in the offensive zone—forechecking—could have an offensive purpose.

And if speed (without any other accommodations for it) made a puck more difficult to control, then forcing bad plays (turnovers) might become more important than making good ones yourself.

As usual, defenses readjusted, easing their pressure by lofting the puck the length of the ice. As usual, the pendulum returned. This time, the league intervened. To silence fans annoyed by this negative tactic, it brought in an icing rule. And the defensive pressure returned.

But out of it had come a new development from the forward pass and the game’s new speed, new skills and styles of play were emerging geared to an out-of-possession game.

In the early 1940s, the offense-defense-aesthetic balance proved unable to right itself, and the league intervened again. Many players had been lost to the war, and those who replaced them had found the styles and tactics they inherited too difficult to play. So teams simpli-fied them. Less skilled passers, unable to penetrate a packed defense, made no pretense of passing, instead shooting the puck ahead of them to the corners, and chasing after it. It was what we later came to disparage as the dump-and-chase style, and it was in these early war years that it had its systematic beginnings. But more troublesome were the problems the defense faced. They were in a box. The rules prevented them from passing the puck over the blueline. Yet the alternative, shooting it out, meant only that it would be shot back in for the struggle to begin again. And it was a struggle. For the attacking team had the blueline behind it as a safety barrier, and could harass with five men unworried by consequences. The defense simply needed help.

And help it got.

Frank Boucher, a former great player and coach with the Rangers, then assistant to league president Red Dutton, was asked to recom-mend changes to the game. He suggested a center red line, and a rule that would permit passing over the blueline as far as the centerline. He wanted a way to force attacking defensemen out of the offensive zone, to break the defensive logjam and make the game faster and more interesting. In fact, his rule worked, though not in the way he intended. The defense got its needed break, the game got faster, but, its patterns unchanged, the lowest-common-denominator dump-and-chase style, explainable by the times, persisted, even as the war ended and the top-class players returned to make it less explainable.

Moreover, an attitude was untouched. For more than seventy years, offense and defense had been kept apart—by traditions, by rules, by the styles and tactics that had emerged from each. There was an offensive zone, a defensive zone, a neutral zone between. In the defensive zone, a team played defense. In the offensive zone, offense.

And with no forward passing, or passing over bluelines, there was no way to join them. Boucher’s rule should have been the link. It should have brought offense and defense together for the first time. It should have created more open ice, and with it more passing, more speed, more open-ice skills, more attackers and defenders outdistanced from the play, less eleven-man congestion from the bluelines to the nets. It should have turned offense and defense into all-ice activities, each the transition of the other. But old habits and traditions die slowly. The game speeded up; the schizophrenia remained. Offense was still offense; defense, defense.

(At this moment, after the war, after the forward pass and the center red line, after nearly seventy years of tradition had hardened the arteries of our game, Soviet hockey was beginning.) With the new centerline, the dump-and-chase style only intensified.

In a 1947 story,
Time
described it as “high-pressure ‘shinny.”’
Saturday
Night
, under the headline “It Isn’t Hockey,” disagreed, certain it could be neither shinny, nor tag, nor wrestling, nor jiujitsu, in the end unsure just what it was. Journalist Bill Roche knew only that he didn’t like it.

“…[W]hen an entire forward line gets a breakaway against a defence pair,” he wrote in
The Hockey Book
, “and the puck-carrier, instead of skating over the blue-line and setting up a clean play for his mates, merely heaves the rubber into a corner to start a free-for-all scramble—well, I feel like walking out of the rink and often do.” The dump and chase had come to dramatize all that had changed in hockey, all that was wrong with it, according to many: the absence of great stickhandlers and body-checkers, the great individual players whose skills could be seen and appreciated, the intricate teamwork of the Cooks and Boucher of the Rangers and others like them, the color of the game. All gone. Replaced by a shot, a chase, a congested crush of bodies, and speed. But whose bodies, and doing what? Not passing or stickhandling—they were not needed in this game. And how could a defenseman, chasing to the boards for a puck, deliver a body-check? Goals? Mostly they were from ganging attacks, from a strategic clutter of legs and bodies, and blinded goalies behind them. The “screened shot” became a popular phrase at the time, and for fans came its logical companion, the “screened goal.”

“On half the goals scored nowadays not ten percent of the fans know who scored,” Boucher complained to journalist Trent Frayne in 1953.

How then did the fans recognize a goal? “By watching for the …glare of the red light,” according to Frayne. (Twenty-five years later, syndicat-ed columnist Jim Murray, claiming to have watched hockey for thirty years without seeing a goal, asked the question, “…what does a goal look like? What color is it? What does it sound like? Is it bigger than a bread-box?”) But the dump-and-chase style survived. It was a team game everyone could play. It required no real finesse, just good legs and a willing mind. And as perhaps our first real venture into team play, involving all five men, it showed us how effective five players, working together, can be. As a rueful Boucher admitted, “Any club that doesn’t use it will have its brains beaten out.” To those who felt the game limited and uninteresting, there were no apologies. This was the modern game.

Like everything else in the postwar world, it was based on speed—“(s)peed in cars, speed in sports, speed in ladies,”
Saturday Night
wrote in 1951. But it was speed for what purpose, and to what end?

What happens to a game when it speeds up? What happens to its patterns and skills and to those who play it? I once read an article on senility in which the writer said that what many regard in the elderly as a hopeless inability to function is often nothing of the kind. Instead it has to do with the shattering impact of pace. When people age, their minds and bodies slow down, and require more time to do the same things. An old man can walk to the store, he just needs longer to get there. But for most daily functions, we are not allowed additional time.

A certain unforgiving pace is expected. It is at this pace, a normal living pace, that the elderly must function. Yet when they try, their minds and bodies get muddled; they appear senile. It is what each of us feels at every age when things move too fast. On a squash court with someone my equal, I play comfortably, the scope of play well-matched to what I can do. But against someone who is clearly superior, my mind and body seize up, and I lose the coordination I had at the slower pace.

It is no different for a game when it speeds up. Simply, it becomes harder to play. Offense, defense, team skills, individual skills—with less time for each, each must be done more quickly: by practicing skills to perform them faster, by using different skills that take less time, by changing the way skills are used—or, as the game goes faster, probably by all three. And if we don’t find enough time, if the game moves too fast for its patterns and skills, it loses its coordination and breaks down. It becomes overmatched, overwhelmed by speed. For speed, like the forward pass and the centerline, like the non-injury substitution, changes the way a game can be played. It gives a game new skills, and takes away others. It requires direction and control.

Yet we have made no accommodation to it. Instead, we have allowed it to dictate our style of play. Speed makes passing more difficult, so we pass less, and do something easier that takes less time. We have not changed our ancient straight-ahead, straightline patterns, though they were only appropriate to the onside game. To accommodate speed, but also to make passing possible, we could move on diagonals across the ice, to give a better target, to find open ice, to use its width unharassed by offside lines. But we do not. We dump and chase, or shoot from a distance, and the faster the game gets, the less chance there is that we can do anything else. Gradually, speed had created a whole range of new and necessary skills, and a new approach to the game, but after the war, after forechecking and the dump and chase, speed also had another effect.

Hockey was a rough game, and had been very nearly from its start.

Its speed, its confined, congested playing area, had almost guaranteed it, and made body-checking accepted defense strategy. But the forward pass, and later the centerline, made body-checking immensely more difficult. Never abandoned, as it might have been, it evolved in part into something else after the war. The sequence was not surprising, for what does a defenseman do when a game speeds up and changes direction on him? When locked in tradition, he continues to do what his coach and his instincts have taught him to do. He body-checks. But more often than not, given the increased speed of the skaters, he misses, but not completely. For just as a well-avoided hip turns into a knee, so a shoulder becomes a high-stick, or a hook, and a punishing ride to the boards.

This was something new. The stick and the boards had never been used so systematically in this way before. But, stuck in old traditions, it was how the defense responded to the game’s new speed. And the league allowed it. To the finesse player, it was one more crushing blow.

What good was it to skate and stickhandle to gain an advantage so easily wrestled away? Why not just dump and chase like the rest? It was from this simmering frustration that violence emerged. Brawling and stick-swinging became more frequent and vicious than before. Not grim and calculated, goon against goon, as it was decades later; this was human nature boiling over. Often it was the game’s biggest stars, Maurice Richard, Gordie Howe, Ted Lindsay, Geoffrion, hooked and high-sticked until they would take no more. The league intervened with fines and suspensions for the worst abuses, but did nothing to penalize its insidious causes, in the end more damaging to the game.